Opinion: It Is Still in Our Hands? What Mandela Day Should Ask of South African Higher Education

Every July, South Africa pauses for 67 minutes. We paint schools, hand out blankets, serve soup, and post about it. This year’s official theme, “It’s still in our hands to combat poverty and inequity,” is a good one. It resists nostalgia. It refuses to let Madiba become a soft, safe memory we visit once a year and then leave behind. But 67 minutes of goodwill cannot fix what 67 years of structural exclusion built. And nowhere is that tension sharper than in our universities, the institutions we still call, without much irony, the custodians of transformation. So, this year, instead of another tribute to Mandela’s kindness, I want to ask harder questions. Who actually governs our universities? Whose knowledge counts inside them? And does the architecture of Higher Education still serve the people it claims to serve, or has it quietly settled into a new kind of comfort?

The problems we already know about
None of this is speculative. Students queue every January and February to confirm National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) funding that arrives late, if it arrives at all. Missing meals, delayed allowances and communication breakdowns between the scheme and institutions are not glitches; they are recurring features of the system. Residence space has not kept pace with enrolment growth, so students end up in overcrowded backyard rooms far from campus, with all the safety and academic risks that come with that. Academic staff, meanwhile, are stretched across research, teaching, and administrative demands that keep multiplying without matching investment. Add to that the slow, uneven progress on curriculum transformation, and the picture is of a sector carrying real strain beneath its public rituals of graduation gowns and open days. These challenges are not separate from the governance conversation. They are downstream of it. Funding decisions, infrastructure priorities, and staffing ratios all get settled somewhere, usually in council meetings whose minutes most students will never see.

Start with the councils
If you want to know whether an institution is serious about transformation, do not read its mission statement. Look at who sits in the room where decisions get made. University councils are where budgets are approved, vice-chancellors are appointed, and institutional priorities are set. At most South African universities, external members – people who are neither staff nor students – make up the majority of council seats. At the University of Cape Town, external members hold 60 percent of the total membership. At the University of Pretoria, 18 of 30 council members come from outside the institution.

That design was deliberate, born of the post-1994 push to open closed, apartheid-shaped institutions to public accountability. But a recent opinion piece by Professor Fulufhelo Nemavhola makes an argument worth sitting with: the governance settlement built for a transitional democracy may no longer match the universities we have. He is right that representation and governance capacity are not the same thing. But I would push further. The question is not only whether councils have the right skills. It is whether they have the right people in terms of gender, class background, disability and lived proximity to the students whose lives these decisions shape. How many university councils in this country have a majority of women in their most senior structures? How many have meaningfully included working-class students, or students who depend on NSFAS, in conversations about institutional strategy? Representation on paper is not representation in practice if the people who carry the deepest knowledge of exclusion are never in the room when policy is written.

The knowledge question nobody wants to ask
There is a second, quieter transformation that councils and senates rarely touch: whose knowledge counts as knowledge. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s work on epistemic freedom reminds us that decolonisation is not finished when the demographics of a lecture hall change. It is unfinished as long as curricula, research agendas, and definitions of academic excellence still take their cues from elsewhere. The Council on Higher Education’s own research has named this directly, describing a form of epistemic inertia in post-colonial Higher Education systems, a resistance to change that outlives the political moment that was supposed to force it. That should worry every vice-chancellor who has ever used the word transformation in a strategic plan.

What Mandela asked of us
Mandela did not spend 27 years in prison so that South Africans could hand out sandwiches once a year and call it justice. He asked us to build institutions that hold power accountable to the people. Universities are among the most powerful institutions we have. They decide who gets in, who is funded, who graduates, and whose research shapes public policy. This Mandela Day, the honest question for every council chair, every senate member, every vice-chancellor is not, “What am I doing for 67 minutes?” It is, “What has my institution done, structurally, this year, to make itself more representative, more accountable, and more honest about whose knowledge it values?” That work does not fit into an hour. It is still, as the theme insists, in our hands.

*Mr Pikolomzi Qaba is a PhD scholar in the College of Law and Management Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His research focuses on public policy, communication and governance.

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.