First of all - I would like to offer my congratulations to every one of you on the local SADESMO team who has worked hard to bring about the fantastic result in last week's SRC elections at the University of Zululand. By winning all seven seats on the university's student body, you have set an example for all of us in the IFP to follow in next year's general election. Well done!

To me, coming to the University of Zululand is like coming home. This institution is in many ways a personification of what I passionately believe in. I probably will not exaggerate if I call it my brain child.
 

The establishment of this university marked the culmination of my fundraising efforts as Chief Minister of KwaZulu. My vision of an educational institution for black students, needless to say, was not the most popular idea at the time. Through first-class education, Unizul brought a beam of enlightenment into an era of darkness and beyond.

But, as you can imagine, it was not all smooth sailing. The folly of apartheid policies on education for non-white children was duly matched by one particular ANC struggle response. Their slogan Liberation before Education saw a whole generation of black school children marching into the 1980s intoning these words like an incantation. I myself had no doubt at the time that it was designed, like most incantations, to save our youth from the tiresome obligation to think for themselves. Of course, nothing could have offered starker contrast to this blatant social irresponsibility than Inkatha's retort Education before Liberation. But this is now history. Let me strike a more contemporary note.

Over the past fourteen years - the lifetime of our democratic South Africa - higher education in this province and the country has been experiencing a period of intense ferment. Institutions of higher learning, which by tradition are conservative bodies, have had to contend with rapid, imposing and often dramatic change. In a way, the period since 1994 has been a time of optimism.

The new government came in with an agenda of change and transformation.  It began reshaping South African society and formulating a new vision.  Universities were key instruments in this agenda. They were where the new democracy's idealism found expression, its leaders trained and its ideas originated and grew. All seemed set for a direct, if not smooth, path.

And yet the system that was inherited from the apartheid regime was inherently unequal. In many ways, its academic input was frequently outdated and out of step with the emerging concepts in the new, democratic South Africa. Its research culture was often incompatible with the progressive agenda of the new country and the culture of the academic environment was alienating to a large majority of South Africans, black, Indian, coloured and white.

In addition to the inherited shortcomings, the interventions by the new educational establishment, although no doubt well-meant, have not always had the desired effect. For the most part, these interventionists miscalculated, because they treated universities as mere weapons in an ideological battle. By establishing hegemony over the tertiary educational institutions, they reached the end of their ambition, not a means to further it.

Our - that is the IFP vision - of technikons and universities and their place in society has always been more realistic. By convention and in our view, tertiary learning stands at the centre of society's self understanding. It holds the records of its history and values. On this basis, it aspires to formulate the society's future prospects. As such, tertiary education has to be open to change and challenge. It has to take calculated risks and it has to embrace the new and the progressive. 

We in the IFP have always recognised that one of the novel concepts tertiary educational institutions in South Africa and elsewhere in the world need to tackle is redefining their core mission in society. This obligation is even more pertinent now, fourteen years into our democratic dispensation, when the fundamental constitutional questions our country struggled with for decades prior to 1994 have been settled.  There is much beyond the post-apartheid transformation that needs to be addressed in South African tertiary institutions today.

For one, the core mission of a South African institution of higher learning no longer seems to be the mere creation of new knowledge and the construction of an intellectual society. We recognise that the cultivation of knowledge can take place anywhere where people gather to trade ideas and challenges: in the marketplace of ideas, at the manufacturing plant, in the executive boardroom. As a result, the elitism of tertiary learning is receding fast in the face of this new competition. The tertiary institutions should welcome and embrace it and, in the process, put up a decent fight for its place in today's world.

In order to advance some of these ideas and prompt them into practice at the Unizul, SADESMO must agitate and mobilise for improvement and reform. You have now won a popular mandate to do so. Along with the improvement of educational content, such as curriculum enhancement and course diversification, the improvement of teaching methods and other aspects of teaching are vital to the qualitative enhancement of tertiary education. These objectives can only be achieved as a concerted effort of students, management and academics. Let SADESMO be the driving force in this alliance.

We in the IFP will count on your expertise, experience and zeal in the upcoming political battle in KwaZulu Natal that is the 2009 election.
 

The IFP is determined to take back the province from the ANC. Our resolve has been incensed as much by our loss of power in 2004 as by the ANC's mismanagement of the public affairs since. In order to prepare the ground for 2009, we must agitate and mobilise for change here and now.
 

You have taken the first step and inspired us all.

Once again I congratulate and thank you.

Contact:
Jon Cayzer, 084 555 7144