Dr Blade Nzimande, the Minister of Higher Education and Training, who is also the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, has recently made a number of very provocative statements:
- The week before last he reportedly told members of Nehawu - the National Health and Education Workers Union - that "we need to give higher education a revolutionary content, and not a liberal content."
- He also warned against "human rights fundamentalism" and said that it - together with academic freedom - were used by the "elite" classes to undermine the transformation of the higher education sector.
- He said that there were no capitalist ideas that can address the problems that we have - and claimed that ‘capitalist ideas' had caused the current global economic crisis.
- More recently Dr Nzimande threatened ‘war' against those who opposed the ANC's proposed National Health Insurance scheme. He said that "the capitalist classes have already started a huge campaign in the media to try to discredit this system, and we want to say to them as communists today, war unto you."
As the Minister of Higher Education and Training Dr Nzimande should know that the essence of excellent university education is academic freedom to access, research, teach and express knowledge in any sphere of enquiry. Students and academics should also be free to be revolutionary (or reactionary) if they wish but they should never abandon the quintessentially liberal commitment to academic freedom.
Our Constitution is a liberal document. It requires ministers - through their ministerial oath - to uphold academic freedom, along with all the other rights and freedoms in the Bill of Rights. It is, no doubt, the insistence on such rights that Dr Nzimande regards as "human rights fundamentalism". However, fundamental rights and freedoms are paramount in our Constitution - and trump even the critically important goal of transformation.
Dr Nzimande goes on to attack capitalism and to blame it for the current economic crisis. If he is referring to the kind of undiluted greed, stupidity, short-sightedness and irresponsibility that lie at the root of the crisis, he might have a point. However, equally culpable were the US government's wild anti-market interventions that rashly encouraged and guaranteed the toxic subprime mortgages that precipitated the crisis. Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is very critical of the failures in the market system that contributed to the crisis. However he also expressed his concern that "as they see more clearly the flaws in America's economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions" (precisely as Dr Nzimande has now done).
Stiglitz feared that such reactions would lead to the return of "a variety of forms of excessive market intervention" and that "these will fail". He pointed out that, in the final analysis, "there has never been a successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets."
According to Dr Nzimande, there are no capitalist ideas that can help us address our current economic challenges. How about the quintessential capitalist ideas of competition, free markets, cost-effectiveness and hard work? Properly applied, they will generate wealth just as they have done throughout the ages.