Mbeki: invest in universities

“As all of us know, at independence and for some time after that, our countries viewed our universities with great pride”.

University of Port Harcourt is the best university in Nigeria, according to a survey of the best universities in Africa by The Times Higher Education journal.

But then the “healthy relationship between the state and the university was weakened and destroyed” by, in part, “the perception among the African ruling elite that universities were serving as centres of political opposition to this elite”.

It is the African political class’s doubt in universities’ crucial roles in the development of the continent that is holding universities back, former president Thabo Mbeki told a summit at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) on Thursday.

“One of the major tasks our universities must undertake is advocacy to convince the so-called political class in Africa that they are indeed situated at the centre of the African development agenda and therefore need new investment significantly to improve their capacity to discharge their responsibilities relating to that development agenda”, added Mbeki.

“These combined in a process which led to the impoverishment and weakening as well as the marginalisation of the African university from both the state and the development agenda”.

Gauteng Premier, David Makhura added that the inaugural Africa University summit that brings under one roof scholars and distinguished persons from sectors across the region should look at new and innovative ways of moving universities forward.

He said without a skilled population, governments had to rely on skilled workers from Europe and North America.

“The debate we will be having about this matter of how do we rank Africa’s universities is – is it research that matters most‚ is it undergraduate teaching that matters most‚ is it social impact of the work of the university that matters most or is it public scholarship that matters most?”

“South African universities, compared to other dispensations… are relatively well funded, but [I’m not saying] they may have no needs themselves”. They are derived from the methodology for the current world university ranking, using the 13 factors (below), combining THE’s own enormous database of statistics along with the Elsevier’s Scopus database – a system that highlights some of the continent’s top performers in terms of how often research papers are referred to and cited by other academics globally.

“The make-up of these universities have changed a lot”.

Like many American universities, she says, African universities struggle for funding. I used to be a student leader. “You can’t see that when you look at the students here [now]”, Makhura said.