Professor RF Sandenbergh, Dean, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, University of Pretoria
Professor de Vaal; Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Pretoria
Delegates
Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here and it has been fascinating to learn a little about tribology. I did not even know what the word meant before last week. I had no idea that it was so important. Of course, I knew about gravity, perhaps because of the high profile that our space programme has in our science sector. I had little idea that friction was as important.
Energy is a subject that dominates a lot of policy discussions in South Africa today. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has funded research in this area to find out whether there is any cost and energy saving potential to the science, but there is more work to be done and we look forward to the outcome of this research.
Last week the South African government endorsed a new energy plan South Africa. It has been a long time in the making. It is immensely difficult to project supply and demand forward for thirty years, not least because of the immense changes that will take place in the science and technology landscape over this period.
But one thing we do know. We have to reduce our reliance on coal and place greater confidence in solar, wind and nuclear power. And this is what the plan does – boldly. It opens up the energy environment to new clean and green research and technologies.
Across government, but particularly in the Department of Science and Technology we are promoting renewable energy research and technologies.
South Africa has a profile in the renewable energy industry, coming in at number 19 in terms of investment in this sector. There are wind farms in the coastal provinces, while solar energy parks are being built in the inland provinces. There are some bold and ambitious projects in development and barely a week goes by without the announcement of some new and grand plan.
This is as it should be. At the heart of our new growth path there are ambitious targets for boosting electricity generation through renewable energy technologies.
This is also good for new jobs, another important South African priority.
Government has set a target of cutting unemployment to 15 percent by 2020.
According to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), “employment in the formal, non-agricultural sector of South Africa’s economy rose by 101 000 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2010”. So this is immensely encouraging.
The real problem lies in youth unemployment. Apart from the boost from the expanded public works programme, and the planned youth subsidy, we anticipate that green growth can provide a third string to our strategy for reducing unemployment.
Existing jobs will need to be redesigned and workers skilled or re-skilled with green skills.
There is a huge opportunity to expanding science and technology r&d in our new growth path economic strategy.
The DST is involved in a number of green r&d projects - bio-composites, biodegradeable packaging for fresh fruit, green chemistry, and our hydrogen energy and fuel-cell initiative.
The CSIR plays a key role in partnership with universities, public entities and industry researchers on all grand challenge areas of the DST’s Ten Year Innovation Plan – farmer to pharma, energy, global change, space science and human & social dynamics.
There is strong commitment across government, at the policy and intervention level, to grow the base of local content in government procurement. Of particular significance is the recapitalization across industries, from energy supply to transport and information communication technology (ICT).
The DST is in partnership with the Department of Public Enterprises and Department of Trade and Industry to support local engineering companies through a technology localisation strategy.
The DST’s technology localisation strategy plays a small but important part in large-scale public sector procurement. Its aim is to stimulate and support local manufacturing firms in engaging with the national localisation programmes, with a specific focus on Eskom and Transet.
To achieve these goals the CSIR is forging stronger links to industry. But South Africa needs more engineers. We’re short of engineers in South Africa today. Not enough engineers graduate each year. Each year there are 1,400 BSc Eng and B eng graduates from our universities. Only half of those 1,400 go on to practice as engineers; a lot of them go on to work in banks and other financial institutes.
We need to quadruple the number of graduates, so that we have a larger pool to draw from.
I should add that we also need more women engineers. Because we need the best people as engineers. If you eliminate women, you are eliminating half of your potential. That would be a waste, and has been a waste in the past.
Government is particularly focussed on improving the quality and quantity of education, and particularly on the importance of boosting the numbers of science, engineering and technology graduates from our tertiary education institutions.
The worry in government has always been that business does not do enough training, that business has not done enough for the development of skills.
Yet an immense synergy can be created if government and business work together constructively.
In closing, I know that Professor Sandenbergh has been in the forefront in alerting government to the pipeline problems that universities face in the engineering field. And I congratulate the Engineering Council of South Africa on undertaking a national initiative, ‘Engenius’, to tackle the shortage so as to train 30,000 engineers by 2014.
