'Get South Africa Thriving'

As South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education and Training, Naledi Pandor is on course to ensure the country’s institutions are geared for the fourth industrial revolution and will generate professionals ready to create enterprises that will employ others.

- Godfrey Mutizwa

IF NALEDI PANDOR HAS HER WAY, an overhaul of South Africa’s higher learning system is on the cards, transforming its institutions into enterprise creators and the vanguard of the country’s march into the fourth industrial revolution.

Two months into her second tenure in education which now includes skills training, Pandor has become a student again as she seeks to understand the forces leaving many of the country’s children unemployable. In her austere office in the Central Business District of South Africa’s capital Tshwane, Pandor, 64, speaks with the enthusiasm of a pioneer.

“We tend to be one-dimensional in our thinking that a qualification will lead to a job and so in speaking to young people, I have been saying more and more that I want to hear about the people that you are going to employ. I want to hear about the enterprise you want to create. I am less interested in hearing about who is going to employ you,’’ she says.

Conversations have already started with the colleges, universities and private sector associations on improving the higher education curriculum and coordinating the country’s drive to be more competitive as the fourth industrial revolution transforms industries and economies, threatening to widen the gap between developing and developed nations.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), very few developing countries are paying attention to the impact of technological advances associated with the fourth industrial revolution, which have the potential to widen the divide between rich and poor nations by worsening unemployment, increasing the concentration of economic power and wealth and spreading biases in influential algorithms.