Xenophobic framing risks shrinking the intellectual horizons of SA’s universities

In February 2026, Minister of Higher Education and Training Buti Manamela stood before a joint sitting of parliamentary portfolio committees and delivered a statement that should have settled the matter.

Foreign nationals constituted approximately 12% of permanent academic staff at South African public universities, he said. That had remained stable over many years. The number of South African academics had grown significantly in the same period.

“There is therefore,” the minister said plainly, “no evidence of systematic displacement of South Africans in permanent academic posts.”

And yet the debate refuses to die.

The Portfolio Committee on Higher Education and Training issued a media statement warning universities “not to misuse internationalisation as a reason for ignoring SA’s immigration and labour laws”. The minister indicated that it was difficult to determine whether institutions were “bypassing” the law by employing foreign nationals “in roles that are not critical or scarce”.

So which is it? Either we have the data, in which case the minister’s opening statement holds, or we do not, in which case the alarm being raised is prematurely, at best, and in a way that is inflammatory, at worst.

A numbers game that obscures the real question

SA’s unemployment crisis is real and its pain is acute. The instinct to protect local jobs is necessary in a country where millions of citizens cannot find work. Any institution spending public money has an obligation to consider whether a South African could fill a role before looking elsewhere. That obligation is not in dispute.

But the framing of the committee’s concerns reveals a conflation of immigration compliance with something else, something closer to a suspicion that foreign academics are a problem. The words “misuse” and “bypassing” imply bad faith on the part of universities, seemingly without evidence.

And the insistence that foreign nationals should only be employed in roles that are “critical or scarce” exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of what a university actually is, and what it does.

Universities are not government departments

A hospital, a municipality, a state-owned enterprise – these institutions have defined functions and can, in principle, map their staffing needs against a register of scarce skills. But universities exist to create and disseminate knowledge, and to produce graduates capable of thinking critically and contributing meaningfully to society. These are not tasks with fixed job descriptions. They require institutions that are intellectually alive – porous, argumentative, cosmopolitan, perpetually in conversation with ideas and people from beyond their own borders.

Diversity is not a luxury for a university. It is a condition of its functioning. A physics department that draws only from one national tradition risks intellectual insularity. A humanities faculty that has never encountered a perspective shaped by a different language or legal system is impoverished in ways that no skills audit can capture. When scholars from different countries, disciplines and cultural backgrounds sit around a seminar table, or supervise a doctoral student, or review a journal article, knowledge is sharpened, assumptions are challenged, and the institution fulfils its purpose.

This is not to suggest that we should not be aware of the numbers of foreign staff and students in the system, but rather that it is problematic to insist that a university justify each foreign appointment against a list of scarce skills. This is a technicist view of a deeply humanistic enterprise.

Students, too, must cross borders

The case for internationalisation does not begin and end with staff. A university that draws its students exclusively from its immediate environs is as intellectually limited as one that draws its faculty from a single country.

SA’s own policy framework recognises this. The 2020 internationalisation policy explicitly commits to student and staff mobility, including through BRICS and other multilateral agreements. It stipulates that we should treat students from the Southern African Development Community member states as home students for the purposes of tuition fees and accommodation.

But troublingly, SA has seen a significant decrease in the number of international students over the past decade – the precise opposite of what the policy envisages, and the precise opposite of what a confident, outward-looking higher education sector should produce.

If the committee is genuinely concerned about compliance with our own laws and policies, the under-implementation of the nation’s internationalisation commitments would be a productive place to direct its attention.

A nation that set ambitious goals — and then forgot them

The ambitions run deeper still. SA’s internationalisation policy draws explicitly on the National Development Plan, which specifies that SA should become “a hub for higher education and training in the region, capable of attracting a significant share of the international student population”. These are not the modest aspirations of a country that is happy to turn inward. They are the declared goals of a nation that understands its higher education sector as a continental and global asset.

Looking at these goals alongside the recent parliamentary debate produces a kind of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, we have a national plan that envisions SA as a magnet for international scholars and students, a regional centre of knowledge and excellence. On the other, we have a parliamentary committee that treats the presence of foreign academics with suspicion, and a home affairs system so dysfunctional that the work permits and student visas required to realise these ambitions can take an appallingly long time to process; long enough, in many cases, to derail academic appointments, disrupt research and send talented people elsewhere.

The problematic working of the visa and work permit system raises serious questions about whether the National Development Plan’s higher education ambitions were ever meant to be realised, or whether they were always aspirational decoration on a document that no one in home affairs was asked to read.

What the rest of the world understands

Across the world’s most respected higher education systems, the internationalisation of both staff and student bodies is actively pursued as a marker of institutional quality. In the UK, for example, 22% of students and 32% of academic staff come from other countries. Comparable figures are found across Europe. These reflect the understanding that intellectual diversity is inseparable from academic excellence. Diverse institutions produce better knowledge, better graduates, and better outcomes for society.

SA has the policy framework, the institutional infrastructure and the intellectual tradition to be part of this global conversation as a confident and equal participant. What it lacks is the political will to resist the narrow nationalism that mistakes insularity for protection.

The spectre of Afrophobia

SA has a painful history of xenophobic violence directed overwhelmingly at migrants from elsewhere on the continent, people seen as competitors for jobs, housing and resources. That violence shapes the political atmosphere in which debates about foreign nationals take place.

It would be naive to imagine that the parliamentary pressure on universities is insulated from this atmosphere. When the concern is framed not as “Are our universities complying with the law?” but as “Are foreigners taking positions that should belong to South Africans?”, the emotional logic is recognisably the same logic that has driven far uglier episodes. The academic might be considered a more respectable target than the informal trader, but the underlying suspicion – that the outsider is a threat – is similar.

It is worth naming this directly: SA’s Afrophobia, if allowed to shape higher education policy, will damage the quality of its universities. It will make them less attractive to the international scholars and students whose presence enriches them. It will narrow the intellectual horizons of South African graduates. And it will signal to the world that SA is retreating from cosmopolitan ambitions.

What should be done

None of this means universities are beyond scrutiny. But compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. SA needs universities that can attract and retain the best minds, both South African and international, that can train the next generation of researchers and professionals, and that can produce knowledge relevant to the country’s challenges while remaining in active dialogue with global intellectual movements. Achieving that requires institutional confidence and political courage, not institutional suspicion and parliamentary warnings.

The committees would do well to begin with a clearer understanding of what they are asking universities to be. Then they might ask a more useful question: not why South African universities employ foreign nationals, but why, despite a decade of policy commitments and the ambitious goals of the National Development Plan, SA is receiving fewer international students than before, and why the bureaucratic systems under the government’s control make it so difficult to receive more.

That is the failure worth investigating. DM

Professor Sioux McKenna is Director of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University.