Medunsa rises from the ashes of Limpopo divorce

Apart from announcing divorce action for one of the country’s unhappier university marriages, Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande had as little time for tertiary troubles in his budget speech on Thursday as Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan had in February.

“Serious money for serious skills development”, as the Mail & Guardian reported in the week of Gordhan’s budget speech of February 23, was Nzimande’s prime focus too. He even duplicated the finance minister’s structural emphasis, spending the first two-thirds of his time on skills, further education and training (FET) colleges and Skills Education Training Authorities (Setas), before finally turning to universities.

The divorce he announced for the University of Limpopo had been widely expected — the forced marriage between the former Medical University of South Africa (Medunsa) and the geographically distant University of the North was under strain even before vows were exchanged in January 2005.

“I have agreed with [Health] Minister [Aaron] Motsoaledi that we must undo this merger and re-establish Medunsa as a standalone medical university,” Nzimande said.

But this divorce will also lead to a new medical school for South Africa, the department of higher education and training said in a separate statement on Thursday. Apart from the re-establishment of Medunsa, a new medical school will be established on the University of Limpopo’s Polokwane campus, becoming the country’s ninth such institution.

Other than that, Nzimande’s brief excursion into the tertiary landscape was dramatic more for the sights the minister said he still wanted to take in, rather than those he already had.

He would establish an advisory panel on African languages because he was “particularly concerned about the glaring weakness in [that] area of the humanities”, he said.

That was in the context of reminding Parliament that he was expecting a report, in three months, on how to “strengthen the humanities and social sciences” because their “vigour … in our universities [had] declined”.

Other tertiary sights which Nzimande looked forward to seeing were the reports in July on how to establish new universities in the only two provinces that have none (Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape); and one next year from businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, who is leading a review of university funding.

But, like Gordhan before him, it was to the present realities of an enormous expansion in skills development that the minister devoted his real passion on Thursday.

Of the R37.4-billion the finance minister had given him to play with, R9-billion goes to Setas and the National Skills Fund, R4.3-billion to FET colleges and R4-billion to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) — some of the latter being earmarked specifically to expand enrolments at the colleges.

NSFAS also funds university students, so the doubling of its disbursements this financial year over 2010/11 will benefit the tertiary sector too. And universities as a whole see a modest increase in their allocation, up to R19.4-billion from last year’s R17.5-billion.

The real expansions are planned elsewhere, however. By 2014, FET colleges should have one million enrolments, Nzimande said. They now have about 400 000 students, compared with higher education’s 800 000.

Similarly, the government’s target of producing 10 000 artisans per year is close to being met already, Nzimande said. Setas registered about 6 000 more apprentices in 2010 (23 517) than in 2009 (17 228).

“Also in 2010, 11 778 apprentices were certificated, partly because the number [of students] who passed their trade tests has been gradually increasing over the past 4 years,” the minister said.

But one area can expect a drastic cutback, Nzimande said: short courses that “provide little lasting benefit and thus serve only to reproduce cheap labour while purporting to develop skills”.

Nzimande said too much levy money – “estimated at over 80%” – had been going on these courses, channelled there by Setas from the National Skills Fund to private companies. This has amounted to “unfair discrimination in skills training” that must be “eliminated”.

“The steps we have taken are a giant step forward in the transformation of the South African skills development system,” Nzimande said.