SA promised to be a continental knowledge hub; instead, we are turning inward

Three months ago, the chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education told a national television audience that he would give my Daily Maverick column on foreign academics “zero”. He then announced that Rhodes University was now on the committee’s radar because of my opinion piece.

You don’t get that level of emotional reaction unless you have struck a nerve. The committee’s nerve, it turns out, is the evidence.

When the committee met again on 24 June, it received updated data from the Department of Higher Education and Training. After months of parliamentary pressure, and threats of Special Investigating Unit investigations and a commission of inquiry, it turns out that universities follow the law. And they record what the law requires them to record. Visa status, permanent residency and citizenship are matters held in individual HR files, as employment law requires.

The committee chair described the numbers at UCT — where foreign professors outnumber black African, coloured and Indian professors combined at full professor level — as “extremely worrying”. The minister of higher education cautioned that permanent residents are South Africans under the country’s labour law and warned against treating all foreign-born academics as a single undifferentiated category. These two comments in the same meeting reveal the internal incoherence of the inquiry. The committee seems to be alarmed by numbers it cannot properly interpret, drawn from data it has itself acknowledged is incomplete.

The underlying facts, to the extent the data permit any conclusions, remain what they have been throughout this debate: foreign staff constitute 7.74% of the total university workforce, and roughly 12% of permanent academic staff — a proportion that has remained stable over many years, alongside growth in the number of South African academics. Minister Buti Manamela said in February, “There is therefore no evidence of systematic displacement of South Africans in permanent academic posts.” Nothing that emerged on 24 June changes that conclusion.

So what should the committee actually be investigating?

A regional hub

South Africa’s internationalisation policy commits the country to becoming a regional hub for higher education, to treating SADC students as home students for fee purposes, and to expanding both staff and student mobility. These are aspirations drawn directly from the National Development Plan. And we are failing hopelessly.

In 2010, international students made up 7.4% of university enrolments. By 2024, that figure had dropped to less than 4%. South Africa ranks 40th out of 44 OECD and partner countries in the proportion of international students enrolled at bachelor’s level. The problem is not too many foreigners in our universities. It is that the country is becoming less internationally connected. A university without a healthy spread of nationalities in its staff and student body is hardly a university.

The committee has before it a genuine accountability failure worth investigating, one that sits squarely within the government’s own purview: the visa and work permit system administered by the Department of Home Affairs. Universities have no control over this system, and it is this system that derails academic appointments, disrupts research collaboration, and sends talented people, both foreign and South African, elsewhere.

The committee met jointly with the Home Affairs portfolio committee on 24 June. That could have been a productive moment to ask hard questions about bureaucratic dysfunction and its effect on the country’s knowledge economy. Instead, the framing remained largely one of suspicion toward universities.

There is also a domestic pipeline question that needs scrutiny. Only about half of all academics at South African universities hold PhDs. Approximately 40% of enrolled doctoral candidates are academics, studying part-time while carrying full teaching loads, typically taking six or seven years to complete their degrees.

New investment

The Future Professors Programme and the New Generation of Academics Programme are working, but they are underfunded and reach only a small number of people. The sector needs to recruit more than 1,000 new academics per year to address backlogs, attrition and planned growth. This cannot be achieved from a depleted local pipeline without significant new investment, and it certainly cannot be achieved by making it harder for international doctoral students to study here.

The UK offers a cautionary tale that the committee would do well to consider. In 2024, international students contributed upwards of £40-billion to the British economy. But in response to their government sending mixed signals about welcoming international students, enrolments have dropped rapidly. The consequences unfolded not over decades but over a few years. Universities have begun implementing retrenchments, and some face closure. People such as George Blake, a policy and networks officer at London Higher, suggest the government’s antipathy will lead to a reduction of 0.5% of their GDP, a drop of £15.19-billion, in just a couple of years.

South Africa has never enjoyed the economic and intellectual benefits that many countries in the Global North have derived from international student populations. Given the shortage of higher education institutions across the continent and the needs of our dire economy, this seems either a politics of distraction or a significant blind spot.

The chairperson’s comment that the committee’s work is “not xenophobia” is one I take seriously. Compliance with immigration law is absolutely a legitimate concern. But a concern about compliance is different from the implication, which runs through much of the committee’s rhetoric, that foreign academics are themselves a problem to be contained.

The committee has now twice heard from the minister that the data do not support the displacement narrative. It has now heard from its own department that the data it has been using to raise the alarm are incomplete. What it has not yet done is ask what it would take for South Africa to fulfil the clearly stated ambitions in our own internationalisation policy rather than retreat from them.

This is the failure we should be investigating. DM