The South African government intends to overhaul its education ministry, splitting it into two, and possibly three, separate ministries under different ministers. As well as allowing one minister to focus solely on the schooling system, this would also allow specialised focus on tertiary-education institutions, including reversing former education minister Kader Asmal’s mergers of key institutions.

African National Congress (ANC) secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, argues that having one ministry of education makes for an unwieldy situation that does not allow proper focus and attention from the minister in charge. “We can’t go on with business as usual in education,.”

While minister of education Naledi Pandor is likely to remain in charge of one of the ministries, South African Communist Party general-secretary Blade Nzimande is tipped to be added as a minister overseeing one of the education ministries in ANC president Jacob Zuma’s cabinet.

The ANC is expected to unveil further details of this refurbishment to the department of education next week. But Mr Mantashe said that it is critical to get the system working so that matriculants are ready to enter tertiary-education institutions and tertiary-education institutions are churning out the quantity and quality of skill that the economy needs.

Mr Mantashe said that universities in predominantly black areas should be the very ones churning out black engineers and doctors. He noted that, fifteen years after the advent of democracy, not one former black university had an engineering faculty and that Medunsa University’s output of doctors had dropped following Mr Asmal’s plan of merging key universities.

From Troye Lund at Finance 24