Speech by Belinda Bozzoli on the National Qualifications Framework Amendment Bill, National Assembly, 27 November 2018

The real issue about degrees is not who does or doesn’t have them – it is the matter of fraud: frauds are everywhere in South Africa today and numbers are growing. We’ve had Hlaudi Motsoeneng pretending he had a matric, Pallo Jordan pretending he had a PhD, Danny Jordaan calling himself “Dr”, and the humble job-seeker pretending he has this or that certificate to gain an advantage over a more honest person. We also have numerous so-called “Colleges” all over the place, offering fake degrees or certificates to the naïve and gullible. All this must stop.

But the Government is going the wrong way about it in this Bill. While they quite rightly emphasise the criminality of fraud by setting sentencing guidelines for those found guilty of it, they go overboard in setting rules as to how it can be exposed.

In a nutshell, they seek to centralise, centralise, centralise. They tend to distrust society’s own mechanisms for dealing with these issues, and to believe that big government is the answer to everything. In this case their centralising obsession has led them to decree that all companies, (and there are a quarter of a million of them), all educational institutions and all government departments must by law consult the Department of Higher Education and Training’s SAQA (South African Qualifications Authority) database in order to verify the qualification of every single person they are thinking of appointing to a job or admitting for study. And if the database does not have proof of that qualification they must then ask for further work to be done by the SAQA

This would mean that the numerous agencies which at the moment assist Universities and Companies in verification would be put out of business, and that a distributed existing method of finding the frauds would be replaced by a leviathan of a database containing literally millions of records and a bureaucracy set up to answer queries on a far bigger scale than at present.

It would also mean that the job seeker and the employer, the aspirant student and the University - indeed the entire economy, higher education sector and civil service - would depend upon the capacity of a government body to respond accurately and efficiently to their requests, which will, once the law comes into effect, run into the tens of thousands per year.

We oppose the Bill for four reasons: Firstly: we believe this provision will place an intolerable burden upon SAQA. Secondly, it will be, as Universities South Africa and ABSA have both said in their comments on the Bill, unenforceable. Who will watch every company to see that they obey it? The law will almost certainly be ignored by most companies, and nobody would ever know. Furthermore the Bill places no obligation upon any institution to take cases of fraud to the police, leaving the issue of prosecution completely open.

Thirdly, where the law is obeyed, it will be yet another obstacle to easy and quick employment in times of desperate unemployment and economic stagnation. And fourthly, there is the risk that properly qualified people whose names do not appear on the database purely for bureaucratic reasons risk the stigma of being labelled frauds or of losing out on the offer of a job.

It is extraordinary that at this stage in our economic decline, the governing party should think that this kind of bureaucratic overreach is what is needed. We can do better than this.