Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela has asked whether South Africa would build the university system it currently has, if it were designing one today with full knowledge of inequality, artificial intelligence, climate change and the future of work.
“If not, what are we prepared to change, and what must we protect?”
He put the question in a keynote at a webinar on the intellectual directions of South African higher education, alongside warnings on funding, student debt and institutional stability.
What a university is for
“A university is not simply a factory producing certificates, a recruitment agency for employers or a consultancy to the state,” Manamela said. “It must remain a place where knowledge is discovered, received wisdom is challenged and society develops the capacity to imagine a different future.”
He acknowledged South Africa’s record in expanding access, transforming the student population and building internationally recognised research institutions — then argued the sector needs to look past immediate pressures to long-term sustainability and purpose.
On financing, his warning was direct: “If we protect access while undermining the institutions that must educate students, we risk weakening the very system we are trying to expand.”
Student funding and institutional sustainability, he said, have to be addressed together.
AI and the capacity to produce it
Manamela’s AI argument came in two parts.
Universities must prepare graduates to think critically, interrogate evidence and exercise ethical judgement in an AI-driven world.
And Africa must develop its own capacity to produce and shape emerging technologies rather than remaining dependent on systems developed elsewhere.
That is consistent with what he told the Universities South Africa Higher Education Conference on 7 October, where he argued the relevant questions are who develops AI technologies, whose languages and experiences are represented, who controls the infrastructure and who benefits — rather than whether students use AI for assignments.
The connection to decolonisation
Manamela treated intellectual transformation as a separate priority, calling for stronger African scholarship, multilingualism, and meaningful integration of African knowledge traditions into teaching and research while maintaining engagement with global scholarship.
Placed next to his AI argument, those are two statements of the same position. A system that produces knowledge in African languages from African traditions is also the system capable of building technologies that work in them. Dependence on scholarship produced elsewhere and dependence on technology produced elsewhere are the same dependence, operating at different layers.
He also stressed protecting the academic profession, supporting emerging scholars, and recognising the contribution of the humanities and arts alongside sciences and technology to national development — a point he made at greater length to the USAf conference, where he argued questions of bias, power, labour, law and human dignity “cannot be settled by computing power alone.”
Universities must demonstrate public value through their contributions to society, he said, while protecting academic freedom and independent inquiry.
A collective question
Manamela framed the redesign question as one for government, universities, students, academics, workers and society together — not for the department alone.
Based on reporting by The Citizen.
