So, Blade approaches 200 days in office. That’s enough to make a fair assessment, is it not? The media, in the light of little news, love to put forward timeline accusations. I’m sure that it’s something that’s been inherited from the United States. ”How is Obama doing after his first 18 hours?” The answer to these kinds of questions is largely negative.
But 200 days is a slightly different matter. Surely that’s enough time to examine the proficiency of our minister of higher education and training? On the face of it he has been full of sound and fury. He has denied, reaffirmed, made off-the-cuff gaffes and equivocated — usually at the same time — during almost all occasions of public exchange. And in some senses I can’t blame him. This is a bitch of a job. Nzimande has just inherited a major department fashioned out of the chaos of Polokwane. He has been touted as a man who is going places in the next government. In short, Nzimande has to perform.
The simple fact of the matter is that, sooner rather than later, he has to make his big move. It doesn’t matter that it is ill-conceived, what matters is that he shows a resolve in the face of higher education confusion that is bordering on panic. So what will be the big move? To work that out, it is better to start from the position of political expediency and work backwards. The move has to be dramatic while appearing to be thought carefully through.
To achieve this, one has only to look to the corporate world and its favourite bullshit term: ”Going forward.” Going forward has achieved the power of a comma or a thoughtful pause in the past 18 months. It means everything because it means nothing. It is there to evoke a sense of continuity, like a stream becoming a river and heading inevitably towards the ocean.
Now for the uneasy alliance it is much more difficult to talk of continuity in this historical sense. Who knows, at any single time, which part of the triumvirate will be fighting with who, shouting their mouths off in blatant disregard for the factional party line, or generally embarrassing themselves. Under these circumstances ”going forward” is a ludicrous statement. But government has consulted the thesaurus of political thought and come up with its own version of going forward — ”alignment”.
Knowing full well that it cannot achieve chronological continuity, it has settled on proximity as a way of giving the public a vague sense that it understands what it’s doing: ”As long as the toe bone is connected to the leg bone it will seem to the gullible masses that we are making progress.”
So, ladies and gentlemen, the big move is this. The minister shoves the Setas into any available orifice within the further education and training (FET) colleges. In fact, I would suggest that he physically moves some of those office-bound bureaucrats from the Seta head office on to the campuses of the FET colleges.
The only way the Setas will be controlled is if they are deconstructed and given back to the community. Then the FET colleges can hand out learnerships and unit standards — the smallest syllable of higher education — thus ensuring that the 2,4-million unemployed at least get some useable skill. It would also mean that the accredited skill providers would be working out of a campus rather than simply fleecing the corporate world with exorbitantly priced courses called ”Introduction to the personal computer” at National Qualifications Framework (NQF) level 0.5. These providers might even wake up to the fact that there really is a skills shortage out there.
That would free up the colleges to teach the same, or ”aligned”, courses as the universities of technology and comprehensives. So a student in hospitality, having grasped the fundamentals of a béchamel sauce at the Central Johannesburg FET College in Parktown, could literally walk across to the newly refurbished and iridescent Bunting Road campus of the University of Johannesburg. And there, no doubt, master hollandaise and béarnaise.
Where there is no common connection possible, the universities of technology would align with the weaker universities — and there are enough of those — to focus on teaching. Just teaching — no extra money, as has been the case for far too long, for nonexistent research outputs.
As for the top research universities, they would be left largely alone to compete internationally, to blather on about academic freedom and to steal A-rated researchers from one another.