1Either as a silent provider of a service or conscious protestor, the post compulsory1 institutions responsible for teaching and learning in South Africa have–in the apartheid era–been agents of government control, and colleges, technikons and Universities, were far from being in a position of academic neutrality. It may be argued that, in general, higher education development mirrored rather than initiated the divisions in South African society. It was nevertheless true that education was a key stakeholder in the apartheid regime just as it remains a key player in the shaping of a new post–apartheid society in South Africa today. Post-apartheid developments in education have been a test bed for the modelling of the new South African democracy with the democratisation of education policy and planning, influenced and implemented by a range of stakeholders. This has given rise to a period of rapid transformation accompanied by critical debates on the nature of education in a new nation; not the least of which is how should education contribute to the shaping of a more equal and democratic society and what role it should play in ’healing the wounds’ of the nation. This paper examines the initial attempts of the South African Department of Education to ’heal’ the system and analyses how the unintended consequences of the initial public policies that were set up led the government to launch a massive–and controversial–restructuring of the higher education system.

2The apartheid legacy to the post compulsory sector was a deeply divided and undermined service. The management and control of the post compulsory institutions was subject to a divisive, bureaucratic and central model of control. In 1994, when the Government of National Unity was formed, there were nineteen different departments administering education. This stemmed from the division created by the government’s policy of ’own and general affairs’, separating the Blacks (Africans, Coloureds, Indians) from the Whites. This separation extended and impacted beyond racial groupings to reflect disparities between urban and rural locations, unequal distribution of resources, qualifications of staff, learning materials and curriculum offerings. Accounts show that the entire focus of education under the apartheid regime had been the white learner.2 In addition to the obvious disparity in resource allocations to the various groups, this ’white focus’ also impacted the provision of curricula and learning resources. For example white teachers and lecturers produced most textbooks and learning materials, and these were obviously written from their own perspective for a clientele whom they understood. Referring to black university education Nkabinde3 described a curriculum and subject matter that denied blacks the opportunity of pursuing science, with an emphasis being placed on the liberal arts, thus preventing the blacks from competing economically with whites. Subject content and their teaching were designed to inculcate order, obedience, and industriousness; with an emphasis on theory presented in rigid disciplinary units, with little encouragement to develop a wider critical approach to social or scientific questions.

3Of all transformation goals informing the first education policy documents, equity and redress were thus unsurprisingly high on the agenda. After half a century of apartheid rule, South Africans yearned for a more equal society. A number of factors though constrained the attempts at breaking away from the apartheid system and healing the wounds of a painful past. First, what has been termed, and rightly so, the ’South African miracle’, referring to the negotiated and rather peaceful transition from the authoritarian apartheid regime to a multipartite democracy, meant that there was no clear victor and that both parties had to compromise.

4The unbanning of the ANC and of the South African Communist Party on the 2 February 1990 signalled the incapacity of the ruling bloc to continue to ‘rule in the old way’, but it did not amount, by any means either, to the overthrow of the dominant forces or to the defeat of the regime. The negotiations which began in 1990 were initiated through the defensive actions taken by the regime in an attempt to solve the economic and political crisis while it and its social supports were still in possession of the instruments of state and economic power.4

5One of the most conspicuous–and controversial–symbols of what has been defined as a pacted transition is certainly the sunset clause, which provided for the retention of civil servants within the line departments of government structures for a five-year period. The ’new South Africa’ was therefore originally plagued by a sharp ideological disjuncture between the state apparatus and the newly elected government. The divide was spanned with the progressive replacement of the apartheid era civil servants but it undoubtedly did not ease the implementation of new policies in the initial ruling period of the ANC. The negotiated transition also impacted in other ways on the shape of the transformative framework. Indeed, ’recognition of fiscal realities was facilitated by the involvement of the ANC in discussions with the National Party government, white-led business interests, the IMF and other economic bodies during the transition period... The ANC [was] probably the only liberation movement in history to speak of financial discipline before it assume[d] power.’5

6These constraints, though, did not prevent action. Thus, in the initial period of intense reflection that preceded the 1994 elections, the National Education Policy Investigation was founded. It produced 12 research reports in 1993, one of which specifically dedicated to post secondary education. The contributors to this process included leading practitioners and academics from formal and informal parts of the service and the community. NEPI was informed by a political imperative to signal a clear break from the education philosophy of the apartheid regime and to ensure the emergence of a more equal society. After 1994, landmark commission reports, policy documents and government acts were published to impact on the higher education transformation process. The ANC Policy framework for education and training (Centre for Education Policy Development, 1994), the report of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE, 1996) and the Higher Education Act of 1997 were all meant to provide the legislative and ideological framework to allow a thorough transformation of the system.

7Our purpose here is not to analyze these policy documents in detail but rather to highlight the common underlying principles that informed the transformation momentum. Equity, democracy, effectiveness and development were defined as the four pillars of transformation and, interestingly, those terms are still omnipresent in official documents and speeches. However, two points need to be underlined: those principles were very general and the way to implement changes was often unclear. A number of proposals were made such as the creation of a National Student Financial Aid Scheme6 (NSFAS) but the context in which they were to be implemented and their possible outcomes were little taken into account. As a result, the period saw a widening gap between the ’ideal’ higher education system portrayed in the legislation and the ’real’ higher education system.

8With the 1999 elections and the appointment of Kader Asmal as Minister of Education replacing Sibusiso Bengu, there was a major break with the initiatives launched in the previous period. One of the reasons for this radical overhaul of higher education policies is certainly to be found in the Department of Education (DoE)’s acknowledgement of the minimal, not to say the negative, impact of reforms voted since 1994. The pervasive feeling was indeed that the system was heading in an unforeseen direction due to a lack of firm control on the part of the DoE.

... it is arguable whether a more robust and timely implementation of key policy instruments would have been possible given the capacity constraints at both the national and institutional levels. However it is clear that the implementation vacuum has given rise to a number of significant developments, including unintended and unanticipated consequences, which, if left unchecked, threaten the development of a single, national, co-ordinated, but diverse higher education system.7

9Among these ’unintended and unanticipated consequences’, one was especially ironic. To ensure individual redress, a National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) was set up in 1996. For the first time, the students were able to choose their institution as consumers and not as members of a specific racial group. It was expected that the measure would benefit historically Black/disadvantaged universities (HDIs) where the majority of the poorest students was registered. The outcome though was widely different and students thronged massively in the former white afrikaans-medium institutions, once forbidden sanctuaries of privilege. In other words, provided with the opportunity to choose their institution, the best students voted with their feet and left the under resourced HDIs for the elite historically advantaged institutions (HAIs). Meanwhile, the HDIs (Historically Disadvantaged Institutions) faced an ever deeper financial crisis.

10The new government in place after the 1999 elections therefore felt the need to act swiftly. What’s more, one cannot discard the idea that Thabo Mbeki wished to signal that his presidency was not going to be a pale reflection of Mandela’s but a turning point in South African history.

Whereas the presidency of Nelson Mandela was characterized by the drive for national unity and racial reconciliation, that of Thabo Mbeki has sought to give substance to the ANC’s perception of its historical role as being to structure a modern democracy out of the backward legacy of apartheid.8

11 While Mandela had emphasized national reconciliation, Mbeki chose to stress modernity. In the educational field, the logic was that, if South Africa wanted to play a role on the international scene, it needed to have a booming ’knowledge’ economy and hence, an efficient and high-quality education system.

12What form did the reform take? In July 1999, Kader Asmal promised in his Call to Action that ’the institutional landscape of higher education [would] be reviewed as a matter of urgency in collaboration with the Council on Higher Education’9 but it was the following year in 2000 that the process really gathered momentum when the Council on Higher Education sent the Minister what came to be known as the Size and Shape report, which recommended very clearly that institutions should be merged. The 1990s merger process in Australia was a major source of inspiration for the Council on Higher Education and for South African policy-makers in general in their attempts at creating a unified higher education system. A National Working Group (NWG) was appointed to look into the practicalities and possibilities of mergers and less than a year later, in January 2002, it presented its conclusions on the restructuring of the post compulsory system in South Africa. Immediately an intense series of exchange and lobbying between the institutions and the government began and finally, in May 2002, the ’New Institutional Landscape for Higher Education in South Africa’ was published. In November 2002 the Cabinet approved the final proposals for restructuring and mergers and incorporations were formally gazetted. In November 2003 and effected in 2004 and 2005.

13The mergers did not all occur at once. The first stage, in 2003, amounted to a sort of pilot stage. Two mergers were supposed to take place, that of M L Sultan Technikon with Technikon Natal, and that of Technikon SA with Unisa and the distance education campus of Vista University. However, the second merger was postponed to January 2004 due to a court case by UNISA against the government to protest against the little time that had been left to the institutions to prepare for the merger. An agreement was finally reached and the institutions merged in January 2004. This case proved interesting in that it was an occasion for a show of force between the institutions and the government and allowed a redefinition of the terms of policy debate on the merger issue. Through these pilot trials, the government could refine its merger implementation framework. The second set of mergers occurred in January 2004–on a much larger scale (4 mergers and 2 incorporations.) And, finally, a third set of mergers took place in January 2005. This stage included 5 mergers and one incorporation. The outcome of this series of mergers and incorporations was first a sharp decrease in the number of institutions (from 36 to 21) and a complete restructuring of the South African Higher Education system. Most notably, the binary division between universities and technikons disappeared. Perhaps less obvious an outcome, the restructuring process led to an evolution in the institutional culture in Higher Education with a greater focus on efficiency and human capital.

14The reaction of the various institutions to this extensive overhaul of the system is complex to analyse especially considering how different the reaction of universities and technikons was. However, the ’healing process’ was definitely not to everyone’s liking. The clearest difference between the responses of the two sectors was in the way that those opposed to the new institutional landscape sought to manifest their opposition. Whilst many in both sectors resorted to ’defensive routines’, that is ‘thoughts and actions used to protect the individuals, the groups, and the organisations’ usual way of dealing with reality’10, opponents in the university sector proved far more willing and skilful in resisting the proposed changes through the exercise of political influence.

15One of the grounds for opposition was that the process was perceived to be flawed. Far from the participatory approach advocated by the state since 1994, the decisions were taken after very little consultation with the higher education community and largely imposed on the institutions from above. On the part of the state, such a top-down approach to policy could arguably be justified by the slow pace of change in tertiary education in the immediate post-Apartheid period. The Ministry of Education was faced with formidable challenges in post compulsory education in 1999. Five years after the first democratic elections, the enormous higher education edifice was still firmly in place. In response, the Ministry under Prof. Asmal chose to conceptualise and push through a set of large, expensive changes with little direct input from stakeholders, civil society or the public at large.11

16Moreover, opposition was also centred on the claim that the restructuring failed to place enough emphasis on the initial policy goals of redress and equity. The Historically Disadvantaged Universities (those formerly reserved for black students) saw the plans as further entrenching inequity in the system by refusing to seriously deal with issues of redress. This perception is well expressed in the response of Itumeleng Mosala, Chairperson of the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Historically Disadvantaged Tertiary Institutions (ASHADI), to the recommendations by the National Working Group:

[The National Working Group report] is an intellectual disgrace, a political disaster, and an educational catastrophe, especially with regard to the rights to higher education of black people in general and African people in particular.... Above all, though, the report is a betrayal of the struggle for a truly and genuinely transformed higher education system in terms of the goals, objectives, principles and challenges identified by the White Paper on Higher Education.12

17The South African Universities Vice-Chancellors Association (SAUVCA)’s response was more moderate but still definitely negative. They acknowledged the need for a more structured system but they questioned the decision to opt for full-scale mergers and preferred to advocate regional collaboration.

18In contrast, the Committee of Technikon Principals (CTP)’s initial response was very positive:

The CTP welcomes the report of the CHE Task Team on Size and Shape. There are many areas of dysfunctionality in the Higher Education sector and the reconfiguration if this sector is long overdue.13

19They were especially enthusiastic about the renaming of technikons as Universities of Technology, a move which was felt to offer opportunities for potential international development. However, when the precise list of mergers was published in 2002, the response became much more negative as the following extract shows:

The reconfiguration of the higher education system as finally gazetted by the Minister of Education in November 2003 will result in a drastic decrease in the number of technikons in South Africa from 15 prior to the merger of Technikon Natal and ML Sultan Technikon in April 2002, to 5 after 1 January 2005, with a number of far-reaching implications.... While the Minister still maintains that his recommendations are aimed at strengthening the technikon sector, it is difficult to convince the sector that a reduction from 15 to 5 technikons achieves this aim. On the contrary, in the CTP’s opinion, this has grave implications for the provision of human resources with middle to high-level technological skills and of increased access to higher education.14

20Thus, whilst the CTP was strongly in favour of strengthened and higher status advanced technical education, the principals were understandably not so enthusiastic about a means of achieving this that would lose two-thirds of Principals’ posts.

21At the level of individual institutions, opposition was also intense in a number of cases. Some, such as the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Peninsula Technikon filed cases against the Department of Education trying to find fault in the legal framework that was used by the Ministry. None of these proved successful. Others, sometimes with more success, used their powerful connections with government to lobby against the proposals. To illustrate this we will look in a little more detail at what happened at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). UWC was established to serve the higher skills needs of the coloured community but had developed into a key institution of struggle and resistance by the late 1980s. Indeed, the 1994 Mandela Cabinet included five of its Professors (including Asmal), whilst the Cabinet Secretary was the former Vice-Chancellor. The National Plan on Higher Education recommended that UWC should be merged with Peninsula Technikon, also historically a coloured institution, from which it was separated by a boundary fence. There was a clear efficiency rationale, driven in large part by the persistent financial problems of UWC. Clearly the merger would make financial sense, but UWC leaders played skilfully on the University’s tradition and highlighted the apparent contradictions in the ANC’s position. Whilst the Minister sought to use the media to advance his argument, his former University engaged in intense lobbying behind the scenes. Eventually, UWC was saved, with Peninsula Technikon instead being merged with Cape Technikon, its historically white counterpart in the centre of Cape Town.

22This is only one example of how the state’s initial drive towards economic rationality was mediated through opposition into an actual plan that appears deeply influenced by political preoccupations. Similar calculations led to the preservation of the Universities of Venda and Zululand. Strikingly, the final plan also left largely untouched most of the elite historically advantaged institutions. The Universities of Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Pretoria and Stellenbosch were allowed to survive as elite universities with a core focus on international competitiveness in research, although the University of Natal was merged with Durban-Westville. In most cases, opposition was slowly overcome through a mix of debate and authoritarianism on the part of the government. In 2002, the Minister of Education was able to state: ’I am pleased to report a significant shift in institutional responses to the mergers. The majority of our higher education institutions now accept our proposals.’15 A feeling of distrust remains however between the higher education community and the party in power. The recent evolutions in the HE system have prompted some current South African researchers to throw a very harsh light on what they analyse as a deviation from the original transformation goal: that is, the creation of a more equal society. The following quotation by Subotsky is a perfect illustration of this critical outlook on South Africa’s transformation process:

A number of recent analyses have attempted to track the trajectory of public policy and socio-economic change in South Africa (see Alexander 2002; Gerwel 2002). The key issue is explaining how the new government’s progressive framework of redistributive transformation, which underpinned the anti-apartheid struggle and framed its first election manifesto in 1994, was subsumed in four short years into a basket of conservative macro-economic policies. It is a deep irony that these have exacerbated, rather than reduced, social stratification and poverty in the new democracy.16

23The distrust is all the more acute as the impression prevails that traditional actors in the decision making process have been sidelined and that the initial insistence on public participation has sunk into oblivion... And indeed, when one examines the interaction between the state and higher education institutions, a clear development in the attitude adopted by the government is traceable. In March 1991, the Discussion Paper for the ANC on Education opened with the following words: ’We must not pretend that we can solve all the problems in education overnight. That is why it will be of vital importance that there is extensive discussion of the ideas which are put forward in this paper’... An attitude in clear contrast with Kader Asmal’s Call to Action in 1999 where he underlines that he intends to play a more ’vigorous’ role in the transformation process. Recognizing that ’ [South Africa] has a long way to go, and no time to lose’, he stresses that ’ [he] intend[s] to exercise [his] political authority as Minister of Education as vigorously as is necessary to promote the advancement of the national education and training system.’ The evolution from a policy of consensus to a policy of imposition can be partly explained by the personality of Kader Asmal, often described as a man of action and rather authoritarian. But it would be reductive to mention only that dimension and the evolution must also be seen as indicative of a change in the nature of the state. Thus, in Transformation in Higher Education: Global Pressures and Local Realities in South Africa, Nico Cloete showed how the 1999 and 2000 amendments to the Higher Education Act (1997) strengthened the Minister’s role and powers, thus reinforcing interventionism.

It seems that the consultative and participatory process of policy formulation and the first cycles of the three-year planning dialogue gave way to a much stronger state-steering approach, driven by government’s frustration at the lack of progress made towards achieving transformation goals... By 2001, it became apparent that, at the national level, serious strains were manifesting themselves in the open, co-operative relationship that characterized the 1994-1999 period.17

24All this might explain the pervasive feeling that the state has betrayed its original ideals and is now deaf to all forms of discussion.

25Arguably, the vision the Ministry of Education has about how to heal the South African Higher Education system differs in many respects from the vision that prevailed in 1994. As expressed in the draft discussion document issued by the President’s office in June 2005, The Challenges Facing Higher Education in South Africa,

The real challenge for the education system is to determine the skill sets and disciplines that are being drawn on most heavily by the society and economy at any point in time. They then have to ensure that they impart the highest possible level of knowledge and basic skills possible in that skills-set or discipline. This requires a very close understanding of the surrounding society and the economy. In fact the university, particularly its faculty, has to be deeply embedded within that society and economy.

26In other words, the focus at present is primarily on ensuring that higher education will support South Africa in playing a part in the emerging knowledge economy. Equity will hopefully follow...

27 Yet, can the recent evolutions in higher education be defined as neo liberal? Though there are undoubtedly features that might appear neo liberal, the picture may be more complex than it seems. In the case of the restructuring process, the government intervened to regulate market forces rather than enhance them. In the National Plan for Higher Education, (NPHE, 2001), the Ministry of Education linked the ’unintended outcomes’ to an implementation vacuum.

However, it is clear that the implementation vacuum has given rise to a number of significant developments, including unintended and unanticipated consequences which, if left unchecked, threaten the development of a single, national, co-ordinated but diverse higher education system.18

28But some researchers give a different–and interesting–account of the situation:

From a governance perspective, it was not in the first place an implementation vacuum that led to the unintended outcomes. Rather it was the participation approach to governance that allowed the new schemes (NSFAS) and old institutions (SAPSE) to stimulate market behaviour of individual students and institutions, without the market behaviour being regulated by the Ministry.19

29In other words, the restructuring was a means on the part of the government to regulate market behaviour and try and repair unintended outcomes. Actually, market forces played little part in the decision making process around the mergers. Many decisions were primarily ’political’, and hardly made economic sense. For example, the minister was adamant in his request that no institution should be closed, not even those in dire financial straits. The symbolic cost (in terms of image in the media) was probably deemed too high. Secondly, in a number of cases, there were arrangements between the government and the institutions because of political pressure. In fact, when reviewing the mergers process, a large discrepancy appears between the first draft reflecting economic preoccupations and the actual plan that was implemented which appears deeply influenced by political preoccupations. One can enumerate numerous examples supporting this view: the case of UWC detailed above, the case of Zululand which was allowed to stand on its own and was only requested to be comprehensive largely as a political concession to the IFP, the case of Wits, UCT, Pretoria and Stellenbosch unscathed by the mergers process largely as a concession to the conception of elite universities leading South African top research.

30Nearly 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, the healing process is still under way and a lot remains to be done. Not only because the task is huge but also because, beyond the general adherence to certain ’magic words’ like equity, transformation, democracy, there is often little agreement as to what those terms entail. Ultimately, the problem revolves around a question of political and racial identity as the recent controversy over the naming of Fort Hare reported in the Mail and Guardian in January 2007 suggests. Considering that the name ‘Fort Hare’ was too colonial, the PAC proposed to rename the university after Robert Sobukwe, the party’s founder and a liberation fighter. Fort Hare was not long in reacting:

No one in their right mind today would conflate the name of Fort Hare with anything other than the liberation legacy. It certainly has no colonial signification in popular imagination. And it is for the same reasons why we have not named the university after any of its other great alumni. As such, we strongly believe that any calling for the university to be renamed is misplaced20

31In the battle of words and naming, wounds are still wide open...

Appendix 1. Higher Education Transformation: Significant Commissions, Policy Documents and Government Acts