The 3rd Annual SATN Conference aims to address the shortage of critical skills in South Africa through partnerships. Previous conferences focused on defining the role of universities of technology and showcasing their innovative work. This conference emphasizes strategic partnerships with skills development organizations, further education and training colleges, and businesses to help develop human capital and reduce unemployment. The keynote speaker outlines South Africa's challenges of high unemployment and skills shortages. Universities of technology seek to help through innovative training programs and international collaborations to build new "high speed trains" that can efficiently transport more students into the workforce. Partnerships will be important to address these issues and neutralize the "four-headed monster" of problems facing South

1. 3rd ANNUAL SATN CONFERENCE 2010:
Universities of technology driving human resource development through
partnerships
Opening and Welcoming Address
By
Professor Thandwa Mthembu
Chairman of the Board of the SATN
30 September 2010

2. Honourable Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, Mphephethe; Chairperson of
TIA, Dr Mamphele Ramphele; CEO/President of Arcada UAS and Chairman of UASNET, Mr Henrik Wolff;
Directors-General of DHET and DST, Prof Mary Metcalfe and Dr Phil Mjwara; President of the NRF, Dr
Albert van Jaarsveld; CEO of ECSA, Dr Oswald Franks; Group Executive for Manufacturing and
Technology and Chairperson of the VUT Council, Dr David Phaho; representatives from business and
industry: Sasol: Mr Braam Erasmus, Chief Process Engineer; Executive Director for Knowledge Fields
Development at the NRF, Dr Andrew Kaniki; Executive Director of the National Science and Technology
Forum (NSTF), Ms Jansie Niehaus; Chairpersons of Council and members of Council present: Dr Sylvan
Seane, Chairman of the CUT Council; My leaders, Vice-Chancellors of UoTs and Board members of the
SATN (Bawa, Kgaphola, Moutlana, Mazwi-Tanga, Acting VC Molefe; Malaza, Phaho, Sibara); Vice-
Chancellor of the Polytechnic Namibia, a new associate member of the SATN; Vice-Chancellors from
other universities; College Principals from SACPO; Deputy Vice-Chancellors and senior staff of the SATN
member institutions and other universities; students and student leaders from our universities;
significantly importantly, sponsors of this conference: Sasol, the NRF and Bestmed without whom this
conference would not have been as grand as it looks; Ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the 3rd Annual Conference of the SATN since its inception in 2006. Just in case some of you
might think this is a continuation of the National General Council (NGC) of the ANC, which actually took
place last week: The only natural resources we have at a university are staff and students’ brains. This
conference is certainly not about nationalizing these natural resources; like the NGC, this conference will
draw the line about disrespect of university management by student leaders; and lastly, as Chairman of
the SATN, I can assure you that the SATN knows better what “generational mix” in its leadership is.
Even though this is not a mid-term review conference like the NGC, I believe the SATN has made some
strides over the last 4 short years. Thanks to my leaders, the Vice-Chancellors and all the innovative and
selfless members of staff at UoTs that actually do all the work Vice-Chancellors gloat about. I must also
thank my predecessor, Prof Roy du Pré, the SATN’s inaugural chairman until late 2009.
Some of the achievements of this sunrise organisation speak for themselves:
• In 2008, thanks to the South Africa Finland partnership, we published a report on Performance
Indicators for Research and Innovation. This report adds many other hitherto unacknowledged
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3. innovations to the research and innovation indicators and outputs currently in use in South Africa.
• In 2009, we published a book entitled: “The Place and Role of Universities of Technology in South
Africa”. This book helps to define who we think we are or should be in the landscape of the
university system.
• In 2007, a Work Integrated Learning (WIL) Position Paper was written by a team on behalf of the
SATN. The position paper is important in that WIL as a teaching and learning methodology is most
misunderstood, underdone and unsupported in our system.
• All the years of our existence, we dealt with what we saw many years ago as anomalies and
unfairness of the HEQF promulgated in 2008 to the extent that the recent Joint HEQF Communiqué
4 of 30 August 2010 acknowledges thus: “In the light of the issues highlighted, it is clear that the
HEQF needs to be reviewed.” We did this with no support at all from our fellow universities
because the HEQF brought minimal change in the way their programmes and curricula are
designed.
• In April 2010, we produced a discussion paper entitled: “Councils and Managements of
Universities in the 21st Century”. This discussion paper was motivated mainly by an unfair share
of instability UoTs have experienced recently. It puts forward some measures to ensure that
governors govern and managers manage. I must acknowledge the CUT Council, now under the
leadership of Dr Seane, for having adopted almost all of the proposals in that paper.
Later, when I give the context of the last two SATN conferences and this one, I will put some of these
achievements in the right perspective.
I was at a conference of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently
where Charles Reed, Chancellor of the California State University, used the metaphor of a train to
describe the knowledge economy’s demand for higher education and limited resources to match it with
the requisite and relevant supply. And, I would add, relevant supply that leads to more innovation, job
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4. creation and socio-economic development. He said higher education is like a train meant for 100 people
and where in the station there are 500 or more all jostling to board. We have invited the UASNET from
Europe to help us through this issue of trains. They have high speed trains across most parts of Europe.
Because Charles Reed was one of the first few speakers, a number of speakers caught on to the
metaphor about trains and added all sorts of dimensions to it:
• Could we build bigger trains or more coaches?
• Could we build high speed trains - like the Gautrain - and transport more people within a given
period?
• Could we design a completely new and more efficient mass transportation system, not just bigger
and more efficient trains?
In a sense, UoTs are part of the strategy to design new, bigger and perhaps more socio-economically
efficient higher education trains. Some old trains – some tired, dilapidated and under-performing given
large investments that have been made in their maintenance over decades - resent this new innovation
in our mass transportation system. But, like the Gautrain, the new train is here. This one is not so elitist,
only serving Sandton and the kugels who travel everyday between Pretoria and Johannesburg. This is a
new mbombela for so many of our youth and young adults out there who would otherwise have no
access to world-class trains, all of whom do not feature in the top 100 world rankings of trains.
In his keynote speech at the recent National Skills Summit of 9-10 September, the Minister of Higher
Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, defined one of the acute problems of South Africa at this
beginning of the 21st century:
“South Africa now suffers from the twin scourges of high unemployment and a shortage of
critical skills needed to drive economic growth and social development”
As a keynote speaker at the 2nd Annual SATN Conference in July 2009, the Minister of Science and
Technology, Ms Naledi Pandor, introduced the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) thus:
“The Technology Innovation Agency is part of our effort to address the challenges presented by
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5. the “innovation chasm” or the gap between the local knowledge base and the productive
economy. Our innovation system is a repository of local knowledge, which could have a more
sustained impact on the real economy. Due to various impediments to productivity and
technological innovation, progress has been slow.
She also referred to some South African technologies like “the lithium battery technology used in
electric cars that we lost to the U.S.A about two decades ago” and “the thin-film solar-cell technology
we lost to Germany”. I know this personally because my institution CUT has also had to lose some
innovations in, amongst others, medical device and additive manufacturing technology to developed
countries.
To paraphrase what these two ministers have said; all in all, we have the following four-headed
monster:
• A seriously undermined local knowledge base that the “innovation chasm” renders not so
useful in the productive economy;
• An acute shortage of high level and critical skills to turn the local knowledge into social and
technological innovations;
• In the absence of those critical skills, a stagnant, underperforming and perhaps deteriorating
economy that, ideally, should help to drive economic growth and social development;
• And, in the absence of social and technological innovations that build our economy and foster
development, more and more of our people remaining unemployed.
How have the last 2 conferences of the SATN dealt with this monster and how will this one deal with it?
As I said earlier, it may be unfair to ask an organisation barely 4 years old and consisting of universities
that are barely 5 years old about these critical issues. The ANC, an organisation that is soon to be 100
years old and has been in government for the last 16 years, and has yet to get to grips with this four-
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6. headed monster. So, we are just minnows in the broader scheme of things. But, like a little beetle
crawling on a critical stability point of a sand dune, I think we could cause an avalanche that will level
the playing field in higher education.
I need to give you a little bit of history in the right perspective so that you could understand what the
SATN does and will be doing over the next day and a half.
The inaugural conference of May 2008 had the theme: “The nature and characteristics of South African
UoTs. The 2009 book I referred to earlier entitled: “The Place and Role of Universities of Technology in
South Africa” is partly a result of this theme and the work of many years before. Because nobody had
actually tried to define what South African UoTs are about and what they could possibly achieve in the
higher education sector, this book is our humble way of making it clear who we are and what we are
about. You should not be surprised, though, to learn that there are those in the higher education system
who still ask: are UoTs legitimately universities or just the same old technikons.
In a sense, that inaugural conference aptly constituted our defining moment. Before the end of that
year, we published a report on performance indicators entitled: “Performance Indicators for Research
and Innovation in UoTs and CUs”. We made it clear then that we are prepared to be judged by these and
we duly submitted them to the then DoE in November 2008. This project was supported by the DoE
through its partnership with the Finnish government. CEPD was the project implementing agency for
this project. I am certain that the now Minister’s Advisor, Mr John Pampallis would have read this
important report.
The second conference of July 2009 had the theme: “Technological innovation at universities in South
Africa: towards industrial and economic development”. This conference was accompanied by a
wonderful exhibition of UoT-based technological innovations, prototypes and products from their
various centres and technology stations. These innovations were both high and low tech, just using the
available scientific research in the relevant areas to produce something that has the potential to grow
the economy and help to develop this country. What we hoped to showcase had been how universities
could be used not only to provide the knowledge base, but to produce critical and high level skills that
could be directly used to “drive economic growth and social development” as our minister demanded
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7. earlier this month. This was, therefore, our attempt as UoTs to not only talk about who we are and what
we are about, but to actually show it in situ that we have potential for much more in the socio-economic
development arena.
However, there are those who think it is only universities with a long history in teaching and research
that could ever do anything to advance the economic growth and social development in this country.
Clearly, the 2009 conference was about dealing with the “innovation chasm”; was about how our
knowledge base could be exploited to make a direct impact in economic growth and social
development and in turn to make contributions towards reducing unemployment in this dear country.
This was a way of beginning to deal with three of the heads of our four-headed monster.
This year, we have chosen to tackle the fourth head of the South African four-headed monster: a lack of
critical and high level skills; and hence, our theme is: “UoTs driving Human Resource Development
through Partnerships”. What we are very conscious and sensitive about from the outset is that dealing
with all these monster heads cannot be achieved singularly. Thus, establishing strategic partnerships,
which was also very much what we fostered in 2009 with business and industry, is what we need to
foster to neutralize this monster head of the innovation chasm that leads to unemployment.
Instead of saying ‘neutralise the monster head’ I would have said to kill this monster or snake head. But,
as you know, killing things in order to usher in a new dispensation was very much criticized when
Malema raised it in 2007 or so; and, killing of snakes, or beating dead ones, rather was discouraged by
our President Zuma then.
It is no wonder, therefore, that part of this conference is about courting stronger ties with the Skills
Development system, the FET system and business/industry. For this reason, the whole session on
Friday, 1 October, is just about that. Having had the FET Summit of 3 September and the National Skills
Summit of 9-10 September, I hope we will use the session tomorrow to carve a niche for UoTs or
universities in general as we try to neutralize the monster head of a lack of high level and critical skills. In
particular, the SATN will be symbolically signing an MoU with the South African College Principals
Organisation (SACPO), and MoU that was sanctioned by the Department of Higher Education and
Training. This MoU is about, amongst others: assuring greater articulation for FET College students into
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8. UoTs; introducing access programmes for students from the colleges who would otherwise not be able
to enrol for any university programme; helping to upgrade college lecturer qualifications especially in
areas of science, engineering and technology. There is also a session this afternoon dealing with
international partnerships and how they could be leveraged to produce relevant trains and an efficient
mass transportation system.
In conclusion, therefore, as we deliberate and engage over the next one and a half days, we should find
innovative ways of improving these new high speed trains we are; innovative ways of revolutionizing our
mass transportation system; innovative ways of neutralising the four-headed monster; innovative ways
of building strategic partnerships to be able to make substantial or maximal impact with the little
resources we have at our disposal.
We hope our partners in Skills Development, the FET sector, business/industry and our international
partners like the UASNET and the ATN will be the kind of strategic partners that will support us to the
hilt in this arduous journey.
..........oOo..........
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