First, let us consider the discipline’s demography in South Africa. Over the last ten years political studies or political science has been taught in each of the country’s 21 universities. Aspects of the discipline were also taught in public administration courses at polytechnics; several of these institutions are now being amalgamated with universities. Historically, as with other areas of social science, politics as an academic community was sharply divided, socially and intellectually between the English language universities and the Afrikaans medium institutions. Within Afrikaner departments, traditionally, the discipline was influenced quite heavily by American behaviouralist and quantitative social science models and methods and researchers tended to focus their work within the confines of the formal political system (including the structures of ethnic homeland government). At the segregated black universities, departments were often led and staffed by graduates from Afrikaans institutions as well as from UNISA. In English speaking departments, by the 1980s, Marxist approaches had supplanted traditionally liberal ideas about politics and leading researchers concentrated their attention on popular political movements, emphasising those dimensions of their activities and ideas that corresponded most closely with expressions of class consciousness. In this context, the study of the discipline had a strong historical dimension: indeed at institutions such as Wits and Cape Town the boundaries between a ‘revisionist’ history grounded in Marxist conceptions of political economy and the discipline of politics became very blurred indeed. Today, though legacies of these differences between Afrikaans and ‘English’ institutions remain, the distinctions between Afrikaans-speakers and English language practitioners of the discipline in South African are less important, particularly since the introduction of English language courses at Afrikaans universities.

South African politics departments are small – between five and ten full time staff is normal, though Wits with its separate establishments for political studies and international relations employs more than twenty political scientists. Overall at the universities there are around 200 or so politics lecturers teaching about 10,000 students enrolled in undergraduate courses. This has been an expanding student population: in the aftermath of the ANC’s accession to government politics classes grew swiftly, contracted slightly in the late 1990s and once again grew, a reflection of trends in secondary school matriculation as well as optimistic perceptions among students about the subject’s vocational utility. Most first year politics classes (including those at former elite institutions such as Wits and Pretoria) are now recruited mainly from working class districts in African townships, though Cape Town and Stellenbosch represent exceptions to this generalization.

Traditionally, South African universities undertook very little post graduate teaching in political studies – more in Afrikaans than in English – but essentially politics departments directed their teaching at undergraduates. At Wits, for example, between the Department’s establishment in 1955 and 1990, four students completed PhDs, though a rather larger number undertook the traditional entirely research based Masters degree. This has changed: all universities offer coursework masters programmes in politics and related fields and several have succeeded in registering substantial PhD-enrolments, drawing significant numbers of their post-graduates from SADC countries and elsewhere in Africa. A growing proportion of the post-graduates are black South Africans but in most institutions this is quite a recent trend: the first black South African to obtain a doctorate in politics at Wits graduated in 2000. At the former homeland universities (which remain more or less exclusively black in their intake) their own graduates today predominate among staff in politics departments though their leadership was augmented in the 1990s by senior appointments from universities in other African countries.

Research in politics remains concentrated in the historically white universities. A rough tracery of its intellectual preoccupations and of the distribution between institutions of the most active researchers can be obtained through looking at the contents pages of Politikon, the biannual journal of the South African Political Science Association.

Between 1994 and 2004, and including the first issue this year, 100 articles appeared in Politikon. Not surprisingly, South African politics predominates within the content of these articles. The work on South Africa has three major focuses. Nineteen of the articles concern democratisation and South African progress in the consolidation or deepening of democratic institutions. A second area that has attracted vigorous research is elections: 14 articles explore various recent South African elections and the behaviour of voters, parties and officials during them. Finally, ten articles address different dimensions of foreign policy; these divide equally between those premised on conventional theoretical presumptions in international relations and advocates of ‘critical theory’ who seek a paradigmatic shift away from state centred notions of bilateral or multilateral relations in favour of more emancipatory notions of international citizenship. We will consider briefly, in a moment, some of the key debates in these three areas, democratisation, electoral behaviour, and foreign policy.

We can note, now, though, certain key omissions from the topics addressed by Politikon’s authors. Not a single article addresses protest politics nor a specific instance of insurgent collective action, though one theoretically oriented discussion of social movement theory by a Swedish PhD-student appeared in 2000. We know from the longitudinal survey and press data bases compiled by the Wits/HSRC/Vrije Universiteit that popular propensities to participate in peaceful kinds of ‘direct action’ (strikes, demonstrations, land invasions, etc.) did not decline significantly, at least during the Mandela administration, though the geographic distribution of such activity became more dispersed, a consequence of the new sites of political power that were established after 1994. The Durban Centre for Civil Society has emerged as the main centre for serious research on so called new social movements, but its findings have yet to make a major impact in the discipline. Another striking silence in the Politikon research concerns the state and the social relationships surrounding it.

Instrumentalist notions of the state as an agency of various combinations of class interest were a major theme in English language South African political studies through the late 1970s and 1980s though approaches that emphasised the state’s degree of social autonomy and the political predispositions of different bureaucratic factions within it (including the army) were beginning to shape political analysis by 1990: even so the completeness of the apparent abandonment by South African political science of class analysis is somewhat startling. In fact, here Politikon’s titles pages misrepresent rather the overall state of the discipline; South African critics of the government’s ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies who assign to the Mbeki administration a comprador role as agents primarily of international capital prefer to publish in Review of African Political Economy, Monthly Review, and, locally, in Dissent. Even in this work though, the local sociology of political power and wealth remains surprisingly under-explored.

Scanning ten years of Politikon suggests that research is quite unevenly distributed among universities. Twenty-one of the articles are from the University of Stellenbosch and Wits staff or students contribute another 18. Cape Town and Western Cape political scientists are also quite frequent contributors. During the period under review the journal published only one article from one of the former homeland universities, by the Nigerian head of politics at Transkei. Only three contributions are from black (African) South Africans, each of them Wits post graduates. Of course Politikon is not an altogether reliable base from which to make generalizations: several other locally edited journals attract a slightly different range of contributors and both the (Pretoria) Africa Institute and the Harare-based African Political Science Review make a point of publishing work by black South African political scientists, much of directed at understanding and promoting African regionalism and pan-African institution building. It is also the case that much of the best local scholarship is published in European and North American journals However, even if this wider range of publication was also to be taken into consideration, the trends in the discipline’s development over the last ten years would not look very different from an overview of the content of Politikon.

So, what are the key issues for South African political scientists in their evaluations of democratisation, in their analysis of elections, and in their considerations of foreign policy, especially with respect to South Africa’s role in Africa?

What claims can be made for South African democracy since 1994? Much of the academic commentary has been negative. UCT’s Bob Mattes notes the failure of the economy to expand at the rate needed to create jobs, persistent social inequalities, a constitution that reinforces executive control over the legislature and hence accentuates centralising tendencies in a one party dominant system. Within the ANC itself, Mattes perceives an ‘increasing tendency’ for ‘party bosses’ to stifle dissent. Alarming constitutional amendments and the use by ANC leaders of state agencies in investigations directed at their rivals in the party round off a prognosis of early ‘institutional decay’. Trends observable in public opinion indicate at best lukewarm support for democracy, especially among the racial minorities and declining trust in political leaders and state institutions. South Africans, pollsters suggest, have highly substantive understandings of democracy, that is they are more likely to view socio-economic benefits as essential components of democracy rather than civil liberties. Compared to citizens in neighbouring countries, South Africans are least predisposed to active forms of civic participation. Such evidence suggests that of democracy’s prospects in South Africa are fragile to the extent that its survival is a function of the popularity of its core values (Mattes 2002).

More in the same vein is widely available and there is no need to relay such arguments in detail here.[i] Among the pessimistic assessments of South African democratic performance and likely future trajectories there are different explanations for why the outcomes of political transition have been so disappointing. One line of argument is to locate the reasons for democratic shortcomings in the deficiencies of the constitutional system, and in particular in the electoral system which provides no incentives for representatives to make themselves accountable to citizens. Another quite widely held view is that neither of the two main players during the negotiations, the ANC and the National Party government, were profoundly committed to democracy and, to cite Pierre du Toit, the ANC in particular was negotiating in ‘bad faith’: assured by their own opinion polls of electoral victory, a temporary embrace by its authoritarian leaders of liberal values was merely a means to the realisation of an ultimately anti liberal transformative project (Du Toit 2001; 2003). In this reading, the ‘progressive colonization’ by the centre of ‘independent checks on executive power’ (Butler 2003: 111) offers increasing confirmation of the ruling party’s ‘hegemonic’ aspirations.

Left wing as opposed to liberal commentaries offer equally gloomy diagnosis of the ANC’s performance in office. Here the ANC’s failings are not so much the consequence of its Leninist heritage but rather the effect of the bad bargain it sealed with multinational capital in the run-up to constitutional negotiations in which leadership supposedly committed itself to accepting the constraints of a globalised market economy and to confining social reforms within the fierce restrictions of a neo-liberal growth strategy. In this view the ANC’s centralisation of power in the executive is a defensive reaction to the growing threat posed by the social movements of the very poor whose expanding constituency is responsible for the withering of the ANC’s own popular base and the general reluctance of citizens to participate in whatever consultative procedures remain within the formal political framework.[ii] From this perspective, the local social group most likely in the future to exercise decisive influence on pubic policy is composed of the beneficiaries of black economic empowerment, many of them former ANC office-holders.

My own work offers rather more complicated readings of South African democratic performance. In contrast to the evaluations just cited, I find that with respect to social delivery, the government has generally met citizen expectations. In fact the expanded provision of public goods – including grants and pensions, subsidised housing, clean water in the countryside, primary health care facilities, and so on – has been on a scale that makes the characterisation of government strategy as ‘neo liberal’ fairly implausible. This is an administration that has significantly, since 1994, increased the ‘social wage’ since 1994 and in so doing has impacted significantly on inequality statistics, for state expenditure has been substantially redirected at especially the rural poor.[iii] One reason for this is that in 1994, an already quite substantial base for a welfare state was in place; as Jeremy Seekings has noted, from the 1960s onwards the apartheid state provided an expanding range of entitlements to both citizens and subjects (Seekings 2002). These were racially calibrated to be sure, but on a scale that made South African rather unusual in the developing world and which may help explain the pro-active (to cite Charles Tilly) nature of the political claims that black South Africans began to assert from the mid 1970s onwards. The state has expanded, not shrunk, and successful deficit reduction (from in any case a relatively low degree of indebtedness in 1994) makes it likely that its welfare capacity will maintain itself.

Nor do I find the emphasis in some liberal as well as certain feminist analyses of the South African state as ‘patrimonial’ especially persuasive. This is despite the increasingly abundant evidence of venality and rent-seeking among officeholders and officials. In fact it is quite difficult to find conclusive signals as to whether corruption in any sphere is waning or expanding though public perceptions suggest the latter. The apartheid state as it became increasingly demoralised was progressively affected by dishonest misappropriations of public goods and certain patterns of behaviour have persisted; after all in many areas the same officials are in place. My own research suggests, though, that much of the corruption is new, and that it flourishes in precisely those areas in which the state is undertaking fresh obligations to citizens, in housing for example, and that it may be the consequence of changed systems of management rather than inherited traditions, patrimonial or otherwise (Lodge 2002b). It does not exist on a scale that is sufficient to seriously negate any claims about the state’s expanded capacity to meet basic needs: this expansion of the state is, I would maintain, one of the most important political developments since 1994. This is not a system in decay.

I think there are strong grounds for proposing a more optimistic scenario for the survival of the procedural aspects of democracy – generalising from the behaviour of parliamentarians, in opposition and otherwise, the record of the judiciary, and the general vigour of the media. My own recent research preoccupation has been with the development of the party system, surely an indispensable component of a healthy and participatory liberal democracy. So far my data collection and analysis has concentrated on the ANC. I have interviewed at length a range of senior officeholders, but more importantly, with a team of student fieldworkers we have questioned nearly 500 rank and file branch members, mainly in the Gauteng. What have been, so far, our most important findings?

This is not a movement in decline. At the time of our research, at the beginning of 2003, membership was booming at around 400,000 – and the trend continued. Our interest was in kinds of commitments that are required of members. A call by leadership for branches to undertake various kinds of community development work evidently elicited a ready response: about three quarters of the people we had interviewed had been involved in such activities as tree planting or hospital visiting, many several times. A large majority attended monthly branch meetings and about a quarter had been involved in fundraising projects. About a third said they read regularly the ANC’s newsletter. Such data suggested a relatively activated membership and a movement with quite a vigorous local life. Cross tabulating demographic data with branch positions suggested, moreover, a movement that at this level is quite egalitarian: about a third of the women we interviewed held positions on the executive as did a similar proportions of the members who were unemployed. In their responses to open-ended questions we did collect sentiments that suggest that ANC members may be motivated by a mixture of concerns – self interested as well as idealistic – but generally it does appear that the ANC has remained a mass party, and that its activist support remains enthusiastic, not just dutiful. Meanwhile, secret ballots supply a degree of opportunity for members to exercise leverage over leaders at party conferences despite strongly consensual mechanisms in which the crucial electoral dynamic is the bargaining between provincial nomination leaders and national notables.

Internal conflicts within the organisation over the government’s reluctance to provide anti-retroviral medication to HIV-AIDS patients supplies one key instance in which leadership found itself compelled to defer to pressure from within (as well as outside of) the organisation. My guarded conclusion from the evidence that I collected was that so far the ANC has managed to hold back the symptoms of organisational degeneration that often characterise dominant parties that face no serious electoral challenge. In so far that strong parties can benefit democracies, my work on the ANC represents a positive finding: South Africa’s party system includes a least one robust organisation.

Is it likely to develop any more? The more obvious trends from a succession of elections that have resulted in ever increasing majorities for the ANC and persistently fragmented opposition might suggest not, at least not in the predictable future. Popular commentaries often echo the predominant academic evaluation of the ‘founding’ 1994 poll as a ‘racial census’ in which, for African voters particularly ‘the charismatic factor appeared the be the single most important motivation’. African voters supported the ANC then largely because of emotional considerations rather than ‘calculations of interests, benefits and costs’ (Johnson and Schlemmer 1996). As Jeremy Seekings has suggested, though, such findings were comparatively uninformed by opinion polling evidence concerning the motivations of individual voter behavior.

Traditionally South African electoral studies tended to assume that voters made their choices largely as a consequence of the collective predispositions of the communities within which they lived with ethnic and (more occasionally) class membership as the principal determinants of electoral decisions. More complicated sentiments that may have prompted voter identification with particular parties were neglected in studies of pre-1994 elections (Seekings 1997). Evaluations of the 1994 poll as a ‘uhuru’ election are reinforced by references to the International Electorate Commision (IEC)’s inefficiency as well as territorially possessive behaviour by parties whose exclusion from their home bases of rival activists apparently enjoyed general support from intolerant voters. The persistence of evident ‘political intolerance’ among citizens as documented in opinion surveys, the ANC’s willingness to use the advantages of incumbency when contesting successor My own work on elections tends to confirm these suppositions, despite its intellectual base in the traditional preoccupation of South African electoral analysis with the behaviour of parties during campaigning. Both in 1999 and more recently this year, parties tended to emphasise ‘policy and performance rather than identity in their electoral appeals’ (Lodge 1999: 208) with the ANC developing especially sophisticated campaigning strategies with respect to those segments of the electorate perceived to be ‘swing’ voters, especially within the racial minorities. The ANC’s emphasis on door to door canvassing in its traditional base communities also indicate a leadership that did not take loyalty as the guaranteed outcome of ascriptive identities. And with good reason: in my research on the 2000 local elections I used more than 5,000 reports of electoral meetings compiled by a national network of election monitors. Here I found ANC candidates confronted with critical and assertive audiences even in small rural settlements: in the conduct of these meetings there was no indication whatsoever of the deferential style one might expect from the dynamics of patronage ‘big man’ politics; electoral support was quite obviously seen as contractual and conditional on performance. Indeed in these local elections historically white parties were able to make significant inroads into previous ANC strongholds, provided that is that they already had a local organisational presence (Lodge 2001).

A huge expansion of welfare entitlements during the course of 2003 was one key to ANC gains in poor communities in 2004, especially in the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) heartlands of northern KwaZulu Natal. Facilitating apparent shifts in African voting choices in the 2000 local elections and in the general election this year were improvements in electoral administration (especially with respect to voter registration) and expanded electoral monitoring as well as a more relaxed local political climate. This year simultaneous elections, and its success in mobilising almost universal support amongst voters in most African neighbourhoods have helped to maintain convictions that the outcomes of South African elections are largely predetermined by the solidarities and ascriptive identities that arise from historic social conflicts, solidarities that are reinforced by the ruling party’s adroit deployment of patronage.

These sorts of assumptions are at odds with the findings that emerge from opinion polling, which suggested, for instance, sharp declines in party identification across a set of intervals between 1994 and 1998 (when identification with the ANC was down to 38 per cent). The gap between the proportions of polling respondents willing to identify themselves with parties and the persistence up to polling day of sizeable shares of the African voting population suggesting to pollsters that they had not made up their mind about who to vote for have suggested to certain analysts that South African voter behaviour is considerably conditioned by performance and campaigning. ‘Discriminate analysis’ of a range of responses concerning economic trends and political performance collected in a 1998 poll enabled a correct prediction of party preferences without knowledge of the respondents’ races, language or classes. To be sure, South African voters are influenced in their evaluations of party performance to a degree by the communal context in which they live, but this does not predetermine their choices: these are the consequence of judgement and to an increasing extent support for the ruling party is conditional (Mattes, Taylor and Africa 1999).

My own work on elections tends to confirm these suppositions, despite its intellectual base in the traditional preoccupation of South African electoral analysis with the behaviour of parties during campaigning. Both in 1999 and more recently this year, parties tended to emphasise ‘policy and performance rather than identity in their electoral appeals’ (Lodge 1999: 208) with the ANC developing especially sophisticated campaigning strategies with respect to those segments of the electorate perceived to be ‘swing’ voters, especially within the racial minorities. The ANC’s emphasis on door to door canvassing in its traditional base communities also indicate a leadership that did not take loyalty as the guaranteed outcome of ascriptive identities. And with good reason: in my research on the 2000 local elections I used more than 5,000 reports of electoral meetings compiled by a national network of election monitors. Here I found ANC candidates confronted with critical and assertive audiences even in small rural settlements: in the conduct of these meetings there was no indication whatsoever of the deferential style one might expect from the dynamics of patronage ‘big man’ politics; electoral support was quite obviously seen as contractual and conditional on performance. Indeed in these local elections historically white parties were able to make significant inroads into previous ANC strongholds, provided that is that they already had a local organisational presence (Lodge 2001). A huge expansion of welfare entitlements during the course of 2003 was one key to ANC gains in poor communities in 2004, especially in the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) heartlands of northern KwaZulu Natal. Facilitating apparent shifts in African voting choices in the 2000 local elections and in the general election this year were improvements in electoral administration (especially with respect to voter registration) and expanded electoral monitoring as well as a more relaxed local political climate.

This year simultaneous canvassing of African neighbourhood by rival teams of activists, impossible in1994, was both routine and tranquil, accepted apparently by residents as legitimate. The Democratic Alliance, the runner-up in the 2004 poll, nearly doubled its support, largely due to new allegiances among Indian and Coloured voters and probably from a few hundred thousand Africans as well. No longer an overwhelmingly white supported party, it faces a formidable task in consolidating it’s very dispersed and socially heterodox electoral base. If we are correct, though, that South African voter behaviour is predicated on judgement and choice, rather than the compulsions of history and communal identity, the DA’s mission to become an African party is by no means quixotic. Much will depend, though, on the success of its efforts to establish a living presence in African communities.

As with evaluations of democratic performance, the academic community that focuses on South African foreign policy is sharply divided. Two interpretations reflect conventional approaches in international relations. In one view, South African policy shifted abruptly in 1994, and since then has been prompted generally by idealist efforts to promote new kinds of democratically-oriented institutional architecture in both continental and global governance and to further a collective search for global re-distributive justice. An opposed understanding is to view South Africa’s external relations as motivated chiefly by realist concerns arising from acknowledgement among policy makers of the instability of the international order and recognition of South Africa’s marginal status within it. From this perspective, South Africa’s priorities should be to align herself with powerful industrial countries and exploit her own status as a sub-hegemonic power on the continent.

Advocates of both realist and idealist prescriptions disagree among themselves about the degree to which an ANC governed South Africa has conformed with one other of these policy prescriptions. Generally speaking, though, the trend among analysts working with these concepts is to suggest that South Africa’s foreign affairs is governed by quite skilful exploitation of its role as a ‘middle power’. Here it joins a group of medium sized regionally dominant states that attempt to enhance their international standing by endorsing ‘multilateral solutions to international problems’ and adhering to conventions of good international citizenship. In Africa this has meant, during the Mbeki presidency, adopting a fairly self effacing position on the continent, to the despair of President Mbeki’s realist critics. The rewards for sensitivity to continental protocols are now evident in the major role South Africa has played in designing successor institutions to the OAU as well as the progress in brokering political settlements in Congo and elsewhere.[iv]

This perspective of South African foreign policy as characterised by essentially benevolent principles conflicts with another set of views that stress continuities rather than ruptures with the apartheid era. This view maintains that policy remains bound up with crudely realist conceptions of national interest. In this vein, Thabo Mbeki’s claims to ‘put people first’ in his conduct of foreign policy are only rhetorical. South African democracy is barely procedural and hence to expect a foreign policy that is either formed in a consultative way or informed by people’s needs is naive.[v] The most important social influences on policy makers are conservative and historically entrenched. In a critical appraisal of ‘South Africa’s post apartheid security system’, Peter Vale has noted that too often, South Africa’s relationships with its African hinterland are still influenced by ‘old security habits’, and by its predispositions for ‘constructing southern Africa as an eschatological threat’. This is especially obvious in South Africa’s harsh treatment of African immigrants (Vale 2003). For Vale and other adherents of the ‘critical reflexive’ school in South African international relations scholarship conceptions of national interest, realist or idealist, remain undemocratic and conservative, constrained as they are by international and domestic hierarchies of power and wealth and wedded as they remain to an oppressive matrix of colonially created states and boundaries.

I am not so sure. I am not an international relations expert and have done relatively little work in this area. I have looked recently in some detail at South Africa’s constructive engagement with Zimbabwe and certainly in as much as we can make sensible judgements about its motivations these do seem to accord with a perception of its own role as a middle power that can best exercise leverage on Harare through multilateral continental institutions. However it is also likely that different and conflicting norms or values – informing for example, efforts to promote human rights – may shape policy in ways that make the definition of interests very difficult to fit comfortably into one or other of the dichotomous categories supplied by realist or idealist notions of state behaviour.[vi]

My main reservations concerning the new ‘critical theory’ based approaches to South African foreign policy studies are to do with their grounding assumptions about the world we live in. As I hope I have shown, South Africa’s new democracy can make stronger claims for itself than merely conformity with its procedural formula. To a remarkable extent the South African state has retained its vigour, in defiance of prescriptions that allegedly arise from global capital movements. In general, democracy’s critics in South Africa, both conservative and radical, have been too ready to write off the prospects for the liberatory fulfilment of a politics of modernity. Certainly apartheid was a modernising project and it failed but that failure was despite a degree of societal and economic and cultural transformation undergone by very few other countries in the colonial world. We should not be so surprised if the inheritors of the state created to administer such a complex and sophisticated system of coercive modernization can continue to change people’s lives – for better and for worse. Nor should we be so eager to dismiss the likelihood that political leaders that command such formidable bureaucratic power can free themselves to an extent from the constraining compulsions of global markets and domestic sectional interest to pursue emancipatory goals.

NOTES
i. For an especially useful review see Butler 2003.
ii. See for a good example of this genre Bond 2000.
iii. See Chapter Three in Lodge 2002a.
iv. For a strongly argued idealist projections of South Africa’s role as a middle power see Landsberg (2000).
v. See especially Ian Taylor’s contribution to Nel and Van der Westhuizen (2004).
vi. See for an intelligent development of this argument Black and Wilson (2004).

References
Black, D. and Wilson, Z. (2004) ‘Rights, region and identity: Exploring the ambiguities of South Africa’s human rights role’, Politikon 31(1).
Bond, P. (2000) Elite transformation: From Apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa, University of Natal Press.
Butler, A. (2003) ‘South Africa’s political futures’, Government and Opposition.
Du Toit, P. (2001) South Africa’s brittle peace: The problem of post-settlement violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Du Toit, P. (2003) ‘Why post-settlement settlements?’, Journal of Democracy 14(3).
Johnson, R.W. and Schlemmer, L. (1996) Launching democracy in South Africa: The first open election, April 1994, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Landsberg, C. (2000) ‘Promoting democracy: The Mandela Mbeki doctrine’, Journal of Democracy 11(3).
Lodge, T. (2002a) Politics in South Africa. From Mandela to Mbeki, London: James Currey.
Lodge, T. (2002b) ‘Political corruption in South Africa’, in A. Heidenheimer and M. Johnson (Eds), Political corruption: Concepts and contexts, transaction books, New Jersey: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Lodge, T. (2001) ‘The South African local government elections of December 2000’, Politikon 28(1), May.
Lodge, T. (1999) Consolidating democracy: South Africa’s second popular election, University of the Witwatersrand Press and the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, p. 208.
Mattes, R. (2002) ‘South Africa without the people?’, Journal of Democracy 13(2).
Mattes, R. Taylor, H. and Africa, C. (1999) ‘Judgement and choice in the 1999 South African election’, Politikon 26(2).
Nel, P. and Van der Westhuizen, J. (Eds) (2004), Democratizing foreign policy? Lessons from South Africa, Maryland: Lexington Books.
Seekings, J. (2002), ‘The broader importance of welfare reform in South Africa’, Social Dynamics 28(2).
Seekings, J. (1997) ‘From ballot box to the bookshelf: Studies of the 1994 South African general election’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15(2).
Vale, P. (2003) Security and politics in South Africa: The regional dimension, Boulder and Cape Town: Lynne Reinner and the University of Cape Town Press.

Introduction
In this paper we will try to make clear that the ANNA-project, in its own way, is one of the (possible) examples to show that different/changing situations, needs and target groups (may) require different/new approaches, models and products.
We will do so by taking the following steps:

– First, some basic terminology will be given.
– Secondly, the lexicographical situation in South Africa will be outlined.
– Thirdly, the ANNA-project itself will be presented.
– Next the ‘new’ features of the ANNA-project will be highlighted.
– To end with, the pros and cons of ANNA in a ‘new’ South Africa will be discussed.

Lexicography
We can define lexicography in at least two ways. The first ‘classical’ definition could read as follows: ‘Lexicography is the description of one or more aspects of one or more vocabularies in function of one or more target groups or users’. For the second, more ‘formal’, definition the following ‘frame’[i] could be used:

Although the latter definition differs formally from the former, it does not really do so from the point-of-view of content. One can easily paraphrase the above frame-based definition as: ‘Lexicology is an activity which leads/should lead to a product made by lexicographers/metalexicographers with the aim to come to a (scientific) description, etc’.

Next to the possibilities that a frame-based definition offers on the levels of explicitness and consistency, it serves our purpose better than the more traditional one in two ways:

– First, it makes clear the fact that lexicography as an activity is no longer to be considered as a solitary act of a lexicographer, but rather as a scene on which next to lexicographers, different players, such as metalexicographers (theoreticians, designers of models/theories upon which to base lexicographical practice), tool developers, project managers, data providers, users, and publishers play a role.
– Secondly, as one can observe, a frame has a stable side (the left hand side, the slots) and a variable side (the right hand side, the fillers). It is to be expected that changes in the fillers over time will entail changes in the character of lexicography itself and so lead to a ‘new’ lexicography. In particular this is what has happened to the fillers for the ‘format’, ‘means’, ‘beneficiary’, and ‘other-participants’-slots during the last decades.

The lexicograpical situation in South Africa[ii]

The situation before 1994
This part of the article is mainly based on Van Schalkwyk 2003. In what follows, we will give a brief outline bullet-wise of the most important lexicographical ‘facts’ of the pre-1994 period:

– Two official languages existed (English and Afrikaans).
– their wake two big government-subsidized lexicographical projects were carried out:
– the Dictionary of SA English on Historical Principles (1968-1996);
– the WAT (= Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal) (1926 – …) (up until 2003, 11 volumes (A-O) have been published).
– For African (black) languages three university projects have been started up: Xhosa (1968 – …) (Greater isiXhosa Dictionary), Zulu (1977 – …) (isiKazamasu Dictionary) and Sesotho sa Leboa (1988 – …) (English – Pedi v.v. Dictionary).
– Furthermore there existed bilingual wordlists between English/Afrikaans and one or more of the African languages mainly meant to give (rapid) access to the ‘white’ languages for the ‘black’ language speaker.

The situation after 1994
A new lexicographical policy/regulation takes place from the side of government leading to:

– The establishment of 11 official languages in 1996: the existing ones, English and Afrikaans, were augmented by Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele, Swati (= members of the Nguni family), Sesotho sa Leboa, Sesotho, Setswana (= members of the Sotho family), Xitsonga, and Tshivenda.
– PANSALB (= Pan South African Language Board) was established in 1996 for the development and stimulation of all official South African languages and, in particular, those which have been marginalized up until now; PANSALB should also promote multilinguality.
– In 1998/99 lexicographical units were established for all South African official languages with the aim to come to monolingual data/databases, serving as a basis for all kinds of lexicographical products.

Van Schalkwyk (2003) reports with regard to the state-of-affairs of the lexicographical units: ‘In die tussetyd is reeds personeel aangestel. Op die oomblik is die soektog na hoofdredakteurs aan die gang’. [‘In the meantime staff has already been appointed. At the moment the search for editors-in-chief is going on’.] This quotation makes clear that, apart from the specific descriptive problems for African languages, the most outstanding problem of South African lexicography at the moment, is the fact that lexicographers/ metalexicographers with a formal training are scarce, making the process of starting up lexicographical projects for Africa languages an extremely slow one.

The ANNA-project: some facts and figures
ANNA is an acronym for Afrikaans-Nederlands, Nederlands-Afrikaans. As a dictionary project it came to the fore in 1999 when a Feasibility and Definition Study was undertaken (see Martin, Gouws and Renders 1999) in order to find out whether such as dictionary was needed and if so, which features it should have. In 2000 it was decided to definitely start up the project, expecting it to be finalized in 2006/7. ANNA is mainly subsidized by private money, namely by two Dutch foundations: ZASM (= Zuid Afrikaanse Spoorweg Maatschappij, ‘South African Railway Company’, Amsterdam) as the main sponsor, and the Van den Berch van Heemstede Foundation, The Hague. The Universities of Potchefstroom and Stellenbosch have also financially contributed. The work is carried out in close co-operation between the universities of Stellenbosch, Port Elisabeth, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the Limburg University Centre (Belgium); the Vrije Universiteit acting as a co-ordinator.

The production is also expected to be a co-operative effort between South Africa and the Low Countries, as Pharos (for the electronic version) and Van Dale (for the paper version) are the intended publishers. The main features of the final ANNA-product can be summarized as follows:

ANNA
– aims to be a bilingual dictionary/database;
– not in the traditional sense of the word;
– making use of modern, new technology (tools) and new metalexicographical insights (models);
– which should lead not only to an innovative, contrastive, comparative dictionary/database between Afrikaans and Dutch;
– but also to new models and tools which can be used by other language pairs such as the African languages spoken in South Africa.

This last feature was one of the basic requirements of the partners to participate in the project and one of the main issues that has been investigated in the pilot study. In what follows this ‘innovative’ feature of ANNA will be dealt with in more detail.

ANNA and the ‘new’ lexicography
In order to make clear what is new in ANNA, we will start from a very simple but concrete example: the Dutch word zalm, with its Afrikaans equivalent salm (English: ‘salmon’) and show what ANNA does and what it does not (does no longer).

What ANNA DOES NOT
A traditional bilingual Dutch-Afrikaans v.v. dictionary (NA/AN) would contain two entries for ‘salmon’, one in the NA-part zalm salm, and one in the AN-part salm ® zalm. One could imagine these entries to look as follows:

NA-part:
ZALM[iii]

1 [kind of fish] salm
een plakje zalm ’n repie salm; verse zalm vars salm; een blikje zalm ’n blikkie salm; gerookte zalm gerookte salm; <fig.> het neusje van de zalm die allerbeste.

AN-part:
SALM
1 [kind of fish]
’n repie salm een plakje zalm; vars salm verse zalm; ’n blikkie salm een blikje zalm; gerookte salm gerookte zalm.

As one can observe, closely related languages, such as Dutch and Afrikaans, resemble each other strongly in their ‘complementary’ parts. They are not each other’s mirror image, yet they come very close. The way they are treated above shows a very high degree of redundancy, that is why we will prefer another descriptive model, the amalgamation model, illustrated in what follows.

ANNA does not treat two closely related languages apart, but unifies them, malagamates them into one, single macrostructure. In other words, it treats zalm/salm as if the two entries were the same (or variants of a common entry). This has the advantage that one can both reduce redundancy (see the preceding paragraph) and enhance/optimalise comparability/contrastivity. For instance, in the case of zalm/salm it will become clear at a single glance what is similar/different between them as the entry below (which is an ANNA-entry) shows.

ZALM/SALM
1 [a kind of fish]
<< >> verse zalm vars salm; een blikje zalm ’n blikkie salm; gerookte zalm gerookte salm;
>> << een plakje zalm ’n repie salm;
<fig.> het neusje van de zalm die allerbeste.

The symbols used are to be interpreted as follows:

<< >>: similar, non-contrastive examples/combinations;
>> <<: different, contrastive examples/combinations;
<fig.>: idioms and figurative usage.

If one is only interested in differences between the two languages (from a combinatorial point-of-view) one could for instance skip the << >>-section. This way the user can define his own ‘paths’ through the data, depending on his/her interests and needs.

What ANNA CAN DO (for a ‘new’ lexicography in South Africa)
It will have been clear from the preceeding that it is the ambition of the ANNA-project that some of its material and immaterial infrastructure can be used beyond the project itself. This is the case for the amalgamation model (immaterial infrastructure) and for the tool to deal with it (material infrastructure). In what follows we briefly present both possibilities.

The amalgamation model
The amalgamation model has proven its value for the ANNA-project in that it successfully unifies the macrostructures of two closely related languages and optimises their comparability. Its main features are the following:

– The two macrostructures are unified into one, amalgamated structure.
– This is done on the basis of formal and semantic relatedness.[iv]
– This amalgamation leads to different lemma-types:

* Combined lemmata (cognates) (A + D) such as:
– absolute cognates (e.g. A tafel/D tafel (E table));
– absolute cognates with systematic morphological/orthographical differences (e.g. A ontsnap/D ontsnappen (E escape));
– partial cognates (contrary to absolute cognates, partial cognates do not share all meanings, e.g. robot A/D = E automaton, A only = traffic light);

* Non-combined lemmata (non-cognates) which formally differ, such as D verkeersdrempel/A spoedwalletjie (E speedwall) and false friends which semantically differ, such as:
– D mus = A mossie (= E sparrow);
– A mus = D muts (= E cap).
* The model can reduce or leave out non contrastive, redundant examples/combinations.
* The model guarantees optimal and direct comparability between two closely related languages.
* The model has proven to be exportable to other closely related languages such as languages from the Nguni and the Sotho family (see Mashamaite 1995).

ANNA, OMBI and the Hub-and-Spoke Model
In order to come to an efficient language infrastructure, resources which have to function within a multilingual environment should be developed with a view on their usability and linkability with other resources of that environment. Therefore they should use adequate instruments such as editors with linking and reversing capacity. ANNA makes use of such an editor, viz. OMBI (acronym for ‘OMkeertool voor BIlinguale bestanden (‘reversing tool for bilingual databases’)).[v] It would lead us too far to enter into details here; let it suffice to state that OMBI links two words of two different languages at meaning level: Dutch ‘paard’, for instance, is linked in its ANIMAL meaning to ‘horse’ (in its ANIMAL meaning) and, in its CHESS meaning, to ‘knight’ (in its CHESS meaning). Furthermore, OMBI specifies the relationship between these semantic units so that one can use them in a calculus in order to reverse them, block them, derive other values for them etc. In other words, OMBI does as what is illustrated in figure 1:

Figure 1 – Linking items from language A with those of language B and vice versa

The fact that one has explicitly specified the relationships between the items makes that, when adding one language (C) to the data collection (A « B), one can infer the links between B and C by means of derivation rules. See fig. 2:

Figure 2 – Linking two languages (B and C) to one common language (A) and deriving the links between B and C

Language A now functions as a common link. It is called the hub-language in analogy with air-traffic organization where often one does not fly directly from a (spoke) airport to another (spoke) airport, but via a hub, a central airport. B and C are the spoke-languages.

The Hub-and-Spoke Model is a model with a large potential. Its strength lies in the fact that it exploits the intra- and interlingual relations in and between languages and does so via a hub (instead of bidirectionally). One can imagine that in a multilingual context such as in South Africa, where there are 11 official languages, the model seems to be very promising. In such a situation (11 languages), 55 different pairs (= 110 bilingual dictionaries; taking both directions into account) could be derived. In a hub-and-spoke configuration one could suffice with ten direct links (10 spokes to 1 hub), the remaining 45 being generated as indirect spin-offs. Actually there is a gain in data-production from the third language onwards (see fig. 3). For more information on the Hub-and-Spoke Model see Martin and Heid (1998).

Figure 3 – Situation with five different languages in a HaS-configuration: ten language pairs; four directly linked (indicated by full lines); six indirectly linked (indicated by broken lines).

Conclusion: PROS and CONS of the ANNA project
As a conclusion one may state that there is (at least) one good argument NOT to carry out the ANNA-project and three good reasons to DO SO. We list them one after the other in what follows.

The communicative argument
There is no big communicative gap to bridge between Afrikaans and Dutch considering the fact that speakers from Afrikaans and Dutch can communicate with each other each speaking his/her own language. Of course, this communication will now and then lead to miscommunication, to misunderstanding, and to linguistic problems, but solving these are not in themselves sufficient conditions to justify the ANNA project.

The functional argument
If one accepts that language is a vehicle not only for basic communication, but also to properly express oneself in, be it in literature, in science or in everyday situations, then a bilingual dictionary is an important instrument to understand the subtleties and nuances of the other language, the other culture. In Afrikaans and Dutch this is the more so as there do not exist fully-fledged dictionaries Afrikaans-Dutch and vice versa at the moment. In this respect ANNA fills a gap both for Dutch and for Afrikaans language users.

The descriptive argument
Afrikaans, until very recently, has been described as a rather homogeneous and ‘pure’ language. ANNA starts from a Dutch database, the RBN (= Referentie Bestand Nederlands, ‘Reference Database of Dutch’)[vi] which shows a rather varied picture of Dutch. It is the aim to link Dutch to Afrikaans as it is used now, being the mother tongue of more coloured than white people (5,5 million speakers in all, in a proportion 60 per cent coloured, 40 per cent white). This way ANNA can give an impetus to a ‘new’ view on the lexicographical description of Afrikaans.

The scientific argument
Last but not least, ANNA has developed a model (the amalgamation model together with the appropriate tools to make the model operative, see preceding section) which has a general linguistic value. The model enables closely related languages, no matter whether they are spoken by ‘white’, ‘black’, or ‘coloured’ linguistic communities, to be described in an own contrastive way. In doing so, attention is paid both to similarities and differences. More in particular contrasts which lie on the supralexical level (co-text (combinations) and context (wider pragmatic situation)) and which often pass unnoticed, can now be captured. We hope that this last feature in particular will pave the way to a ‘new’, useful and co-operative lexicography in South Africa.

NOTES
[i] A frame is a schema to represent knowledge with. It consists of slots (general classes) and fillers (specifications of the slots). Frames and their variants (as graphs, networks etc.) are well-known in Artificial Intelligence literature.
[ii] This part of the article is mainly based on Van Schalkwyk 2003.
[iii] For clarity’s sake the metalanguage in the meaning resumés is represented in English here (see: kind of fish).
[iv] Words (from Dutch and Afrikaans) that are combined are declared to be cognates. In order to be considered a cognate, the word pair must share the ‘same’ form (deviations permitted), and at least one meaning.
[v] For more information on OMBI see Martin and Tamm 1996.
[vi] For more information on the RBN see Van der Vliet 2005 (forthcoming).

References
Martin, W. and Tamm, A. (1996) ‘OMBI, an editor for constructing reversible lexical databases’, in M. Gellerstamm et al. (Eds), Euralex ’96 Proceedings, Göteborg: Göteborg University, pp. 675-85.
Martin, W. and Heid, U. (1998) On the construction of bilingual dictionaries, Den Haag: CLVV.
Martin, W., Gouws, R. and Renders, L. (1999) Haalbaarheids- en definitiestudie voor een woordenboek Afrikaans-Nederlands/Nederlands-Afrikaans. Amsterdam: VU University Press.
Martin, W. and Gouws, R. (2000) ‘A new dictionary model for closely related languages: The Dutch-Afrikaans dictionary project as a case-in-point’, in U. Heid et al. (Eds), The ninth Euralex International Congress Proceedings, Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart, pp. 783-92.
Martin, W. (2003) ‘Lexicography, lexicology, linking and the hub-and-spoke model’, in W. Botha (Ed.), ’n Man wat beur. Huldigingsbundel vir Dirk van Schalkwyk, Stellenbosch: Buro van die WAT, pp. 268-85.
Mashamaite, K.J. (1995) The hub-and-spoke model: A recipe for making bilingual dictionaries between African languages in South Africa, MA-thesis, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit.
Van der Vliet, H. (2005, forthcoming). Digitale bronnen voor het Nederlands: Het referentiebestand Nederlands (RBN).
Van Schalkwyk, D. (2003) Lexicografie in Afrika met die klem op Suid-Afrika (unpublished manuscript).

The wealth of Africa
Wealth producing innovation does not occur in a vacuum.
Technological breakthroughs do not automatically lead to increased wealth. More wealth does not lead to a better society.

Research for a better life
The benefication of research into wealth requires
– Skilled people;
– And ideas;
– That translate into novel practices;
– Organisations;
– And products

In other words, it takes social innovation to make wealth through research and it takes research to make innovation in the 21st century.

The NRF – A South African national mandate in an African context

Support and promote research
– through funding, human resource development and the provision of the necessary research facilities

To facilitate
– the creation of knowledge, innovation and development in all fields of science and technology, including indigenous knowledge.

In order
– to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of all the people of the Republic
Managing and stimulating research across the knowledge spectrum

Strategic priorities
– High quality research;
– Equity and redress;
– Internationalisation of research;
– Focus on Africa;
– Positioning the NRF within the NSI;
– Organisational transformation.

PhDs as the driver
Strategy requires multiple interventions at different nodes along the Higher Education and National Innovation system.

The key driver for the NRF is the production of PhDs
– In sufficient quantities;
– Of sufficient quality;
– Across the knowledge spectrum;
– In order to create an innovative and entrepreneurial knowledge society.

The challenge is
– To efficiently feed and create high levels of knowledge resource;
– To offer graduates visible, meaningful career paths;
– To translate the benefits of sustained Higher Education into people able to produce or use new knowledge to meet challenges of democratic development.

Social Science, Law and Humanities = The Significant Other
– Requirement for creating a democratic, culturally informed and innovative society (social);
– Awaken new directions in scholarship (social);
– Create a platform for understanding and building teh interface between and across knowledge systems (systemic);
– Present the need for research in humanities in the NSI (policy).

NRF-driven SSLH initiatives
– Shifting boundaries of knowledge;
– Developing the study of science as a research field;
– Introduction of SSLH into Large Science Platforms – African Coelacanth;
– Stimulation of Science and Society.

Shifting boundaries – first draft themes
– Theories of knowledge;
– Theories and knowledge;
– Social functioning a.k.a. development;
– Globalisation and community;
– Social structure – race, class and gender.

Approach to international partnerships

Purpose is to build
– Research links;
– Individual and institutional capacity;
– Networks and partnerships.
In a way that is enduring and self-sustaining.

Compelling arguments
– Expertise;
– Performance;
– Relevance;
– Intellectual leadership;
– Social accountability;
– Prospective thinking.

Compelling engagement
– Direct institution to institution linkages for SA capacity building;
– System to system dialogue and exchanges;
– Scholarships;
– Research partnerships;
– Access to EU Framework Programmes;
– Active public scholarship.

Note: This contribution is the unadapted text from a Powerpoint presentation.

This paper endeavours to offer policy perspectives on international relations between South Africa and other countries in general and South Africa and the Netherlands in particular. More specifically, the paper looks at South African Dutch relationships against the historical background on the one hand and current research priorities for South Africa on the other. The paper, first of all, offers a number of propositions that will guide the remainder of the paper. In the second place, a listing is offered of some notable South African scholars and leaders with Dutch connections. Some of the characteristics of the South African research and development (R&D) system are next offered, followed by main challenges faced by that system. The fifth section deals with its comparative strengths and weaknesses. In the sixth section different sets of priorities are given after which the paper looks at different aspects of international R&D cooperation. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for the future.

Two background notes may be in order at this point. The analyses in this paper are mainly informed by the author’s exposure to international collaboration (for instance, the collaborative study undertaken by the Vrije Universiteit and the Human Science Research Council on social movements), interpretations of national policy and priorities, and exposure to the business of a national advisory council. Finally it is necessary to say that this paper focuses on science, technology and innovation, more particularly on research and development, with an emphasis on the social sciences and humanities. The following limited set of propositions guided the composition and analyses in this paper.

– Academic exposure to the Dutch Higher Education and Science and Technology systems in the past contributed substantially to both the emergence of a democratic dispensation and also to scientific excellence in South Africa – and it will hopefully in future contribute to both.

– The democratisation of South Africa has brought in its wake the potential for full participation in the global research and development network, including training, collaborative research, international funding for research, access to opportunities – training and research – access to job opportunities, and mobility of research workers. The country still has a long way to go to realise all the potential inherent in these new opportunities.

– South Africa possesses a reasonably strong science and technology system which was inherited from the previous constitutional dispensation.

– There still remains, however, a number of factors that could inhibit optimistic scenarios about the future: The relative geographic isolation of South Africa, Information Communication Technology limitations, asymmetrical needs (for instance the challenge to match the need for excellence with that of capacity development), and the relatively limited financial capacity of the country.

– South Africa is well placed to offer Europe in general and the Netherlands in particular unique opportunities for good quality collaboration in various fields of research and development, especially if certain conditions are accounted for.

Dutch influence on democratisation in South Africa
The Netherlands as ‘capacity builder’ has manifestly and latently impacted in important ways on developments in South Africa. ‘A significant number of dissident of Afrikaner intellectuals [many with post-1960 Dutch connections, HCM] have consistently voiced their critique of Apartheid’, according to Mouton and Muller (1995: 182). To contextualise this relatively powerful statement the following, admittedly arbitrarily chosen, examples could be listed:

– Literature: from Vincent February, through Njabula Ndebele, to N.P. van Wyk Louw;
– Theology: Alan Boesak, Beyers Naudé, Jaap Durand, and Willie Jonker;
– Law: from John Dugard to Bhandra Ranscod;
– Science management: Rob Adam to Johan Garbers;
– Political science: Willie Esterhuize.

Typology of the South African R&D system
The South African R&D system is located in a national context that is characterised by a complex configuration of challenges. These challenges include:

– Competition for resources (ranging from the funding of primary health care, proper housing, proper secondary school education to international competitiveness in high technology).

– An R&D system that is a system-in-transition and is therefore very dynamic, sometimes even turbulent (cf. the mergers in the higher education system, reducing the number of institution from 33 to 22; the reorganisation of the science and technology governance system; and the acute need for research capacity building).

– A system that is largely in Mode 2 of knowledge production (see e.g. Gibbons et al. 1994 or Rip and Marais 1998), which means, amongst other things, that publicly funded R&D is in important respects priorities-guided. The consequences for self-initiated basic research should be clear. The fact that South Africa is in a strategic science mode means that a very high premium is being placed on the notion of collaboration, and that is obviously conducive to international collaboration.

– South Africa has a relatively well-developed research system. Many political spokespersons have since 1994 confirmed this. A few indicators of the strength of the system are offered in a later section.

– The system is subject to serious financial constraints. These constraints are related to the competing priorities mentioned earlier, as well as the emphasis been placed by the country’s National Treasury on criteria for the funding of new programmes, namely outcomes and even increasingly on the possible impacts of such programmes.

Challenges to the South African system
Against the background of the preceding characterisation of the South African Science and Technology system the following are some of the major challenges to that system.

Firstly, South Africa has to create an optimal level of stability in the system. Currently, the mergers in the higher education system generate unproductive turbulence and one cannot expect an increase in the productivity of researchers until that has settled. In this regard it should be noted that the university system accounts for approximately 25 per cent of research output.

Secondly, and of critical importance, is the need for effective research capacity development. All research and development indicators point to the dire need for new or novice black researchers to enter the system and to start contributing to it. The problem currently, it would seem, is not the fact that ageing white male researchers are responsible for the larger proportion of publications in the country (45 per cent in 1998 older than 50 years of age; NACI 2002) but the fact that there is not a sufficient inflow of young black and women researchers.

Thirdly the country is being faced with rapidly ageing equipment and research infrastructure. On the one hand a proportion of equipment is rapidly ageing, but on the other hand there is also the suggestion that coordination, cooperation, and collaboration with regard to existing equipment could be improved.

Fourthly – and as already implied earlier – there is a dire need to improve the conversion rate of research into innovation (that is, technology, problem solutions, etcetera). As has been said, given the relatively restricted resources at the disposal of the research community, more of that research output should find its way towards the solution of the many and varied challenges confronting the country. Attention should be given to a sensitivity to the need to accelerate the conversion from research to some form of implementation.

Fifthly, the climate for research by the business sector must be improved. Currently, the country lags behind other countries with regard to the incentivisation of research and development by the business sector. Examples include the lack of tax incentives, the relatively vulnerable intellectual property rights security, and the relative lack of incentives for university-business collaboration. The importance of this challenge cannot be sufficiently emphasised, since the business sector is generally seen as the crucible of converting research into innovation – a driver of the growth rate and improvement of the quality of life of all South Africans.

Finally, and cross-cutting the above five challenges, is the need to technologise society. South Africa is essentially, as government often emphasises, a dual economy. The term here refers to the fact that there is a highly developed and industrialised modern economy on the one hand and a developing, even underdeveloped, economy on the other. If the divide between these two cannot be bridged, the science community would be unreasonable to suspect significant increases in R&D investment. Research and development, technology and innovation should be seen to benefit the have-nots, i.e. the deprived members of the second economy, otherwise scepticism about the so-called benefits of investment in research and development could be expected.

Comparative strength and performance of the system
The preceding paragraphs offered a selective qualitative overview of the nature of the science and technology system in South Africa. In this section, some of the qualitative comments are translated into comparative quantitative data – a few ‘hard’ stepping stones across the qualitative stream, as it were. For this purpose, two comparator countries have been chosen that represent extremes on the international scale, viz. the Netherlands and Senegal, while seven quantitative indicators are summarised in the following table (cf. e.g. DST 2005; UNDP 2002).

Table 1: Comparative S&T capacities

The information in the table is rather self-explanatory and shows that South Africa compares rather unfavourably with a developed country, such as the Netherlands, while it compares very favourably with African countries, here exemplified by Senegal. Although one could elaborate on the data, only a few additional comments should suffice:

– First of all it should be noted that South Africa is far from obtaining the magic 1 per cent of GDP spend on research and development (GERD). Although there is a slow upward trend (from 0.76 in 2001/2002 to 0.81 in 2002/2003) and a target has been set to reach 1 per cent by 2008. In comparison, the GERD of the Netherlands is more then twice that of South Africa.

– Secondly it should be noticed that the productivity of the South African research community is proportionally much lower than that of an industrialised country such as the Netherlands, even when the data are normalised.

– A very significant international indicator of capacity and also of S&T performance is that of the Technology Achievement Index: South Africa is far lower than industrialised Netherlands, but significantly higher than a developing country, such as Senegal. In terms of these indices the Netherlands is ranked eighth, South Africa as 107th and Senegal as 154th .

Put together data such as these show that South Africa has a well developed system for an African country, but still lags far behind industrialised countries.

To keep the implications of these and related figures in perspective requires that we remind ourselves that the literature indicates a strong positive correlation between science and technology on the one hand and economic and social development of a country on the other. In this regard, a reference to what King, the science advisor of the British Prime Minister, recently said: ‘…sustainable economic development in highly competitive world markets requires a direct engagement in the generation of knowledge’, and he went on to show ‘…the cycle of poverty and dependence [that is in developing countries] will only be broken by capacity building between nations of high and low science intensity often characterised as the North and the South’ (2004: 403). The message is very clear, namely to enhance South Africa’s economic and social development requires the intensification of its science and research endeavours – in this regard one of the obvious instruments is that of international collaboration. Through cooperation between South African and the Netherlands, South Africa stands a better chance to further accelerate its research and development capacity and thereby raise its economic growth.

Priority themes and areas: an overview
Talking about research priorities might come across as a rather strong form of research steering. However, it is necessary to recall that the South African Research and Development System is currently one that is priorities-directed. The missions of most South African research institutions currently specify explicitly that the research agenda should be aligned with national priorities. Obviously this is a contestable area, yet it is a reality within which South Africa operates.

I would like to start with the national priorities of central government followed by the South African Research and Development Strategy (NRDS) and its priorities, thirdly the priorities that guide NACI currently and, finally, the NEPAD priorities. All of the above, however, in the full realisation that a government’ priorities are by definition political in nature and that that such priorities are very broad.

Government priorities
The so-called national imperatives that government promote are driven by the need to link what is called the first and second economies of the country. That literally means to have the underdeveloped – mostly deep rural communities – share in the benefits of the developed economy. More specifically the following imperatives are promoted.

– Eradication of poverty;
– Improvement of quality of life;
– Reconstruction and development of the country;
– Racial and gender equality;
– National unity and intonation;
– Effectiveness and efficiency of the public sector;
– Human Resource Development;
– Appropriate responses to globalisation.

National R&D Strategy
The key document directing publicly funded research and development in South Africa is currently ‘The National Research and Development Strategy’ (2003). A summary of the priorities covered by the strategy is summarised below.

– Poverty reduction;
– New technology platforms:
* Biotechnology;
* Information and communication technology;
– Advanced manufacturing;
– Leveraging resource-based industries and developing new knowledge-based industries from them.

Given that this book primarily focuses on the human and social sciences it may be useful at this point to refer to the position of the social sciences as summarised in the NRDS:

Our ability to respond [to new areas of technology] is not simply depended on having the technological capacity available. There is a particular need to mobilise the social sciences to develop far more holistic understandings and interventions to improve the rate of innovation in our society. The role of the social sciences is often underestimated, and it is therefore necessary to develop specific capacities in the social sciences to understand and strengthen our system of innovation (2003: 38). Indeed, a tall order for the social sciences but at the same time one which they surely should take up.

NACI priorities
The National Advisory Council on Innovation has identified the following broad set of priorities, some of which are already far advanced and others only in the initial phases of study:

– Necessary best practice in innovation policy and strategy;
– Optimal provision of infrastructure;
– Dynamic modelling of appropriate human resources for the NSI;
– A mapping of regional systems of innovation;
– The position of women in the national system of innovation;
– Social aspects of innovation;
– The state and scope of ethics in the national system of innovation.

NEPAD flagship programmes
Since the establishment of a science and technology secretariat within in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) structures a number of so-called flagship programmes have been identified and are currently being operationalised.

These programmes are:
– Biodiversity;
– Biotechnology;
– Information and communication technology;
– Energy technologies
– Material sciences;
– Space science and technology;
– Post harvest food technology;
– Water science and technology;
– Indigenous knowledge systems;
– Desertification research;
– Science and technology for manufacturing;
– Major technology.

These priorities or flagship programmes fall, with a few exceptions, clearly in the realm of the hard sciences. Nevertheless, the social sciences and humanities could in partnership with natural scientists and engineers make a meaningful contribution. For instance, in the case of energy technologies the whole question of pollution and human behaviour with regard to energy conservation comes into play. The same would apply to desertification where agricultural practices are a factor in the encroachment by the desert.

Observations on international cooperation
This chapter has so far dealt primarily with the South African situation and has moved towards specific priorities with regard to which there is a national need for R&D. This section of this chapter looks at the pros and cons, respectively the opportunities and the threats to international collaboration. Table 2 summarises some of the opportunities and the threats to such cooperation.

A close study of the self-explanatory table shows that the opportunities are primarily those concerning the broadening of scientific horizons, in either the form of participation in an international context or by cross-validation of such studies. Seen from a different perspective, the challenges focus more on what could be called programme management and human aspects of research.

Table 2: Observations on international collaboration

Implications for international cooperation
If there is a message hidden in the previous sections of this chapter, then it is a call for the extension of Dutch involvement in collaboration with South African universities and research institutions. South Africa certainly needs Dutch cooperation, but the chapter implies that Dutch research can also profit and benefit from collaboration with their South African counterparts.

One condition for such cooperation and collaboration is to have such collaboration preferably be centred around South African priority areas. It would be fair to say that the priorities mentioned earlier in this chapter offer a very wide range of topics for which there should be serious interest from Dutch colleagues. This point relates to the argument that such research should at least take account of a Mode 2 design. That, of course, does not imply that the quality of such research should be suspect in any way. To the contrary, an assumption of this chapter has throughout been that international collaboration should entail high quality research.

An important implication of the analyses so far is that a distinction should be made between knowledge generation in its own right and research capacity development, i.e. training of novice researchers. We cannot simply assume that a research project will necessarily contribute to research capacity development. Our experience has so far shown that one has to explicitly manage capacity development as an additional and a unique function attached to research. Indeed, funding agencies should explicitly require a plan to show how a project would contribute to capacity building.

Another guideline that is also emerging from the above analyses is that we should preferably invest in larger and multi institutional programs rather than small individual projects. This is not to say that the latter should be ignored. However, an important project of NACI (2003) has convincingly shown that larger projects have a significantly better chance of getting implemented and utilized than small projects. And that is what strategic science and Mode 2 are all about. And this means that research partners should plan for meaningful outcomes and impacts from the start of collaborative ventures – it should not be a postscript, an afterthought.

All of the above adds up to the need for professional project management skills and approaches. In fact, it would be a truism to say that the larger the project and the more participants in such a project, the more challenging the management challenges become.

Strategic – also ethical – questions
In conclusion I would like to raise a number of strategic, respectively ethical questions. When planning international collaborative ventures we should ask ourselves at least the following questions and obviously also have sound and defendable answers to them.

– What would we leave behind upon completion of the project?
– What and how would we contribute to the development of South Africa in general and the particular field or community in particular?
– How sustainable would our project involvement be? Or will it be a once-off effort and excuse to spend some time in Africa?
– What would we take back in terms of learning experience? Would we be able to transfer the skills to our students back home?
– Is it part of a larger program or incidental personal project-in-a-different-context?
– Would we be prepared for a thorough program evaluation upon its completion? To put it rather starkly, would our study stand the light of thorough program interrogation?

Conclusions
This chapter has tried to address a number of parameters associated with international collaboration in general and between South Africa and the Netherlands in particular. The analyses offered in this chapter, would justify the following conclusions (which are also related to the propositions made in the earlier part of the chapter):

– Both South Africa and the Netherlands can profit from intensified engagement and this is not only for historical reasons but in the spirit of globalisation the nature of Mode 2 of knowledge production and the spirit of this particular workshop.
– South Africa has indeed elevated international collaboration to a priority at national and institutional levels.
– Ideally, projects should be located within an innovation value chain – this is also a context in which the social scientist can make essential multi-, inter- and trans disciplinary contributions.
– Larger projects and programs are preferable to small and incidental ones.
– It is essential to explicate the expected value addition by the collaborating partners rather than just engaging in a program of which the outcomes are not clear at the start.
– Collaborative research and development programs pose project management challenges that cannot simply be left to chance or default options.
– Collaborative programs should be evaluated on a regular basis.

NOTES
[i] Edward Rakate and Ria Vogel are thanked for their assistance in the preparation of this paper.
[ii] The National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) is a South African statutory advisory body, established in 1997 to advise the Minister of Science and Technology and Cabinet on all matters pertaining to innovation, which includes science and technology. Counterparts of NACI include the Dutch Adviesraad voor het Wetenschaps– en Technologiebeleid (AWT).

References
Department of Science and Technology (2004) National Survey of Research and Experimental Development [R&D], 2001/2 fiscal year, Cape Town: DST.
Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The new production of knowledge. The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies, London: Sage.
King, D.A. (2004) ‘The scientific impact of nations: What different countries get for their research spending’, Nature 15(July).
Mouton, J. and Muller, J. (1995) ‘A typology of shifts in intellectual formations’, in U. van Beek (Ed.), South Africa and Poland in transition: A comparative perspective, Pretoria: HSRC, pp. 163-97.
National Advisory Council on Innovation and Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (2002) South African science and technology: Key facts and figures, Pretoria: NACI.
National Advisory Council on Innovation (2003) Utilisation of research findings: Extent, dynamics and strategies, Pretoria: NACI.
Rip, A. and Marais, H.C. (1998) ‘Assessing university research under conditions of changing knowledge production’, SAUVCA Publication Series 98(2): 1-22.
UNDP (2002) Human Development Report 2002: Deepening democracy in a fragmented world, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

…training new generations of scientists and technologists oriented towards the solving of real problems (White Paper on Science and Technology 1996).

The SandT capacity of the country is running as fast as it can, but is still losing ground (National Research and Development Strategy 2000).

Introduction
The landscape of scientific practice and higher education in South Africa has changed drastically since 2 February 1990. The changes that occurred in these fields during the last decade of the 20th century were probably the most incisive in the history of science and higher education in South Africa.
When the democratically elected government came into power in 1994, science was confronted with two main challenges, namely to transform the system so that the welfare of all the inhabitants could be promoted and to make South Africa competitive in a globalising world.
The new government inherited a sound science infrastructure. It was a widely dispersed and uncoordinated system in which scientists enjoyed international recognition for transplanting hearts and for enabling the deepest exploitation of mines in the world. However, the system was mainly directed at the promotion of the welfare of the white community and was strongly focussed on military defence; the provision of energy and food; and the combating of diseases.[i]

In this transformation process, South Africa was very receptive to theories, models and schools of thought. Expertise from abroad was not provided in all instances without direct or subtle influence. There are already indications that certain models, that were applied successfully elsewhere, cannot be transferred without adaptations to the South African situation, where complex issues have to be addressed. The question that arises is whether the government implements the policy documents that were designed by intellectuals who are not part of the bureaucracy.

Two examples are applicable to the aims of this paper. Firstly, the work by Gibbons et al. (1994) entitled The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies and also Scott et al.’s (1995) The meaning of mass higher education have had a strong influence on policy formulation regarding science and regarding higher education (Kraak 2000). Secondly, the World Bank has made significant inputs to the establishment of the policy on land reform. There is at present a widespread debate on whether a shift of emphasis from Gibbons’ Mode 1 (basic) to Mode 2 (interdisciplinary or applied research) has had a beneficial effect on teaching and research in higher education in particular and on science in general. Older academics and researchers find it difficult to switch from Mode 1 to Mode 2. Younger researchers and some faculties at universities have probably embraced this new paradigm and the pursuit of relevance so strongly that it now threatens to smother them. In this regard there appears to be a great deal of validity in Sheila Slaughter’s statement, as quoted by Kraak (2000: 33):
… that the commercialization of the academy will lead to a decline of the canonical tradition itself, the weakening of the professorate and scholarly research and the triumph of a managerial mode of control in the university not unlike that of corporate capitalism.

The new way of creating and disseminating knowledge is an indisputable feature across the world and a new social organisation of knowledge and learning is emerging. In South Africa it has occurred very rapidly and with strong government interference, and therefore it is inevitable that there will be some distortion.

Part I of this paper summarises the strengths and weaknesses of science and of higher education over the past ten years. Part II focuses on the complexity of land reform, which is one of the most important political and socio-economic issues that faces the country en route to ensuring that its society is fair and peaceful to a greater extent than before. This issue can only be resolved by new generation researchers who use a combination of basic and interdisciplinary applied research.

Part I – Strengths and weaknesses of science and higher education
Throughout the struggle years, the ANC accorded a high priority to the role that science and technology should fulfil in the reconstruction of the country. After coming to power in 1994, they maintained the science infrastructure to a large extent and approached it with circumspection. The expenditure on military research[ii] and on energy independence was reduced. This reduction partly explains why the expenditure on RandD declined from 1,19 per cent of the GDP in 1990 to 0,79 per cent in 2002 (National Research and Development Strategy 2002). It is probable that more expertise could have been retained to convert ‘swords into ploughshares’. Some knowledge used in the production of weapons has been applied in industry, while some of the expertise of the former Atomic Energy Corporation is currently being used in amongst other things the new Pebble Bed Modular Reactor at Koeberg in the Western Cape. The establishment of a new ministry for science and technology in 2004 underlines the importance that the government attributes to science and technology.

Some building blocks in the establishment of a new framework for science and higher education Large-scale restructuring of the science system was required to achieve the main goals of transformation, a better quality of life for all inhabitants and international competitiveness. This discussion is limited to only some of the important building blocks of the process.

The Green Paper and the White Paper on science and technology: Preparing for the 21st century (1996) provided a new framework for scientific practice. It evaluated the existing system and created structures to develop, implement and monitor the policy framework (Bawa and Mouton 2003: 300). The aim was to make South Africa more responsive to restructuring and development needs. Of particular importance was the establishment of a National System of Innovation (NSI). A National System of Innovation can be thought of as a set of functioning institutions, organisations and politics that interact constructively in the pursuit of a common set of social and economic goals or objectives.

The funding of research and postgraduate training in the human and the natural sciences[iii], which was previously managed by two institutions, was integrated upon the establishment of the National Research Foundation (Act 23 of 1998). It benefited the human sciences, because more funds became available and a system of peer evaluation now identifies top researchers and funds them as generously as in the natural sciences. The total amount of funding has been increased, especially for high-level human resources development. In 2003, ‘…a total of 5442 students received bursaries, of which 3309 were awarded to black students. It was also the first year in which the NRF supported more than 1000 PhD students…’ (Von Gruenewaldt 2004).

The National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) was founded and began functioning in November 1998. The institution, which in essence replaced the former Science Advisory Council, advises the Minister of Science and Technology on science and technology, innovation and competitiveness. It is an important guiding mechanism in the establishment of the NSI.

An innovation fund was established in 1998 to promote technological innovation and competitiveness. Up to 2004 the fund has spend R665 million on 106 projects (Von Gruenewaldt 2004). In order to direct the research of the science councils, government grants were pruned so that income has to be augmented by means of contract research. These councils can also apply to the Innovation Fund for funds to do directed research. Thus far the science councils have benefited more from the fund than the universities have. The greater teaching load that lecturers have as a result of a larger number of ill-prepared students is one of the reasons why the universities have been poorer competitors for the funds.
Technological innovation and competitiveness have been strongly promoted by the establishment of the Technology for Human Resources for Industry Programme (THRIP). This programme is the result of a joint initiative undertaken by industry, the Department of Trade and Industry, research and education institutions, the Innovation Fund, and the Department of Science and Technology. From 1992 to September 2004, the fund spent R1,8 billion on research and development projects (Von Gruenewaldt 2004). This is one of the success stories of the past number of years.

An important milestone in the development of the research system was the National Research and Technology Audit (NRTA), which was undertaken in 1997/98. All research councils and national institutes were evaluated. Important weaknesses and strengths were identified. Science councils are evaluated annually to determine whether stated objectives have been achieved.

The National Research and Technology Foresight Exercise (1998/2000) did planning for long-term research on the technological needs of South Africa (Bawa and Mouton 2002: 302). Thirteen focal areas were identified. To a large extent, the NRF’s nine focal areas accommodate the focal areas identified by the National Research and Technology Foresight Exercise.[iv] The establishment of Centres of Excellence (COE) rewards excellent researchers and enables them to co-operate across disciplinary boundaries and institutions in respect of projects that are locally relevant and internationally competitive. Some examples are: biomedical TB research; excellence in strong materials; invasion biology etc. The research system in higher education, which is an important part of the national research system, was even more unequal and uncoordinated than the science system. In many respects, the higher education system experienced a revolution since 1994. Only some relevant aspects are identified in this context.

The Report of the National Commission on Higher Education (1996) and the White Paper (1997) emphasised the importance of research and the development of high-level human resources. The restructuring of curricula, to convert courses into programmes that have clear outcomes, has had a far-reaching impact on higher education. Many of the consequences of this process will only be felt after a number of years. The experience in many countries has revealed that the transformation of higher education always has some unexpected consequences. A number of universities went overboard by instituting programmes that are mainly directed at occupational training and the needs of the market. It was particularly the universities at which student numbers were increasing slowly and which were experiencing financial crises that saw these courses as a means to attract more students. For example, technikons began to offer MBA programmes without having the required human resources, experience and infrastructure. A recent evaluation of the programmes did not accord full accreditation to a number of these programmes.
In my opinion, it was especially the human sciences that considered this programme approach to be an opportunity to stop and reverse the decline in student numbers. The decline in student numbers had a particularly severe effect on the black universities and Cloete (2003: 422) justifiably remarks that ‘for historically black universities the new South Africa was a disaster’. In the fields of the human sciences and education, the universities and technikons produce more than 50 per cent of all graduates. Just above one-quarter of all graduates qualify in the fields of the natural sciences and engineering.

The conversion of courses to programmes caused a large number of departments to close, while other departments were consolidated and new faculties were established. In many cases, imaginative new programmes were instituted, but it is clear that the traditional formative courses have lost ground. The pursuit of relevance eroded the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Outcome became more important than content. The energy that was put into these exercises, together with an increased teaching load, caused many academics to become disheartened and it has had negative consequences for teaching and especially for research. It is also doubtful whether students are better prepared for the workplace. The number of unemployed graduates, especially blacks, continues to increase.

The student numbers at universities and technikons increased at a relatively fast pace. The percentage of black students at universities increased from 32 per cent in 1990 to 60 per cent in 2000. In the same period, the increase at technikons was from 32 per cent tot 72 per cent. However, the number of white students at Universities declined (Cloete 2003: 415). The high growth projections of the National Commission for Higher Education did not materialise. At the historically disadvantaged institutions in particular there were relatively small increases and even decreases in the student numbers. This phenomenon, together with maladministration at a number of institutions, led to financial crises.

Graduation trends were not reflected in the rapid increase in the number of students.[v] Therefore the Treasury was no longer prepared to fund ineffectiveness. Mass higher education (that is, the model of mass higher education as advocated by Scott) did not materialise. The consequence was that it was announced in 2004 that student numbers would be restricted. Preliminary indications are that students at several of the larger universities will be restricted and that a quota system will be introduced. Some experts are of the opinion that the universities have been deprived of their autonomy. Programmes dictate what may be taught and now quotas are being introduced that dictate who may be taught.[vi]

The merger of the 21 universities and 15 technikons into 22 institutions of higher education is a far-reaching intervention. In 2000, the Minister of Education requested the Council on Higher Education to make concrete proposals on the size and shape of the higher education system. When he received the report, the Minister indicated that the government would respond to it with a national plan. The National Plan for Higher Education was released in 2001.

Although there is general consensus that there are too many universities and technikons and that a number of the institutions can probably not continue to exist independently, there are serious debates on the way in which institutions are being compelled to merge. There are large inequalities between the various universities as well as between the technikons. Many of the historically disadvantaged universities are no more than teaching institutions that have almost no research output or research culture. In this regard, two universities, namely the University of the Western Cape and the University of Durban-Westville are exceptions as they have made great strides in respect of their research output.

The merging of universities and technikons will require much energy and an enormous amount of money. Only R3,2 billion has been set aside for the purpose, but a large portion of these funds will be used to cover the current debt of the institutions. It is quite clear that the cost has been underestimated. It is nevertheless heartening that many academic leaders, who initially raised objections to the process of merging, are now dedicated in their endeavours to make a success of the mergers.

A further drastic step was taken when technikons were granted the status of being a technological university. The important place and role that the technikons fulfil cannot be denied. However, several of these institutions still have a long way to go in terms of performance and the pursuit of excellence before they are worthy of the status of a technical university. Being appointed to a chair has traditionally been associated with postgraduate qualifications, experience in the training of students up to the doctoral level and specialised research that is published in recognised science journals. A great deal of erosion has taken place in the application of these criteria. Right-minded South Africans agree that it was necessary to restructure higher education for the purposes of fairness and accessibility, and to direct it to a greater extent at the need for high-level human resources. The tempo at which the restructuring is occurring, could be debated, and there are real dangers that incalculable harm is being done. The fact that the goalposts are often shifted has a demoralising effect on the staff concerned. The new Minister of Education has a record of success and pragmatism and is prepared to consult widely.

The National Research and Development Strategy, which was published in 2002, provides, in some respects, a new direction for the implementation of the science policy. It sets out a strategy in terms of which science and technology should achieve the objectives of increasing the quality of life of all inhabitants and of increasing the country’s competitiveness with the rest of the world. The strategy presupposes amongst other things ‘…doubling government investment in Science and Technology over the next three years…’ (p. 17).

Have the stated objectives been achieved?
The policy documents that have been produced to establish a framework for science and technology have generally been acclaimed in the national and international arenas. In answering the question whether the stated objectives have been achieved, two provisions should be applied. Firstly, it is probably too soon to evaluate the results critically. Secondly, the statistical basis available for an analysis has serious shortcomings. There can be no doubt that a new science landscape is developing, both nationally and within institutions (Bawa and Mouton 2002: 323). However, at this stage, some of the contours are still too feint or too vague.

Although a great deal has been achieved, many of the objectives have not been achieved. When the effectiveness of higher education is assessed in terms of the number of graduates and research outputs, it appears that it has not increased. The National Research and Development Strategy (2002: 73) states that ‘the system is working hard … but is going backwards’. And furthermore, ‘… the total capacity of the system is about one-third to one-half the size that it should be to form the basis of a competitive knowledge-based economy for South Africa in the medium and long term’. There is serious concern that basic research and teaching, which are preconditions for interdisciplinary teaching and research, are being weakened by policy and market forces.

The expenditure on RandD, which represents 0,79 per cent of the GDP, is low in comparison with the 2,15 per cent of GDP of the OECD countries. It should be doubled in the next three to four years. The fact that the universities in South Africa are not adequately equipped and that some equipment is obsolete was stated as far back as 1992 and again highlighted in the National Research and Technology Audit in 1998. The audit emphasised that ‘… only 10 per cent of the country’s equipment base at the time could be considered as state-of-the-art, i.e. less than five years old’ (A National Key Research and Technology Infrastructure Strategy July 2004). The replacement value of the equipment is R3.7 billion. According to some experts, the new subsidy formula for 2004 provides even less funds for the purchase of research equipment.

The number of subsidised research outputs is diminishing. Large inequalities exist between ethnic groups and institutions in higher education. There are indications that the differences between universities are increasing rather than decreasing. By the year 2000, whites still produced 91,9 per cent of all outputs, Africans 2,6 per cent, coloureds 1,19 per cent, and Asians 4,4 per cent. (Boshoff and Mouton 2003: 220). Five universities produce 60 per cent of the total research output in the sector. Contract research has increased rapidly. However, the quality of the contract work is often suspect. Some historically disadvantaged universities produce hardly any output at all. The new subsidy formula will encourage all universities, including the new universities of technology, to strive to become research universities. An investigation undertaken in 1997 indicated that ‘… academic science in South Africa … was conducted within rather confined disciplinary and institutional enclaves’ (Mouton 2004).

The ageing of the science population and the fact that there is an inadequate inflow to the system are probably the greatest threats. The research output in the age group above 50 years is increasing, while the output of the age group below 50 years is decreasing (Boshoff and Mouton 2003: 221). Affirmative action is having the effect that some white academics do not see a future for themselves in academia. The composition of the staff has not changed dramatically over a decade. From 1988 to 1998 the percentage of Africans increased from 30 per cent to 38 per cent and that of whites decreased from 55 per cent to 47 per cent (Cloete et al. 2003: 200). Salaries in the higher education sector have fallen significantly behind that of the public and private sectors. It will be indicated in a later section that there is a strong mobility of blacks in the academic sector as a result of shortages and promotions. It is difficult to calculate the extent of the effect of HIV/AIDS, but statistics indicate that it could be extensive.

There is an ongoing debate on the extent and influence of the so-called brain drain. The reason is that statistics on emigration are unreliable and that many highly trained individuals do not leave the country permanently. A recent (2004) investigation, which was undertaken for the National Council on Innovation and entitled Flight of the Flamingos, found that ‘South Africa is faced with a strong resource constraint surrounding highly skilled individuals’, but that there is no proof of a brain drain crisis (p. xvii).[vii] It is also not certain how many of the highly trained individuals will return. An important statement that is made is that if there is a perception that the research system is weak or that it erodes because there are few posts or sources available, an even larger number of individuals will attempt to find opportunities in other countries. As already indicated, there is a large measure of mobility of black scientists between sectors before they make a significant contribution in certain posts. It is especially disconcerting that top scientists leave the higher education and research institutions for managerial posts in the public and private sectors.

Research funding from abroad has increased rapidly since 1994. One research university already receives 20 per cent of its research expenditure from abroad. In summary it can be said that South Africa may eventually have sufficient financial resources for its scientific practice and higher education, but that the human resources may be insufficient.

There is a marked decline in RandD in the private sector. In the four years to 2002, the number of researchers declined by 16 per cent (National Research and Development Strategy 2002: 54).

As far as the science councils are concerned, the Human Sciences Research Council and the Agricultural Research Council should be highlighted. Human sciences research has never figured relatively strongly in the research system. Poor methodology, insufficient statistical grounding, a variety of schools of thought, ideological differences and divides (English, Africans, black, white) together with the academic boycott in the apartheid years had a detrimental effect on the system for several decades. Nevertheless there can be no doubt regarding the important role that research in the human sciences can fulfil by analysing changes in the socio-economic and political fields and by communicating relevant knowledge efficiently through information and communication systems.[viii]

There has been an ongoing debate on whether the Human Sciences Research Council should continue to exist (Bawa and Mouton 2003: 325). Its personnel complement has been reduced and significant changes have been made to the course that it was taking. Certain research divisions were closed down or transferred to universities. It could be accused of too much direct competition with universities and technikons for research funds. However, the universities do not have the infrastructure to do the national surveys that the Human Sciences Research Council undertakes successfully. My personal observation is that a new generation of human science researchers is emerging who analyse issues fearlessly, objectively and critically.

The Agricultural Research Council (ARC), which was established in 1992, has undergone major changes and crises (Liebenberg et al. 2004; Thirtle, Van Zyl and Vink 2000). The focus has been shifted from large commercial agriculture to emerging black farming units; and from highly subsidised agriculture and price protection by marketing councils to competition within world markets. A combination of factors, including the lack of leadership, has had the effect that the number of research personnel at the ARC decreased from 761 in 1996 to 634 fte researchers in 2000. The number decreased further to 400 by April 2003. Large numbers of highly qualified researchers left the ARC precisely during a period when research could have contributed in respect of the structural problems in agriculture and the land reform process.

Finally, some international benchmarks could be considered. Bundlender (2003: 257) says that ‘Given its relative wealth, South Africa performs less well in HRD indicators, education, health and labour’. According to the World Competitiveness Index (2001), South Africa holds the 42nd position among 49 countries.

It is in the fields of Mathematics and Science that the performance at the school level is especially poor. Of the 440,267 candidates that wrote the school-leavers examination (grade 12) in 2003, only 82,010 (18.7 per cent) passed with exemption to enrol for higher education. The number of candidates that obtain exemption has remained reasonably constant over the past few years. Of the candidates that obtained exemption, only 23,088 (28 per cent) passed Mathematics and 25,972 (31 per cent) passed Science on the higher grade. Many experts are of the opinion that the large increase from 1999 to 2003 in the number of grade 12 candidates that passed, ostensibly without a drop in standards, is simply too good to be true. The pass rate of grade 12 pupils was 48.9 per cent in 1999 and it increased to 73 per cent in 2003. The number of poorly prepared candidates that enter the tertiary institutions is increasing. In 2004 it was announced that 40 per cent of students fail their first year.

Part II – Land reform: a complex issue that requires interdisciplinary, applied research
Few topics in these countries (South Africa and Zimbabwe) have been more widely discussed but less understood than land reform (International Crisis Group 2004)

Introduction
Land reform has been chosen as a focal area because it has far-reaching consequences. These consequences encompass the following crucial areas: Political (race restructuring), economic (alleviation of poverty and job creation in rural areas) and social (change in the communal land ownership system that has a radical effect on the social order of traditional communities, as well as the moving of millions of people, which may be even more extensive than the social engineering of the apartheid years). Furthermore, more than 20.4 million people (46.3 per cent of the total population) live in the rural areas (Strategic Plan for the Department of Agriculture 2004: 11). More than 70 per cent of the rural population is poor and approximately 27 per cent live below the bread line. In a broader African context, it is said that NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) ‘… believes that agriculture will provide the engine of growth in Africa’ (Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme 2003). Land reform may have major national and international consequences and it may influence the food security of the poorest of the poor in Southern Africa.

Contextualising the place and role of agriculture
In order to gain a clear understanding of the land reform process, it is necessary to put into perspective the place and role of agriculture in the South African economy. Although agriculture contributes just more than 3.9 per cent to the GDP, it has important backward and forward links with the national economy. As a consequence of low rainfall and relatively poor soil, only 13 per cent of the surface of the country can be used for crop production and of this area only one-fifth is high-potential arable land. A little more than 1.3 million hectare (1.19 per cent) are under irrigation (Strategic Plan for Agriculture). Between 50,000 and 60,000 commercial (mainly white) farmers farm on 87 per cent of the total agricultural land, which is highly developed, and they account for more than 95 per cent of the total agricultural production. As in many countries, agriculture is not very kind to farmers. Since 1965, commercial agricultural production increased slower than the national economy with the result that the 9.129 per cent contribution to the GDP in 1965 decreased to 3.2 per cent in 2002. Various structural changes in agriculture and globalisation have been the cause that many farmers have lost their farms and that the agricultural debt increased by more than 3 per cent per annum from 1991 to reach R31 billion in 2003.

Events preceding the land reform programme
Land occupation by indigenous groups in southern Africa occurred over many centuries. With the arrival of white settlers, the conflict intensified. In 1655 the indigenous people had already built their huts near the Fort at Table Bay and were requested by the colonists ‘… to go a little further away’ (Davenport and Hunt 1974: 11). The first division of land occurred in the Western Cape when the Salt River and the Liesbeek River were accepted as the dividing line between the indigenous people and the colonists (Davies 1971: 5). Over a period of 300 years it eventually lead to South Africa having ‘… one of the most unequal land distributions in the world’ (Binswanger and Deiniger 1993: 451). The problem of land reform is currently a topical issue in virtually all the countries in Southern Africa. Both the previous government and the ANC paid a great deal of attention to land reform during the struggle. After 2 February 1990 various national and international conferences were held on this issue.

The current land reform process commenced with the acceptance of the Interim Constitution in 1993. It was essentially aimed at correcting the wrongs that were brought about by the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Natives Land and Trust Act of 1936 in terms of which blacks’ land rights were limited to approximately 13 per cent[ix] of the country. Besides these two acts, a host of other laws were also promulgated over the years, which lead to the blacks being dispossessed of their land rights and to population shifts. It is estimated that ‘… 3,5 million people were forcibly removed from their land between 1960 and 1982’ (Aliber and Mokoena 2004: 330). The limitation of blacks’ land rights and subsidies granted to commercial farmers supplied labour to the mines and lead to large-scale distortion in agriculture (Thirtle, Van Zyl and Vink 2000: 6-21).

The intricate legislation passed to set the land reform programmes in motion, such as the Restitution of Land Rights Act No. 22 of 1994, and the Land Claims Court that was established, are not discussed in this context. (In this regard see The Law of S.A. Vol. 14 1999). Land reform comprises three basic processes, namely:
– Restitution or return of land that was expropriated and that led to, for example, large-scale removal of people or communities;
– Redistribution of land directed at assisting the poor, farm workers and especially black women to obtain land; and
– Changing the land ownership system, mainly in the former homelands where communal land ownership is the most general form of land ownership.

Land claims could be instituted from 1994 to 31 December 1998. In total, 79,649 claims were registered. It is a comprehensive task to evaluate the validity of the claims, identity documents, title deeds etc. Corruption is also inherent in the process.

Of the more than 55,000 claims that have already been concluded, approximately 80 per cent concerned urban areas. By March 2004, 2.9 per cent of the agricultural land (former homelands excluded) was transferred to blacks at a total cost of R4.6 billion (Hall and Laliff 2004: 1). Thus far restitution has received the greatest attention. Although a great deal of land in urban areas has been returned to former owners, criticism has been expressed that the easy route was taken by giving the claimants cash instead of land (Business Day 18 August 2003). Land reform on farms is more complex. Changing the communal land ownership system has vast political and social implications.

Land reform, which is protected by the Constitution, is one of the great achievements of the government. Thus far the process has proceeded very slowly. Research is revealing how complex the issue is. Much criticism has been expressed, especially of the unrealistic expectations that are being created (Walker 2004). Researchers do, however, agree on one matter, namely that those countries that do not undertake land reform successfully, run the risk of paralysing civil unrest and violence. The land reform process gained new momentum in July 2004 when the Department of Agriculture released a document entitled AgriBEE, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Framework for Agriculture. The most important aims of the document are summarised below.

The Established Industry (Agriculture) undertakes to:
– Contribute to the realisation of country’s objective of ensuring that 30 per cent of agricultural land is owned by Black South Africans by the year 2014;
– Contribute to an additional target to make available (20 per cent) of own existing high potential and unique agricultural land for lease by Black South Africans by year 2014;
– Make available 15 per cent of existing high potential and unique agricultural land for acquisition or lease by 2010;
– Support legislative and development initiatives intended to secure tenure rights to agricultural land in all areas;
– Make available 10 per cent of own agricultural land to farm workers for their own animal and plant production activities.

The Sector undertakes to:
– Eliminate by 75 per cent the rate of illiteracy[x] within farming communities by year 2008;
– Eliminate completely the rate of illiteracy within farming communities by year 2010;
– Ensure that all workers in the secondary and tertiary level of the sector are functionally literate and numerate by year 2010;
– Establish training programmes for farm and enterprise workers in appropriate technical and management skills by July 2005;
– Collaborate in ensuring maximum use of resources of the relevant Sector Education and Training Authorities (PAETA), Food and Beverage Sector and SETAs[xi] to achieve the above targets;
– Institute a sector-wide young professionals employment and mentoring programme, which targets 5,000 black unemployed and underemployed graduates per annum for the next five years in all disciplines, starting in 2005 financial year. Mentorship programmes shall be accredited by the relevant SETA or other agreed authority

The way in which this framework was released, elicited a great deal of criticism. It was said that there had been a breach of trust, because organised agriculture, which had cooperated in the establishment of a new framework, had not been consulted in regard to the final edition of the document. Furthermore, it was pointed out that unrealistic expectations were being created and that there were neither the funds nor the infrastructure to achieve the stated aims. Thereafter the Minister of Agriculture did a great deal to effect damage control and invited institutions to make inputs towards a final framework by the end of 2004. Is it a symbolic policy that is not really intended for implementation?
The most important preliminary findings have been indicated. Although this is a critical analysis, an attempt has been made to avoid value judgements. Furthermore the analysis does not question the necessity of land reform.

Schools of thought, models and expectations
As in the case of science and higher education, in many cases policy formulation on land reform has been strongly influenced by experts from abroad. The assistance that has been received has also often been accompanied by particular inputs and conditions. For example, land rights are based on Roman Dutch Law and elements of English Law, with some accommodation of the customary law of Africans, and it is susceptible to differing interpretations.

Hereafter a number of the relevant aspects are highlighted
– There is a fundamental difference between the value that the most Westerners attach to land and the value that Africans attach to it. This aspect probably underlies the problems that are experienced in respect of land reform. Westerners view land as a means of production that has a market value. The black man has never been a crop farmer and farmed with cattle in a context in which numbers were more important than quality. In many traditional communities the woman was and still is the crop farmer. It is for this very reason that the criticism is expressed that black women are not given sufficient assistance to obtain land.

Davidson and other researchers (London Review of Books 1994b) shed light on the metaphysical considerations in respect of ancestral land that motivated the Mau Mau murders in Kenya. He points out the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The Kikuyu did not lose a large area of land. ‘But what they crucially did lose was all assurance of control over ancestral forest and fields that had been theirs from “time out of mind”, they lost, it could be said, their environment’, and as a result a ‘Land and Freedom Army’ was established ‘… In line with Kukuyu ancestral concepts of the difference between good and evil, between success and failure, eventually between life and death’. After many years it now becomes clear what the underlying reason for the murders was. In South Africa, the whites are particularly ignorant about the meaning that land has for blacks, i.e. the homes and graves of their ancestors. Following from the preceding discussion, there is an open debate on whether blacks, especially the younger generation, are interested in becoming farmers. My research in the 1980s indicated that young black men who do not have a regular job in urban areas, earn more money than their brothers who till the soil in the African sun. The aspirations and expectations of the youth are more prevalent amongst urban blacks than in amongst rural blacks. Surveys reveal that the majority of blacks have a desire for a relatively small area of land on which they can live and can farm to provide in their own needs. A broad-based attitude survey found that one-third of the respondents indicated ‘… no interest in additional farm land, and another third wanted one hectare or less’ (Zimmerman 2000: 16). This is clearly an area in need of further research.

– It is clear what the political objectives of land reform are, namely the correction of inequalities by means of race restructuring. Some researchers believe that politics is the main driving force. It is for this reasons that high expectations are created by urban politicians who do not grasp the complexity of farming. Others believe that economic objectives – alleviation of rural poverty, work creation and general economic growth – should be the main driving forces.

– There are two strongly divergent schools of thoughts on how land should be divided and rural poverty alleviated. A school of thought of the World Bank, which is supported by prominent South Africans, states that ‘… our research shows that efficiency and employment in South African agriculture would increase if average farm size were to decrease in the commercial farming sector and increase in the former homelands’ (Thirtle, van Zyl and Vink 2000: 303). Another school of thought holds the view that the aforementioned opinion is ideologically driven. Only large commercial farms can afford new technology and negotiate prices. There are, however, many examples in the world in which agricultural production has been increased by the subdivision of land, but these countries do not have the uncertain rainfall and poor soil that South Africa has. Sender and Johnston (2004: 144) say that there is no empirical proof of successful small farming in Africa and that ‘… many economists arguments for land reform amount to an ideologically driven search for something that does not exist, namely efficient and egalitarian family-operated small farms that are likely to provide an escape from poverty for millions of the poorest rural Africans’. Davidson (1994: 275) points out that neither capitalistic nor socialistic systems have been successful in Africa. Africa, like South Africa, requires its own unique solutions. The school of thought that advocates an enlargement of the land of black households, bases its argument on surplus labour that is available. Empirical research indicates that this surplus does not exist. Productive men are away as migrant labourers. The women, children and elder persons that are left behind, spend most of their time fetching water and gathering firewood.

– Another aspect that still requires a great deal of research is the question whether blacks are willing or able to move to new land. Zimmerman (2000: 1) summarises a number of obstacles as follows: ‘… the poor have less inclination to move the distance demanded by the redistribution, have less labour available for farming, are less able to afford the program’s upfront costs, have fewer farming-specific skills, and have less capacity to cope with agricultural risk’. The question is also asked regarding where poor black people will find the funds for transport to a new home where basic infrastructure has to be created. Many are unwilling to exchange their social networks for new homes where they face an uncertain future. If the objective is achieved of having 30 per cent of agricultural land in black ownership by 2015, it will involve social engineering that will probably exceed that of the apartheid years.

– It is probably too early to make a final judgement on the influence of the alleviation of poverty in rural areas. One group points to the marginal success, the other highlights failure (Neto 2004). There is no proof of job creation on the new land. Statements made by the government have led to approximately 200,000 farm workers losing their jobs on commercial farms. Sender and Johnston (2004: 158) conclude that ‘… over the last decade, redistribute land reform in South Africa has had adverse effects on the standard of living of very large numbers of the poorest rural people. They did not require any land and suffer from declines in the rural wage earning opportunities that are crucial for their survival’.[xii] Land reform should be part of a wider rural economic restructuring process.

– Changing the communal land ownership system is a complex and a politically highly explosive enterprise. Communal land ownership, in which the power of the traditional leaders is largely vested, is the cornerstone of the social system in many African countries. On this issue, too, there are different schools of thought. One school of thought believes that communal ownership does not permit any individual initiative and does not offer access to credit. Another school of thought stresses the utility value of communal ownership and the safety net that it offers many poor black people (Hall, Jacobs and Lahiff 2003: 22). Research reveals that chiefs’ power over land is rejected in some areas and applauded in other areas. The Communal Land Rights Act (2004) is intended to give title deeds to the inhabitants of tribal or trust lands. It will have a far-reaching effect on the lives of more than 7 million people in the former homelands.

– There is a variety of other aspects that should be taken into account and that cannot be discussed in any detail. One such aspect is that the current approach departs from the point of view that black communities are homogeneous, while there are large differences between ethnic groups and between various areas. Research indicates that the demand-driven approach can lead to the establishment of a black elite of owners to the detriment of the poor. Thus far the process has been driven by some (urban) elite with little input from rural communities (Levin and Weiner 1997: 4). Some observers say that the process is being retarded because it has become ‘… over-centralised and bureaucratic’ and the state ‘… tries to do everything’ (Kirsten et al. 2000). Lastly, researchers refer to the fact that land reform could have far-reaching implications for sustained development, biodiversity and the preservation of, amongst other things, national parks (De Villiers 1999).

– Research indicates that the HIV/AIDS pandemic may have a major influence on land reform. One aspect is particularly important, namely that the law of inheritance should give ownership to the women whose husbands die of AIDS.

– A shortage of funding is one of the strongest reasons why only 2.9 per cent of the agricultural land has been transferred to blacks. Funding for land reform has never yet exceeded 0.5 per cent of the national budget (Hall and Lahiff 2004: 1). It is being asked whether the funding is in line with the expectation that has been created that 30 per cent of the agricultural land should be in black hands by 2015.

The Landless Peoples Movement and the South African Communist Party have already made threats. There are no comprehensive estimates of what the total cost will be. The 2004/5 allocations in the budget include R474 million for land reform, but it is estimated that at least R1 billion will be needed. The implementation of the Communal Land Rights Act will amount to R1 billion per year over the next five years, ‘… equivalent to over 70 per cent of its current budget for all aspects of land reform’ (Hall and Lahiff 2004: 3).

The preceding discussion gives rise to the question whether the government can continue with its current policy of ‘demand driven and willing buyer, willing seller’. There have already been calls to farmers to reduce the price of land. A committee was appointed by the Minister Agriculture and Land Affairs in 2004 to investigate the purchasing of the land of foreigners and the increase in land prices. A lack of funds, the inability of the government to conclude land claims speedily and to select and train black farmers, can lead to illegal land invasion. In fact, it has been pointed out that “the history of land reform around the world demonstrates that land invasions, which governments then normalize through legal processes of expropriation and allocation, have been the most common and effective processes of land reform (Van Zyl, Kirsten and Van Binswanger 1996: 10). A legal framework should attempt to reduce the probability of such action being taken. It is being asked whether the current legal framework is advantageous for land reform. Various cases have gone the long route through the high court and the appeal court to the constitutional court.

A possible strategy and the role of research
It is important not to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the problem. International donors have largely failed to form a coherent strategy and the complexity of land reform makes it difficult to justify aid. Research indicates that the process is proceeding too slowly and has failed in certain respects. Various researchers state that the entire programme should be reconsidered and that a new vision should be formulated. In the first instance, land reform should form part of a broad rural development programme. Secondly, experience in other countries indicates that centralised ministries or parastatal institutions do not always implement land reform successfully. The civil society (communities, farmers, organised agriculture, unions, NGOs, commercial banks, research institutions, traditional leaders etc.) should be involved. An information and communication system is a precondition for success. A foundation or forum for land reform is advocated where the best experts, nationally and internationally, can provide inputs, which involves the civil society and the private sector and which can provide independent advice and assistance.

The aforementioned illustrates the necessity of research. The extent of the interest in land reform in South Africa is astounding. Commendable work has been produced by agronomists, land ownership specialists, economists, sociologists etc, but ‘there has been little systematic effort to synthesise their findings and combine them with intensive field research to produce practical policy recommendations for both local actors and the international community’ (International Crisis Group 2004: v). In particular, there is a lack of fieldwork that indicates, among other things, the large spatial differences between heterogeneous groups. There is an urgent need in respect of the following fields: Historical research on the validity of land claims; the attitude of blacks towards land in general and towards farming in particular; the best way of selecting black farmers and providing them with training, mentorship, finance or agricultural extension in respect of crop varieties and the marketing of seed; an effective information and communication system; literacy programmes etc.

Universities in the Netherlands have, over a period of more than 100 years, made huge contributions to the training of South African academics and researchers. The Netherlands has had an immeasurable influence through constructive criticism and even an academic boycott to bring about a just and fair South African society. In the late eighties and nineties, I benefited a great deal from universities and academics in the Netherlands in my endeavour to establish a system of self-evaluation and quality promotion at the University of Pretoria.

In some respects the task of the Netherlands has been made easier by the fact that a democratic government was established in South Africa in 1994. In some other respect the task is more daunting, because the issues that face science and technology and higher education at present are even more challenging than in the past. The new generation of academics and researchers look forward to co-operating closely with the Netherlands in the future in the building of a just and better future for all inhabitants, not only in South Africa, but also in Southern Africa. In the fields of science and technology South and southern Africa cannot afford to fall farther and father behind the industrialised nations.

NOTES
i. Research on infectious diseases was neglected.
ii. 54,2 per cent of the total expenditure in 1987 to 12,4 per cent in 1997.
iii. With the exclusion of the medical sciences.
iv. The NRF (8 October 2004) states clearly that it ‘…will support research only within these focus areas’.
v. If reasonable throughtput rates of 20 per cent had been achieved 25,000 more graduates would have been produced.
vi. ‘… that the ministry will be able to plan the country’s highly skilled human resource provision efficiently by determining how many students may be admitted to which programmes’ (SAUVCA April 2004).
vii. Specific sectors, such as public health, were not investigated and it is precisely in these sectors that many medical doctors are leaving the country.
viii. In 2003 the NRF commenced the development of a National Research Agenda for Social Sciences, Law and Humanities.
ix. This percentage should be qualified. The western part of South Africa is a semi-desert with a sparse population. The eastern part of the country accommodates the majority of the population on relatively fertile land with a high rainfall. These facts do not, however, mean that the country is not unfairly divided.
x. ‘41 per cent of the Africans in the agricultural section had no schooling’ (Strategic Plan for the Department of Agriculture 2004: 42).
xi. Sector Education Training Authority.
xii. Land claims on the largest tea plantation in South Africa near Tzaneen are the main reasons why production will be terminated. More than 10,000 workers will lose their jobs.

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The apartheid legacy
In order to contextualise the discourse on the changing higher education landscape in South Africa, it is necessary to briefly sketch the historical origins and thrust of the ideology underpinning black education in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Hendrik Verwoerd and apartheid education laws 1953-59
Black education in South Africa was originally introduced, developed and funded by Christian missions of various denominations. Subsequently and as the benefits to the economy of an educated black workforce became apparent, the government introduced a system of subsidization for the mission schools. The mission schools offered the same content and used the same syllabuses as the white schools, and the successful students received the same diplomas and certificates as the white students. Some of these black mission schools became well known for excellence, such as Lovedale in the Cape (Mandela’s old school), Marianhill and Adam’s College in Natal.

Fort Hare Native College, later Fort Hare University, was established by the Presbyterian Church and drew students from as far afield as east and central Africa. It boasts among its graduates such famous African leaders as Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela.

In the early 1950s, Hendrik Verwoerd was Minister of Native Affairs, and immediately complained that missionaries were providing the wrong kind of education for black people, and were trying to make ‘black Englishmen’ out of them. In 1953, he introduced legislation to remove black education from mission control to that of the Department of the Department of Native Affairs, vowing that:
I will reform it [black education] so that Natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them.

There was ‘no place [for blacks] above the level of certain forms of labour. So, what is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when he cannot use it in practice? Education must train and teach people in accordance with their opportunities in life’.

Verwoerd then created the following landmark laws:
Bantu Education Act (1953)
Separate education for black children; use of the vernacular; teachers and school, boards handpicked by the government.

Extension of University Education Act (1957)
Banned undergraduate training of black people at white universities; created what became know as ‘bush colleges’.

Democratic dispensation
The apartheid ideology and apartheid laws ruled the roost for four decades, until the political changes culminating in the democratic elections of 27 April 1994. The advent of democracy in 1994 brought about dramatic changes in the South African higher education system, described by Van Vught (of the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, CHEPS, of the Universiteit Twente, and later rector of that same university) as ‘probably the most ambitious and comprehensive change programme in the world today’. The changes began with the appointment by Nelson Mandela of a national commission to map out the future of HE in a democratic SA.

National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) The NCHE made sweeping recommendations, which were incorporated in the Higher Education White Paper (policy document) and the Higher Education Act (legislation) and continue to reverberate through the Higher Education system today. Among these were:

– Deracialise the HE education system;
– Increase the participation rate (18-24 year olds in Higher Education): from 19 per cent overall (12 per cent for black students, 70 per cent for white students) to 30 per cent overall [these goals have not been attained];
– Transform from the Higher Education system from an ‘elite’ to a ‘mass’ system, a process called massification, which refers not only to an increase in student numbers, but also to diversification of academic programmes and qualifications [note: there is a tension between massification and quality, hence the concomitant need for a quality assurance mechanism];
– Adopt a cooperative governance model for institutions: between internal stakeholders, and between the institution and the state [raising the question of institutional autonomy];
– Promote race and gender equity among students and staff.

Subsequent to the NCHE, the government published: The 1997 White Paper called A orogramme for the transformation of Higher Education. The White Paper took cognisance of the far-reaching NCHE recommendations, and laid down the philosophy underpinning the new HE system as follows:
To redress past inequities and to transform the HE system to serve a new social order, to meet pressing national needs and to respond to the new realities and opportunities.

The impact of democratic change on higher education
The new democratic dispensation was followed by numerous changes in the higher education sector, both positive and negative, three of which are perhaps most relevant in the context of this paper:
Drastic changes in student demographics in Higher Education
One of the most dramatic changes have been in the composition of the student population at universities/technikons:
– The overall proportion of white students dropped from 44 per cent in 1994 to 36 per cent in 1997.
– In the Technikon sector, there was an even more dramatic change from 52 per cent in 1993 to 24 per cent in 1997.
– Black students now constitute more than 50 per cent at historically white institutions.

Underperformance of the secondary school system
Ironically, as the tertiary system was expanding to take in more disadvantaged applicants, the secondary school system was increasingly producing applicants who were alarmingly under-prepared for tertiary education, particularly for science and technology disciplines.

In 2002, the year considered to have produced the best high school results since 1994, 443,821 candidates wrote the senior certificate examinations nationwide, of whom only:
– 4.6 per cent passed mathematics HG;
– 5.6 per cent passed physical science;
– 5.1 per cent passed accounting;
– 16.9 per cent obtained university entrance grades (matriculation).

And there is evidence that high school graduate proficiency in literacy and numeracy has deteriorated significantly, certainly to a level inferior to that of the other SADC states.

The rise of private HE providers
With the inception of the democratic dispensation in 1994, private Higher Education became a growth industry with numerous domestic and international Higher Education providers establishing themselves in the country. In 1999, private Higher Education colleges were thought to have attracted more than 150,000 away from the public universities. Perhaps fuelled by negative perceptions regarding the quality of public HE in South Africa, these private institutions continue to thrive.

The changing Higher Education landscape: the merger movement
Prevailing HE debates and contestations post-1994
The post-1994 era has been characterized by a whole set of debates and contestations, many of them historically based. These included the following:
– Historically Disadvantaged Institutions (HDIs) expressed frustration and resentment towards the government for failing to provide redress funding to help liquidate their huge student fee debts, upgrade their crumbling infrastructure and provide facilities similar to older universities so as to ‘level the playing fields’; there was a sense that the new democratic government had a moral obligation to create black institutions of equal prestige to the historically white institutions.
– On the other hand, the government’s attitude seemed to be that HDIs were poorly managed, financially wasteful, racked with disruptions, corruption and chaos, and probably beyond salvage.
– There was the unmistakable community perception that HDIs offered second-rate education and produced poor quality graduates, and the better qualified high school graduates flocked to previously white and largely English-medium institutions.
– Afrikaans-medium institutions struggled to find black students, and were perceived as unwilling or unable to transform, and as covertly wishing to remain white using language as a barrier to access by black students.
– English medium institutions were seen as elitist, arrogant, covertly racist and financially ‘fat and sassy’, and the earlier cohorts of black students at these institutions were frightfully unhappy.

The government found it difficult to run an orderly operation in the midst of these conflict-ridden divisions and contestations within the Higher Education system, and probably saw academic mergers as one way to get rid of the problem.

Rationale for institutional mergers
According to the Department of Education, the main objective of mergers is to establish institutions that:
– Are better placed to meet the demands of the modern job market;
– Offer equalized access;
– Provide opportunities for sustained student growth.

Mergers are also intended to address the thorny questions of quality, institutional governance, and financial sustainability. However, there clearly are tacit subtexts beyond the formal motivations. These include the desire:
– To deal with perceived incompetence at HDIs;
– To blunt the tensions between HDIs and the more successful historically white institutions;
– To deal with the conundrum of Afrikaans-medium universities.

Minister Kader Asmal put it more plainly on 25 July 2002, when he told the Mail & Guardian that mergers would help eradicate unhealthy competition between apartheid divided academies.

Institutions for the most part have yet to go beyond the old apartheid divides. The reality on the ground has unfortunately been characterized by unhealthy competition between institutions rather than working together to complement each other’s work.

Minister Kader Asmal was well known for his impatience with, and some would say disdain for the frequently crisis-ridden HDIs. On 12 March 1999, he complained to the newspaper Business Day that
… some of our vice chancellors [rectors][of HDIs] are still using historical disadvantage as an unconvincing cover for the mess they’ve caused in their tertiary education institutions.

Higher education institutions under apartheid
To understand the changes brought about by mergers, it is necessary to have an idea of the nature of the deployment of Higher Education institutions prior to the inception of the merger process.

In 1994, there were 36 Higher Education institutions in South Africa, consisting of 21 universities and 15 Technikons. These could be classified as follows:
* Historically White Universities 11
– Afrikaans medium (5)
– English medium (4)
– Bilingual (1)

– University of South Africa 11
– Historically Black Universities 9
– Technikons (white and black) 15

Total of universities + technikons 36

Pre-1994 institutional governance models
Prior to 1994, three governance models were to be found in Higher Education:
– The collegial model primarily at the English-medium institutions, with minimal state interference;
– The centrist/‘autocratic’ model primarily at the Afrikaans-medium institutions, with minimal state interference;
– The nominal autonomy model with strong state interference, primarily at historically black institutions.

For a variety of reasons, all of these models began to change quite significantly post-1994, with a move towards the managerial model (the adaptation of business management principles and style) with varying degrees of success, coupled with greater state interference than before 1994. Nevertheless, significant institutional culture differences remain within the system, and overcoming these differences would inevitably constitute one of the critical challenges for merging institutions.

The changed Higher Education landscape post-merger
The merger template provides for a radically reduced and diversified higher education landscape from the pre-1994 constellation of 36 universities and technikons down to 21 Higher Education entities consisting of four types of tertiary institutions: traditional universities, comprehensive institutions (now also called universities), universities of technology, and national institutes:
– Some institutions would be merged, some across the binary divide (between technikons and universities), and some would remain unmerged to constitute 11 traditional universities.
– Some institutions would be merged, or if unmerged would convert, to form six comprehensive institutions offering both university and technikon courses (such as the new University of Johannesburg resulting from the merger of Rand Afrikaans University and Technikon Witwatersrand).
– Five technikons would remain unmerged, to be known as ‘universities of technology’.
– Two national institutes, offering a limited menu of tertiary courses, would be established in the provinces currently without universities or technikons.

The role of government in the merger process
The role of government in the actual merger process has been uneven, for a number of reasons, among which are:
– There is a lack of capacity (in terms of staff and expertise) within the Department of Education to guide and manage the massive nationwide merger process.
– It is evident that the merger initiative was undertaken with insufficient insight preparation for the sheer magnitude and complexity of the exercise.
– The government underestimated the cost of the exercise.
– The objectives would appear not to have been sufficiently thought through; for example, the concept of a ‘comprehensive university’ remains poorly articulated. Without a roadmap, institutions destined to assume this role are at sixes and sevens about how to curriculate, staff and implement a combined offering of traditional university and technikon programmes while the binary divide continues to be maintained.
– The introduction of a new funding formula in the midst of all the changes has created uncertainties about the sustainability of newly merged institutions.
– The government has imposed a cap on growth in student numbers, which would seem to contradict the fundamental objectives of increased access and participation rates.
– Some mergers do not appear to have an academic rationale, do not seem to meet the test of common sense and would seem to have been politically inspired.

The impact of the merger on the Higher Education system
It will probably be a decade before the benefits of the merger, if any, are realised (according to international experience, merger consolidation can take up to 10 years). Merger has, however, achieved some things:
– Adjacent institutions separated only by a road or a fence on the historical basis of ethnicity have been brought together.
– The merger will neutralize the perception of exclusivity for those Afrikaans-medium institutions that are being merged.

But it is not clear that the merger will save money, increase access or promote institutional stability at this present time.

The challenges of merger for the institutions
My own institution, the Durban Institute of Technology (DIT) is a product of a merger between two technikons, one historically white and one historically black, which occurred on 1 April 2002. As South Africa’s first merger, we have the longest merger experience spanning two-and-a-half years.

Originally separated by a fence for historical reasons, a merger seemed the right thing to do. But we were also separated by institutional culture and traditions, ethnicity, resource endowment and long-standing rivalries, and these barriers have proved more difficult to overcome than was anticipated. Potentially, there are significant academic benefits to be gained from the merger, but not before we have resolved the complexities of merging people, systems and academic programmes.

Merging people in an endeavour to mould a single unified institution with common citizenship has proved to be the greatest challenge. As one example, human resource issues have loomed large, such as harmonizing salaries and benefits, sorting out academic leadership contestations, and dealing with staff redundancies. However, the academic endeavour, our core business, has proceeded largely unimpeded, and the process of merger consolidation is beginning to come together. We are therefore confident that DIT is already proving to be a viable institution, and that in time, our merger will prove to have been the right thing to do.

Other post-1994 changes in the Higher Education landscape
Finally, I want to conclude by highlighting some of the other changes in the Higher Education landscape beyond the merger initiative, as articulated by Professor Jonathan Jansen of the University of Pretoria in an article published in 2003. He lists:
– The dominance of an ageing white professorate in South African HE and in research particular, and the declining research output as these greying individuals are ‘put out to pasture’ (my words). The greying white professors are being replaced by less experienced black appointees under pressure to meet equity targets, and Jansen is concerned about what he sees as ‘the declining status of the South African professorate’.
– The declining quality of the student body due to secondary school problems already discussed in this paper.
– The culture of instability and campus conflict at some institutions, mainly the HDIs, reflecting lack of credibility of institutional leadership due to the intrusion of political considerations in the appointment of such leaders.
– Declining the voice of criticism of government and public policy within higher education ‘in the face of perhaps the greatest challenges to universities’ such as mergers and changes in the funding formula.

Jansen calls these ‘changes in the soft architecture of higher education’ as opposed to the ‘changes in the hard architecture’ in the form of mergers. However, the final word has to be that despite challenges of the hard and soft changes in the Higher Education landscape and the associated turmoil, South African Higher Education remains intrinsically sound, and it is up to people of good will and of courage to ensure that the seemingly monumental challenges are overcome.