I am the son of the late Philip Kgosana, one of the many South Africans who left this country in 1961, forced into exile by apartheid. When we speak of South African exile, we usually imagine familiar destinations: Lusaka, London, Moscow, New York or Dar es Salaam. Less often written about is that some South African families, like mine, ended up far from these well‑trodden paths, on the Indian sub‑continent.
In our case, exile took us to Sri Lanka. From 1981 to 1987, that is where we lived. During those years, I completed the final three years of my high school education in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I was a teenager, following my parents through the uncertainty of exile, with no real expectation that I would ever return to a free South Africa.
What I did not understand then—but understand very clearly now—is that those years exposed me to something else: the long‑term consequences of deliberate national choices about science, technology and industrial development.
India became independent in 1947. Almost immediately, its leaders confronted a hard truth: political independence without technological and industrial capability is fragile. Sovereignty means little if a country cannot build, design, manufacture and innovate for itself.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, understood this with remarkable clarity. For Nehru, science was not a luxury. It was the foundation of national sovereignty. He spoke of building the “temples of modern India,” and among the most important of these were institutions that could produce engineers, scientists and applied problem‑solvers at scale.
One of the boldest expressions of this vision was the creation of the Indian Institutes of Technology. The first IIT was established at Kharagpur in 1951, barely four years after independence, on the site of a former colonial detention camp. Knowledge, Nehru believed, was how a formerly colonised people would reclaim control over their future.
The IITs were never intended to be isolated elite universities. They were conceived as a national system, deliberately distributed across different regions, governed by a dedicated Act of Parliament, and designated as Institutes of National Importance. Their mandate was explicit: produce engineers and scientists at scale, advance applied research, and serve the long‑term industrial and technological needs of the Indian economy.
Crucially, the IITs were embedded within a broader science, technology and innovation ecosystem. Graduates flowed into institutions such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, into public laboratories, into emerging technology firms, and into industrial champions such as Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy Services and Mahindra & Mahindra. Over time, this ecosystem created powerful feedback loops between education, research, manufacturing and innovation.
When I lived in South India in the 1980s, the full fruits of this vision were not yet visible. India was still poor. The roads were dominated by Hindustan Ambassadors. Early Mahindra vehicles were rugged and clumsy. India’s insistence on building its own cars—often ridiculed at the time—was seen by many as inefficient and ideologically stubborn.
Yet India persisted. It continued to invest in engineers, laboratories, public research institutions and domestic industry, even when short‑term results were modest and global opinion sceptical.
Four decades later, the results are unmistakable. Today, on South African highways, one is overtaken by vehicles such as the Mahindra XUV700 or the Tata Curvv—globally competitive products designed, engineered and manufactured by Indian companies. India is now a software powerhouse, a major automotive manufacturer, and a producer of world‑class scientists, engineers and mathematicians. This transformation did not occur by accident. It is the compound interest of sustained investment in science, technology and innovation.
India’s experience is not unique. China’s industrial rise followed a similar logic, albeit on a vastly larger scale. From the late 1970s onwards, China invested aggressively in technical universities, applied research institutes and state‑linked industrial ecosystems. Engineers were produced in the numbers required to support manufacturing, infrastructure and export‑led growth. Today, China dominates global value chains in sectors ranging from electronics to renewable energy and advanced manufacturing.
Brazil, too, offers important lessons. While its path has been uneven, Brazil made deliberate investments in applied science and industrial research through institutions such as EMBRAPA in agriculture and strong engineering universities that supported aerospace, mining and manufacturing. Where Brazil aligned education, research and industry, it built globally competitive capabilities.
The lesson across these countries is consistent: industrialisation is not an accident of markets alone. It is the result of deliberate, long‑term commitments to building scientific and technological capability through institutions designed for that purpose.
South Africa, by contrast, produces just over twelve thousand engineering graduates a year, a figure that has declined in recent years. We speak endlessly about industrialisation, infrastructure renewal and the digital economy, yet we underinvest in the very institutions that make these ambitions possible.
This is why the proposed Ekurhuleni University of Applied Science matters.
Ekurhuleni sits at the heart of South Africa’s industrial economy, astride logistics corridors, manufacturing zones and energy‑intensive industry. Yet it remains underserved by institutions focused squarely on applied science, engineering and industry‑linked research.
A university of applied science in Ekurhuleni would represent a structural shift: an institution designed from inception to integrate education with production, research with industry, and theory with practice. In time, it could become the first of many such institutions—South Africa’s own equivalent of the IITs, adapted to our context but driven by the same clarity of purpose.
I do not need to believe this is possible. I know it is possible, because I have seen it. That is why the ST&I Business Forum has made the establishment of the Ekurhuleni University of Applied Science a central pillar of its work.
Fifty years ago, I was born to parents forced into exile from a country that denied us a future. Today, in a democratic South Africa, the question is whether we are prepared to make the disciplined, long‑term commitments required to build real technological and industrial capability. India did. China did. The evidence is driving past us on our highways.
The only remaining question is whether we are willing to begin.
Mohlabani (Bani) Kgosana - Treasurer, ST&I Business Forum