Held in the memory of the legacy of anti-apartheid stalwart, United Democratic Front co-founder, ex-Robben Island detainee and entrepreneur par excellence [amongst myriad achievements from a laudable resume] in the person of Molobi – not even an eleventh hour change of venue of an event initially penciled in for the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, but shifted owing to the unrest prevailing around the city’s tertiary institutions could deter a mix of attendees from the political, academic, business, showbiz spectrum from honouring it with their esteemed presence.
The assembled numbered highbrows such as the currently embattled Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, General Siphiwe Nyanda, Valli Moosa, Sydney Mufamadi, Aziz Pahad, Popo Molefe, UJ Vice Chancellor, Prof Ihron Rensburg, Sheila Sisulu, erstwhile The Star newspaper editor, Peter Sullivan, the IEC’s Terry Tselane, Joburg City Manager, Trevor Fowler, poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, musician Sipho Mabuse, Talk Radio 702 hostess, Azania Mosaka– as well as Molobi’s family, widow, Martha, daughters, Lele and Tiisetso and grandchildren.
Hosted by the University of Johannesburg, the inaugural lecture came precisely 10 years after the activist-turned-businessman’s passing back in June of 2006, a mere day before his 61st birthday.
Molobi’s biography had him having matriculated at Musi High School in Pimville, and moving on to work as an electronic technician at Phillips in Johannesburg and then being jailed for 6 years for his political activities back in 1975.
Whilst under incarceration, he obtained a BA degree through UNISA and went on to work on the Education Aid Programme of the South African Council of Churches under Beyers Naude. He was the first director of the Joint Enrichment Programme [JEP], a joint initiative of the SACC and South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
Instrumental in the formation of the UDF in 1983, he later became the national coordinator of the National Education Crisis Committee [NECC], an alliance of high school and university student, youth and labour movements which had been created as a response to the crisis in black schools whilst steering the development of education policy for a post-apartheid future.
Following the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation movements in 1990, Molobi became a member of the National Reception Committee to welcome Nelson Mandela upon his release. He joined the Kagiso Charitable Trust [Kagiso Trust] as chief executive in the same year, where he was responsible for raising funds from foreign development aid agencies to channel into educational and community development projects in South Africa.
In 1994, he initiated the establishment of Kagiso Trust Investments [KTI] as an investment vehicle to support the work of the Trust.
This model of financing development initiatives generated by a portion of the proceeds derived from KTI was a novel way of financing social investment – and in the process garnered him much respect amongst the business community as increasingly his advice was sought. He served on many company boards and held directorships in a number of leading South African companies.
The University of the Witwatersrand awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Law for his contribution to community development, education and social responsibility in business, in 2003 – that in addition to being the recipient of numerous other prestigious international awards. Molobi also served on the Council of the University of Stellenbosch.
On the other hand, the man to whom fell the honour of being the first ever addressee of the lecture in Molobi’s memory, Professor Tiyambe Zeleza, also faced the esteemed audience at Milpark with a daunting resume which includes being recognized as one of 43 Great Immigrants in the United States, by The New York Times in 2013 – amongst other international achievements which has him holding degrees from institutions stretching from the US, Canada, Africa and Europe.
Introduced a while later after the UJ’s Vice Chancellor, Professor IhronRensburg had elicited laughter from the guests by mentioning having compared notes with Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan and thereafter offering the latter his position seeing as both seemed to be in untenable situations with the unrest at campuses and the National Prosecuting Authority’s charges hanging over the others head – Zeleza proceeded to deliver his address titled: “The Role of Higher Education in Africa’s Resurgence.”
Zeleza’s opening remarks had him acknowledging Molobi as a model for all of us of the indefatigable spirit of struggle for emancipation and empowerment through his political activism in the dark days of apartheid, and in his commitment to inclusive and innovative economic and social development, and to transformative education in democratic South Africa.
Both universities and development across the continent are undergoing complex and contradictory changes that reflect, reframe, and reproduce social inequalities that threaten the humanistic and historic dreams of the nationalist project for self-determination, democratization, development, nation-building, and regional integration – delivered Zeleza.
Exploring contemporary African development trends, Zeleza pointed out having been a marked shift from the Afropessimism of the 1980s and 1990s to Afroptimism verging on Afri-euphoria – twin factors he noted as being dangerous and based on the denigration of Africa so deeply rooted in the western imagination and colonial discourse, whilst the other invokes fantasies of merry Africa beloved in uncritical Afrocentric celebration of African pasts and futures.
Under the subtitle,Transformations in Higher Education, the former Harvard fellow gave a breakdown of Massification thus:
a) No. of universities in the world from 6,931 in 1970 to 18808 in 2015. The fastest growth was registered in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean; for Africa it was from 170 to 1639.
b) Tertiary enrolments 32.6 million in 1970 to 198.6 million in 2013. Fastest growth in the global South—for Africa from 0.74 million to 12.2 million, Asia,
7.3 million to 108.2 million, and South America 1.2 million to 18.0 million, while for Europe it was from 13.3 million to 31.5 million and North America,
9.8 million to 27.0 million. Enrolment ratios in Africa rose to 12.08% compared to the world average of 32.88%,
c) Factors include population growth, urbanization, decolonization, development, and demands from women and other disadvantaged groups for access to the social, cultural, and political capitals and opportunities promised by higher education,
d) Variations among countries and regions: e.g. demographic growth countries in global North facing demographic decline (institutional supply increasingly outstrips student demand) global South, especially Africa, experiencing rapid population growth (student demand overwhelms institutional supply.
Regarding knowledge reorganization, the keynote speaker opined on the:
a) Evident in the expansion and emergence of new disciplines, sub-disciplines, and inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinary fields of study from environmental studies to ‘big science’; led to shifts in the positioning and status of different academic fields both inside and outside the academy.
b) Shifts in global knowledge hegemonies and hierarchies
i. Dominance of Global North declining and rising for emerging economies; e.g. North America’s share of global research and development declined from 37.9% in 1994 to 28.9% in 2013, while
Europe’s fell from $31.4% to 22.7%; it rose for Asia from 26.6% to 42.2%, and to much smaller extent for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1.9% to 3.5%, and for Africa from 0.9% to 1.3%, respectively.
ii. The proportions of the developed countries in the growth and distribution of researchers and publications also fell relative to the emerging economies, especially China. Copious details in my book.
c. Modes of scholarly knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption are also undergoing changes, facilitated by the rise of new ICTs.
i. Technology-enhanced learning has brought new pedagogical opportunities and challenges.
ii. Role of libraries changing from repositories of information into nerve centres for digitised information communication; necessitating the provision information and digital literacy for students.
iii. Changes in academic publishing by the acceleration, commercialisation, and digitisation of scholarly communication; academic impact measures from citation index to altmetrics (social media & data mining tools).
d. Disruption of academic profession
i. Shifts in the relative influence among the state, academic professionals, and market models of governance; progressive shift towards more top down institutional governance.
ii. Edicts of managerialism increasingly undermining academic autonomy and freedom.
iii. Both academics and academic work are also becoming more fragmented. This is a product of the institutional, professional, and instructional unbundling of faculty roles.
iv. Academic workforce is also becoming more casualized and stratified as institutions seek to cut costs by reducing the number of permanent faculty and expand the ranks of part-time faculty (over 75% in US a reversal of the ratio of tenured and contingent faculty in the early 1970s).
Steaming ahead on an address itinerant on numerous salient subtitles, regarding Accountability, he advanced these:
a) As the costs and need for competitiveness among higher education institutions increase, demands have grown for accountability from all the affected constituencies. The concerns about the value proposition of higher education tend to find expression in the quality assurance and accountability movements.
b) No longer enough for universities to brag about inputs; now they are expected to demonstrate value through outputs, including learning outcomes, retention, graduation and placement rates, and employability. Employability is particularly critical. It encompasses the acquisition knowledge and skills (job specific and generic work skills), development of personal qualities and values (e.g. reliability and time management), and social networks.
A recent report on Universities, Employability and Inclusive Development: Repositioning Higher
Education in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa makes sobering reading.
a) The African media is full of stories of the difficulties of graduates finding suitable employment and employers finding suitable graduates;
b) The Inter-University Council of East Africa estimates “over half of all graduates are inadequately prepared for employment;
c) The accountability movement also manifests itself in rising student protests for access, equity, and affordability.
There has been a resurgence of student activism around the world: in Europe from Britain following the increase of tuition from £3290 to £9000 in 2010 to Spain, Portugal, Greece, Belgium Switzerland, Ukraine, and Albania; in North America in Canada, the US and
Mexico; in Asia in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Bangladesh; and in North Africa during the Arab Spring, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa, etc;
d) The demands and pressures have led to the development of national, regional, and global quality assurance and regulatory regimes in many countries especially since the 1990s, for both public and private institutions.
In conclusion under the subheading, ‘Revitalizing Higher Education for Africa’s Development’, Zeleza drew attention to priorities outlined in the Framing Paper he wrote for the 1st African Higher Education Summit held in Dakar, March 2015, and the summit’s Declaration and Action Plan as being critical for African higher education to promote the development project:
1. Revitalizing the commitment of the various stakeholders to expand higher education, including raising enrollments to global averages while making concomitant investments in academic staff, infrastructure, and facilities by the state, private sector, society at large, and higher education institutions themselves to ensure and raise quality;
2. Promoting the diversification, differentiation, and harmonization of highereducation systems atthe national, institutional and regional/continental levels;
3. Increasing higher education investments at institutional, national and international levels to facilitate development, promote stability, enhance access and equity, and develop, recruit and retain excellent academic staff and ensure high levels of institutional performance;
4. Pursuing excellence in teaching and learning, research and scholarship, public service and provision of solutions to the development challenges and opportunities facing African peoples across the continent;
5. Building capacity in research, science, technology, and innovation by developing and designating select universities as research universities that drive the higher education sector and are globally competitive;
6. Strengthening linkages between academia, business, and government to overcome the skills mismatch and improve the production of graduates who are employable and who can drive the continent forward;
7. Ensuring that higher education is at the centre of nation building processes and nurturing of democratic citizenship by deepening the culture of good governance, democratic values, gender equality, respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law as enshrined in the relevant sections of African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, 1981 and in the AU’s Agenda 2063;
8. Promoting productive and empowering forms of internationalization that facilitate the Africanization of global knowledges and globalization of African knowledges and include the mobilization of the Diaspora in the revitalization of the pan-Africanist project for the 21st century.
“In short it is imperative that the various key constituencies in African higher education from government to the general public to parents, and to students, faculty, staff, and administrators in the academic institutions themselves raise the value proposition of African higher education”, rounded off the speaker.
This requires commitment to:
1. The 4As: availability (of institutions), access (to institutions), affordability (in institutions), and accountability (by institutions).
2. The 4Cs: comprehensiveness (provision of education that develops the whole person), curiosity (cultivation of lifelong learning), community (fostering civic values), capabilities (developing soft skills and attributes beyond technical, job specific, and generic cognitive skills, especially communication and critical thinking skills, problem solving, empathy, creativity, self-confidence, and intercultural, international, interdisciplinary and information literacies).
3. The 4Is: inclusion (valuing institutional diversity—class, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, etc.); innovation (cultivating creative and entrepreneurial mindsets); integration (building cohesive teaching, learning and research communities); impact (fostering inclusive cultures of institutional assessment).
4. The 4Rs: relevance (of knowledges produced, disseminated, and consumed to economy, society, and the times—entails sustaining the project of decolonizing knowledge from the historic epistemic stranglehold of Eurocentricism); retention (ensuring student completion, faculty and staff professional development and success); research (unwavering commitment to critical and basic knowledge production and evidence based decision making); and rigor (in all activities to ensure academic excellence, operational excellence and service excellence).
“Only then will our universities contribute meaningfully to the ‘Africa rising’ narrative, turning it from a momentary rhetoric reflecting the fortunes of the few into a lasting reality for the well-being of the many.
Higher education is a powerful engine for the construction of inclusive, integrated, innovative and sustainable democratic developmental states and societies. It is indispensable for fulfilling the dreams of generations of struggles against imperial and neo-colonial exploitation and marginalization and realizing our peoples enduring aspirations for emancipation and advancement. With that the continent may finally realize Kwame Nkrumah’s vision, expressed prematurely at the height of decolonization that the late 20th century would be Africa’s, and turn the 21st century into one that is truly ours.
THANK YOU!” ended the Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town.
Zeleza’s address was preceded by Molobi’s youngest daughter, Tiisetso, who rendered a family tribute punctuated by tugging at the audience’s heartstrings through recalling nostalgic moments the family shared with him through his lifetime – whilst friend and comrade, former North West Province Premier and present PRASA boss, Popo Molefe also delivered a tribute, partly lamenting the country’s state of being.
Imilonji ka Ntu had the attendees all of a doodah with their familiar melodies pending the programme and a jazz ensemble continued with serenading guests’ spirits on the substitute venue’s outside deck – once they had retreated for cocktails at conclusion.
