Manamela to universities: stop buying knowledge from abroad, build it here
The Higher Education and Training Minister says South Africa's universities must rethink teaching and assessment for an AI world and stop being permanent consumers of technology designed elsewhere.
Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela has told South Africa’s universities to rethink how they teach and assess students in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, and to build the country’s own capacity to develop and govern the technology rather than remain a permanent buyer of systems designed elsewhere.
Delivering a keynote address at a national webinar on Tuesday titled “The Intellectual Directions of Higher Education in South Africa”, Manamela said generative AI can improve research, translation, administration and teaching. He also set out the risks he sees in it: reproducing bias, generating fabricated evidence, deepening dependence on proprietary systems, and encouraging students to mistake a fluent answer for an understood argument.
“If a machine can produce a plausible essay in seconds, our response cannot be limited to finding a better machine to detect it,” the Minister said.
The webinar was convened by Nelson Mandela University, the University of the Free State, Rosebank International and Higher Education Media Services.
Manamela called for assessment methods that test whether a student can frame a worthwhile question, test evidence, make ethical judgements, work with others, and apply knowledge to an unfamiliar problem. He said the country must build African capacity in AI through research infrastructure, open resources, African-language technologies and trustworthy data.
“Digital transformation should not mean that our universities become permanent consumers of knowledge infrastructures designed elsewhere,” he said.
The Minister used the platform to reopen the funding question, saying the future of higher education requires an honest discussion about funding, access, institutional sustainability and the purpose of universities. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme has expanded access to higher education, he said, but its administrative weaknesses and the growing gap between financial commitments and available funding affect the sustainability of the entire system.
Student support and institutional funding cannot be treated as unrelated, he warned, and protecting access while undermining the institutions that must educate students will not secure meaningful access.
“If we protect institutional balance sheets by excluding capable young people, we have betrayed the public mission,” Manamela said. “The challenge is to build a settlement that is equitable, financially credible and administratively deliverable.”
That settlement, he said, requires institutions to ask difficult questions about cost, differentiation and cooperation.
“South Africa does not need 26 copies of the same university, each competing to look like a particular international model. We need a connected system of distinct institutions, with different strengths and responsibilities, all committed to quality,” he said.
Rankings can provide useful information, he said, but they cannot be the intellectual compass of the entire system.
On intellectual transformation, Manamela said decolonisation is “neither a slogan for strategic plans nor a rejection of every idea originating elsewhere”.
“It is a disciplined interrogation of power in the production of knowledge: what has been treated as universal, what has been dismissed as local, who is permitted to theorise and who is expected only to supply experience. When African languages are absent from serious scholarship, we lose more than an opportunity to translate existing material,” he said.
Multilingual teaching resources, scholarly vocabularies and digital tools can expand both access and intellectual possibility, he said, and the same responsibility applies to climate, health, land, food, water and energy.
“The planetary crisis is not somewhere outside South Africa. It is present in our municipalities, farms, mines, coastlines and households,” he said. Universities should connect scientific, technical, social and indigenous knowledge to understand these challenges, while protecting the space to criticise prevailing economic and political arrangements.
Manamela challenged universities to renew their public purpose by moving teaching and research beyond campus gates. “A university located near communities experiencing water insecurity, unemployment, failing infrastructure or preventable disease should not be intellectually distant from those realities,” he said.
He also called for stronger partnerships between universities, technical and vocational education and training colleges, community colleges, employers, labour and civil society to strengthen pathways into work and support research and innovation.
This report is drawn from the government’s own account of the address, published by SAnews (South African Government News Agency) at https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/universities-urged-rethink-learning-age-ai. The full text of the Minister’s address was not carried in that record.
