PROFESSOR SIBUSISO VIL- NKOMO LECTURE BY THE DEPUTY MINISTER OF HIGHER EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND INNOVATION, MR BUTI MANAMELA AT THE 22ND ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ASSOCIATION OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT AT BIRCHWOOD HOTEL, 25 SEPTEMBER 2023
Programme Director;
Prof Shai, President of SAAPAM;
Dr John Molepo, Executive Director;
Professor Vil-Nkomo;
Honoured guests;
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Thank you for the honour of inviting me to come and deliver the Vil- Nkomo lecture as part of the 22nd Annual General meeting of the South African Association of Public Administration and Management.
Since its founding, the South African Association of Public Administration and Management has made a significant contribution to shaping our understanding of the role of public servants in a democratic order.
For over two decades, SAAPAM has been a strong advocate for a competent and ethical public service, efficient service delivery and promotion of academic scholarship and critical inquiry.
As you are aware, Prof Vil- Nkomo is not just a globally renowned and award-winning academic, but also a distinguished intellectual and model public servant. Prof Vil-Nkomo is also a patriot who was instrumental in shaping the institutional architecture for the post 1994 democratic state.
Therefore, the decision by the South African Association of Public Administration and Management to host a lecture in his honour, is most apt. The life and contribution of Prof Vil- Nkomo compels us to ask our ourselves a number of critical questions relating to among others, ethics, knowledge, leadership, and the kind of country we should build.
Consistent with the wide scope of his work and concern for the development of our country and its people, I thought I should share a couple of things which I believe deserve the attention of today’s policy makers, public servants, and academics.
The first is the importance of ethics. Even though the apartheid state had one of the most ruthless security machinery in the world, many of the women and men of our country still had the courage to stand up and fight against this regime.
They did this fully aware of the fact that, they are risking detention without trial, torture and even death. Even though they knew all this, they drew courage from one fundamental thing and that is the moral foundation upon which our struggle for freedom was founded.
The moral premise of our struggle also empowers us with the understanding that, accordingly, the project to construct a new South Africa should be based on the highest moral standards possible and that central to this task is the building of a competent and ethical state.
If this is the general understanding then we will also agree that, by this moral standard, if one component of the state fails to provide water, housing, or education to the citizenry or if we as public servants engage in various forms of unethical conduct, we are undermining the very moral foundation upon which the democratic state is constructed.
Even though the democratic state has put in place a number of legislative, policy and regulatory prescripts to foster a culture of ethical conduct in public institutions, we continue to see a number of incidents that suggest that we need to intensify the fight against unethical conduct within state institutions.
The second issue I wish to talk about is our strategic objective of building of a capable and ethical state. One of the critical enablers for the achievement of this objective, is to ensure that, our public servants, at all levels, possess the requisite skills and competencies.
In addition to the interventions by government departments, the National School of Government has been doing commendable work in trying to instil a culture of competence, ethics, and scholarship in the public service.
Given the development complexities imposed on us by our colonial past and the capacity of the state in undoing this, it is important that we ensure that we do indeed build a capable, robust and interventionist state that will not be shy to intervene of behalf of our country’s poor.
The third issue I wish to focus on is the importance of building and sustaining a culture of knowledge and service. We have one of the biggest post school education and training systems in the world.
As with any modern state, our education system is central to the development of the necessary knowledge and skills among our youth and the achievement of our national goals.
Most fundamentally, our education system is our primary instrument for unlocking the potential of our all our people.
In this connection, while we have made commendable progress in increasing access and through-put rates for young people in the basic, further, and higher education sectors, we are still confronted with a number of systemic challenges.
These include a serious skills deficit, especially engineers and the depressing fact that just over three million of our young people are not in any formal training, education, or employment.
We cannot hope to achieve any of our national goals or sustain the progress we have made over the past two decades, if we are not able to ensure that the majority of our country’s young people have access to the education, skills development, or employment.
The social cost of having a significant section of our population excluded from education, employment, or training, is just too heavy to bear.
To make our education system more responsive to the realities of our time, over the last few years, we as the Department of Higher Education and Training, have put in place various policy and institutional mechanisms that are aimed facilitating a regularly review of the quality and relevance of the programmes of our universities and TVET colleges.
This is necessary for a number of reasons, including the need to ensure that what our young people are taught at our universities and TVET colleges enables them to develop solutions for our country’s problems, but also to ensure that our education system remains agile in the context of the rapid changes that are taking place in the world.
These as you know, are changes such as the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and related technology domains that are compelling us to radically rethink our understanding and approaches to education, skills development, and the world of work.
The last point I wish to focus on is the importance of building a country that affords each citizen and in particular our young people, as much opportunities as possible for them to pursue their dreams and eventually realise their full potential.
One of the biggest impediments to achieving this goal is the persistence of inequality in our country. The fact that we continue to carry the dubious title of being the most unequal society in the world, according to among others, the World Bank, should trouble us all.
For this reason, our efforts at building of an ethical and capable state shouldn’t just be limited to the development of skills and competencies in the public sector. An ethical and capable state must also concern itself with issues of social and economic justice in society.
We must realise that our current levels of inequality as a country are not sustainable. In fact, they threaten to undo the very foundation upon which the democratic project basis itself. This means that, if we don’t deal decisively with inequality in our country, all our critical public and social institutions are likely to face imminent collapse.
There is therefore an urgent need for us as policy makers, public servants, and academics, to get together as regularly as possible and engage in deep and critical reflection about our current socio-economic trajectory and as an outcome, put in place a set of well thought out interventions that will put our country on a total different socio-economic trajectory in the coming decades.
We have a moral and ethical obligation to confront these and other discomforting questions about the condition of our people and the role of the democratic state.
In conclusion, we should preoccupy ourselves with these questions not only because of their impact on the project to build a more equal and human country, but also because we recognise the centrality of the state, academics, and civil society in the construction of such a society.
I believe these are some of the issues that Prof Vil-Nkomo would expect us to grapple with and find answers to and in my view, this is one of the ways in which we can honour the contribution that has been made by patriots such as Prof Sibusiso Vil-Nkomo.
Thank you.