‘Pan-African HE centres are the way forward’ – Mbeki

This year, the ninth annual international IE University “Reinventing Higher Education” conference kicked off with a conversation between Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa and chancellor of the University of South Africa (UNISA), and Santiago Íñiguez, president at Madrid-based IE University.

The discussion, entitled “The Global Impact of Higher Education: The African perspective”, took place on 5 March at IE University, which is a private non-profit business owned by the Instituto de Empresa SL in Spain.

“Should university students be activists?” Íñiguez directly asked the former African National Congress leader, aiming perhaps to provoke a biographical anecdote. After revealing that such was his thirst for knowledge that he had formed a small group to steal books as a child, Mbeki emphatically said “yes”, that it was critically important for students to be active within the societies they live.

At the start of Mbeki’s 28 years in exile he studied at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, where he sought to develop a global movement against apartheid. “We had to train ourselves for the return to South Africa,” he said, “and we also had to be ambassadors for the country [while abroad].”

Since his resignation as president of South Africa, during which he presided over the longest period of economic growth since the Second World War, Mbeki has championed an ambitious project for higher education involving the development of a pan-African university.

Many students “can’t access higher education and we don’t have the resources to build the physical institutions in Africa”, he said, “but we can co-operate and develop a network with tasks allocated to each university”.

In this vision, universities across Africa would develop as ‘centres of excellence’, in which a student who wanted to be a space scientist, for example, would not have to leave the continent in order to study. One major barrier to developing this at the moment is visa requirements, he explained, and this specifically needs to be addressed for the scheme to be successful.

Another challenge is the number of languages spoken within the continent. When the Ethiopian government sought out UNISA, the continent’s largest open distance education provider, to provide PhD programmes for their top students 10 years ago, for example, many only spoke Amharic, which meant that they could not write their papers in English. “We therefore had to partner with the British Council in Ethiopia to teach them English; and we have peculiar African problems like that,” he said.

Mbeki argued that as African universities are “underfunded and understaffed”, and that for example population growth in Nigeria alone is projected to surpass the whole of Europe in the coming years, another pillar of the scheme needs to involve distance learning.

At UNISA, for instance, there are around 400,000 students, but 30% or 40% of those students are not resident. “The African continent cannot avoid engaging with the distance learning model,” he said.

Turning to the issue of the ‘right faculty’, Mbeki said that there was “a general problem in African universities about staff qualifications”. However, on this point he argued that it was not necessary for faculty at UNISA, for example, to stay within the continent to study for a doctorate, as they “should be able to get their education anywhere”.

A separate issue is that 85% of the teaching staff are white, and in that sense UNISA “remains an apartheid university”, but this cohort is ageing, and the process of replacement should therefore be a natural one, he said.

When Íñiguez asked whether – with all the problems of populism, anti-globalisation and the rise of nationalism – Mbeki could offer any message of hope for universities, the ex-president answered succinctly: “Yes, follow the African example”. He argued that there is an urgent need to be pro-globalisation and promote co-operation on the basis of unity and equality. “If we don’t, none of us will succeed,” he said.