Programme Director;
Ministers Hanekom, Manuel and Patel;
Deputy Minister Masutha;
Directors-General;
Chairpersons of Science Councils;
Chief Executive Officers of Companies and Science Councils;
Representatives of Higher Education Sector and Research Institutes;
Delegates and
Ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks for affording me the honour to address the Science, Technology and Innovation Summit. A high-level gathering of this kind made up of some of the best of our nation's minds is a clear signal of our intention to break new ground in meeting the developmental needs of our country.
Perhaps, given the peculiarities of our past, more than any other country South Africa needs a meeting of this kind to compare notes and assess the lie of the land in the field of science and technology the better to identify key weaknesses as well as rethink approaches and strategies to sustain reconstruction and development.
As a country our vision of creating a united, non-racial non-sexist, just and prosperous society will only see the light of day if and only if it is fertilised by economically lush conditions of social progress.
In any case, no modern society has scaled the heights of social progress without science and technology as the innately driving impulse. As amply demonstrated elsewhere in the world, science and technology is a sine qua non for modernisation. It even enables societies previously stuck in under-development to catch up with if not leap-frog those already determining the global development agenda.
Indeed former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill had a point when he noted that 'the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see'.
How societies shape up on the level of science and technology in their historical evolution has and will determine their levels of progress in the distant future.
The story of human progress is the story of science and technology. The innovation in the invention, design and modification of technology has over the years impacted on social systems in ways hitherto unknown to human history.
From the development of flake stone tools by hominids millions of years ago to the emergence of the industrial revolution in the 1700s, science and technology as well as innovation have been the prime motor of history.
This historical lesson has never been lost on South Africa even prior to the onset of democracy.
Despite isolation, or, some may even argue, because of it, South Africa saw greater research output from institutes such as CSIR, Agriculture Research Councils and others.
The democratic state has inherited these research institutions, which it has over time tried to put to the service of the democratic agenda. Unfortunately, we have also inherited a raft of social disabilities spawned by the history of apartheid.
Inevitably, most if not all the historically inherited challenges constituting a dead weight on our development ambitions can only be addressed through the research agenda of our national research institutes.
However, increased and relevant research output rooted in the developmental conditions of our society is necessarily premised on a shared vision by all stakeholders.
If we have no common ground in terms of where we need to take our country as well as a shared understanding of the route to get there our efforts, disjointed and even intrinsically antithetical to each other, are bound to fail.
Our national research institutes — with unreserved government support— have the task to remain relevant to this developmental agenda through the use of science, technology and innovation.
In other words harnessing the force of science and technology to meet our developmental needs is among the surest ways out of the current quagmire of under-development.
Alive to this pressing need to drive the process of reconstruction and development, government has come up with innovative ways aimed at uprooting the dehumanising conditions engulfing the lives of multitudes of South Africans.
We have as government summed up this under-development as the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment, all of which are inter-related.
With this in mind, government has established the National Planning Commission with the mandate to come up with the national development framework.
In essence, through the National Development Plan, government has laid out the parameters within which each social partner can make a contribution towards the achievement of our shared vision.
This shared vision entails the reduction of poverty, stimulating economic growth, effecting economic transformation and creating employment.
This role has to be seen within the context of a broad and continued social dialogue.
Government, on its side, knows only too well the indispensability of science, technology and innovation if it must deliver on its historical mandate of addressing social inequality, poverty and unemployment.
To this end, and despite drawbacks and false starts at times, government has sought credible ways and means of harnessing the benefits of science for development.
Nowhere was this shown than in our successful bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The key challenge pertaining to this historic stride is to maximise benefits flowing from it.
Among others this calls for more generations of South Africans to take charge of this and many other scientific projects whose success will ineluctably impact on our future.
This reality places enormous responsibility on government and all its social partners to improve the education of our people, with particular attention to primary and secondary school levels.
We need to do much more to mobilise all the resources within our reach for the task of producing quality education for both teachers and learners alike.
Only a sound and quality education system with strong emphasis on mathematics and science can serve as a reliable feeder for tertiary institutions, which will in turn be able to produce top-notch graduates geared to the needs of the country.
Consequently such graduates can find their ways into our national research institutes, expanding the cohort of researchers at any given time.
It is therefore encouraging to note that, notwithstanding several challenges dogging our education system, our country has always striven to find creative ways to improve our education.
Once again, we are relying on social partnership and continued dialogue among all stakeholders to ensure an improved education system responsive to our needs as a country.
This kind of partnership gained traction in the recent launch of the National Education Collaboration Trust. This initiative, launched on the 16 July this year, represented the high-point of collaboration between government and non-governmental organisations, labour, parents, business and other education stakeholders.
This historic collaboration lays the necessary groundwork for our education system to take off, especially in the areas of science and mathematics.
The above partnership by South Africans serves as a model we can adopt with some adjustments for the purposes of strengthening our national research institutes with the aim of remaining competitive in our research output.
Programme Director;
The widely-peer reviewed research on "Science in South Africa: The Dawn of a Renaissance?", by University of Pretoria's Institute for Technological Innovation, led by Professor Anastassios Pouris, paints a positive picture of a growing number of highly rated research and A-rated researchers.
South Africa's research output between 2000 and 2010 shows that the country has climbed two positions in world rankings to 33rd and has increased its peer reviewed and publishable research output from 3617 in 2000 to 7468 in 2010.
Professor Pouris suggests that this success is attributable to government interventions, such as increased resource support from the Department of Science and Technology, which aims to spend R45 billion on research and development by 2014.
This is in addition to National Research Foundation spending R43 million each year on boosting research activity in the historically disadvantaged institutions. Our country is also leading in areas such as HIV and Aids research setting the benchmark for HIV and AIDS research globally.
However, despite these gains, this progress is still from a lower base when compared to Brazil, India, Russia and China. This is partly because of systemic problems in education and partly due to lack of national co-ordination in the research field.
Part of the problem is that we have not built on the research comparative advantage gained from our country's previous policy. With the reintegration of South Africa into the global community we could no longer compete and make head way on the economies of scale gained.
Secondly, research projects are carried out disparately without knowledge sharing and coordination to avoid duplications. Our national research efforts lack a central framework or institute to define and identify the most immediate projects, resulting in duplication, wastage and inefficient use of funding.
Lack of collaboration robs our country of the benefits which would accrue from such an exercise. For instance, among others our research institutes could commission a study of the systemic failure in our governance system and how we can best address such challenges.
Under-utilisation of our existing research institutes by government often leads to wasteful expenditure in that each government department commissions research in common areas. For example the Department of Transport commissioned research into ways to prevent driver's licence fraud and the South African Social Security Agency commissioned its own research into fraud prevention. If we had integrated and consolidated national research effort as one stop shop we could have avoided unnecessary expenditure.
This is a prime example of what sustained collaboration between all of us, especially government, national research institutes and the private sector can achieve within the context of reconstruction and development of our country.
Programme Director;
In view of the above challenges and potential for advancing the developmental agenda of our country, I would like to welcome this Science, Technology and Innovation Summit because it offers us an opportunity to think creatively around providing new and innovative solutions to our unique challenges.
I submit that the benefits of science, technology and innovation are not only potentially immense for us but also, and more crucially, constitute the pre-conditions for South Africa's development.
Research has shown that nations such as Japan, South Korea and Germany put science, technology and innovation to the service of the development of their societies, with commendable results.
Among others, in these and other fast developing as well as developed nations, science, technology and innovation, driven by close cooperation between government and business, is pivotal in the sense that:
- Investment in Science, Technology and Innovation was imperative for socio-economic development;
- Government and industry worked together and their roles were clearly defined. For instance, government was responsible for facilitating and leading the building of infrastructure and business was responsible for servicing the domestic markets;
- Each of these countries had to make sacrifices such as people making savings in Japan and working long hours in Germany.
In South Africa's case, one cannot help thinking about the concept of 'the advantages of backwardness', articulated by thinkers such as Ian Morris. In this scenario, backward societies harness the progress in scientific innovations to advance their own social development without having to go through the growing pains undertaken by advanced societies.
Against this background, I would like to venture a few areas of concern for which this summit is best suited to apply the strength of its collective brain power. Among others, the Summit may need to reflect on the following:
- Exploring ways of improving collaboration between research institutes, government and business;
- Ensuring that we conduct research in favour of public good and remain relevant to the research needs of society at large;
- To learn how nations of comparable development levels used collaboration as well as science, technology and innovation to advance social development. In this regard, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research can play a role as a research institute in the natural sciences;
- To seek ways and means of attracting new researchers as well as maintaining an improved culture of research comparable to best international practices;
- To increase research output year on year to meet the demands of a developmental state;
- To increase research output year on year
- This Summit could establish a task team to look into ways of co-ordinating the work of national research institutes to maximise aggregate impact.
In conclusion, summits of this nature are indeed critical in enabling us to take stock, to share ideas and to explore new ways of addressing our challenges.
I am therefore encouraged by this initiative to bring together under one roof all the leading lights in the field of scientific research in our country, as well as thought leaders from all other relevant areas.
I wish you all the best in this exercise and guarantee whatever resolutions and recommendations you will come up with, government is there to support you up to the hilt!
I thank you for your kind attention.
