YUSEF WAGHID

HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY DISCOURSE(S) IN SOUTH AFRICA

Procedural or Substantive Democracy?

INTRODUCTION Prior to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, the political and educational systems in the country were racially determined. The tricameral parliament, comprising of the House of Assembly (representing the White population), House of Representatives (representing the Coloured population) and House of Delegates (representing the Indian population), which was instituted in 1983 divided the education system into 19 separately controlled departments, with Whites, Coloureds, Indians and Blacks being controlled by mutually exclusive education departments with their own budgets. In general, the segregated education departments were designed to favour the minority White population. Basically, Blacks were denied the franchise, whereas the other racial groups had representation in government, but on the basis of inequality and discrimination. The terms ‘Blacks’, ‘Coloureds’ and ‘Indians’ are used for those racial groups in South African society that are other than ‘White’. These terms are still being used today to distinguish between ‘Whites’ favoured by the racist apartheid system and those ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Blacks’ discriminated against. Over the past decade higher education in South Africa has undergone a significant shift from an apartheid-dominated system to one which incorporates principles of liberal democracy and social justice. This essay attempts to map some of the pertinent conceptual and structural changes which occurred during this period in relation to frameworks of deliberative democracy as articulated by Seyla Benhabib (1996) and Eamonn Callan (1997). I shall firstly show how the Education White Paper 3 (1997) and the National Plan for Higher Education (2001) emerged; secondly, I shall explain how the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) were established; and thirdly, I shall describe how the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) and the National Review of Teacher Education were constituted – all salient moments in the higher education policy discourse as the government endeavoured to break with the apartheid past and move towards the achievement of substantive democracy. In 1994 the higher education sector consisted of 36 public higher education institutions. The size and shape of the higher education system posed significant challenges to the state in 1994 and debates on the appropriate configuration of the higher education system for South Africa ensued. The period 1999-2002 was

M. Simons, M. Olssen and M.A. Peters (eds.), Re-Reading Education Policies: A Handbook Studying the Policy Agenda of the 21st Century, 495–514. © 2009 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. WAGHID dominated by intense debate on mergers, incorporations and closures of higher education institutions. By 2002 the Minister gazetted the newly configured landscape, which would reduce the number of institutions from 36 to 22 over a three-year period from 2002-2005. Higher education policy transformation in South Africa can be demarcated into three pertinent phases: 1990-1994 – symbolic policy making with an agreement on values, goals and principles (this was the period just before the first democratic elections in 1994, when the African National Congress was still the government in the making and already beginning a process of national policy investigation); 1995-1998 – formalisation of the legislative and policy framework with the establishment of appropriate governance structures for higher education (during this period the newly elected government instituted major policy changes); and 1999 to the present – accelerated policy making of a distributive, redistributive and material nature (this period was characterised by the implementation of the policy changes in the country) (Badat, 2005, pp.18-20). Kraak (2001, pp.86-87) offers a similar account of higher education policy trans- formation according to five overlapping phases: 1989-1994: the phase prior to taking of power; 1994-1997: the legislative era; 1997-1998: the policy imple- mentation phase; 1999-2000: a vacillating state, the era of doubt and retraction; and 2001: the National Plan. For purposes of this essay I shall firstly describe the events leading up to the formulation and implementation of both the Education White Paper 3 (1997) and the National Plan for Higher Education (2001).

HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY TRANSFORMATION AS A DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE: FROM THE EDUCATION WHITE PAPER 3 TO THE NATIONAL PLAN FOR HIGHER EDUCATION Radical education policy changes South Africa’s higher education policy discourse took its first substantive steps with the appointment of the National Commission of Higher Education (NCHE) in 1995 after the publication of the first White Paper on Education and Training (WPET, 1995). The Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD), aligned with the ruling African National Congress (ANC), produced the NCHE’s policy brief to come up with a document that satisfied a plurality of competing interests, including those of apartheid bureaucrats whose jobs had been secured as part of the negotiated political settlement and who arguably represented White minority interests (Moja & Hayward, 2000, p. 338). Prior to 1994 the government favoured the position of Whites and one of the decisions taken at the Kempton Park negotiations between the ANC and the then ruling National Party was that Whites’ economic interests, including capital, would be protected under a new government. The substantive NCHE process – constituted by representatives from varying political, cultural, academic and economic spheres, who had the self-determining, conscious and political will-formation – was characterised by argumentation and deliberative consensus-seeking, drawing considerably from international expertise and practical experience in higher education restructuring.

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