Higher Education and the Work of Nation-Building - Rhodes University, Makhanda

 Higher Education and the Work of Nation-Building
A Response at Rhodes University, Makhanda
1 September 2026
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and Chairman of the Archbishop Thabo Makgoba Development Trust

Vice-Chancellor, 
Deputy Vice-Chancellors, 
the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Professor Owen Skae, 
Faculty, 
Students, 
Other distinguished guests:

Thank you for asking me to join this panel today. It is a great privilege to have been invited to respond to Professor Mohale’s outstanding address, and also to be a fellow panellist with him and Judge Madlanga. Not only are the three of us fellow university Chancellors, but Bonang and I share the experience of being residents at Glyn Thomas House in the grounds of Baragwanath Hospital when it was the res to which Wits sent black students in the 1980s.
    Allow me also to greet also the Bishop of Grahamstown and his clergy, the Rector of the College of the Transfiguration, the students and staff, and my fellow parishioners in the Diocese of Grahamstown. 
     I am honoured to be standing on this campus, under a motto I have always admired: “Where Leaders Learn”. It is a fitting motto for the question put to us this evening: what is the role of higher education in nation-building, today, in 2026, more than three decades into our democracy; and at a moment when so many of the certainties of that democracy feel, once again, up for debate? As someone who once worked in academia, but who has been out of it full-time for many years, I hope I can contribute as one who is intensely concerned about today’s topic, using what I have learned as a leader in other fields for my input.
    Let me respond to Prof Mohale in two ways: one by using my own recent learning to underline the importance of universities helping to promote the transformation that our nation desperately needs with practical action; and the other by pointing to the kind of values I believe a university education needs to embody.

Practical ways of building a nation

Two weeks ago, Dr Phil Mjwara, South Africa’s representative at UNESCO and former Director-General of our Department of Science and Technology, gave us a thumbnail sketch at Fort Hare of how our universities have developed. He identified three waves: the first shaped by the discovery of gold and the demands of mining; the second influenced by the nexus between academia and the growth of state-backed industries; and the third, which we are in now, is one in which universities must aim for inclusion, sustainable regional development and engagement with the communities we serve.
    The sharpest point that Dr Mjwara made was this: South Africa is not short of knowledge, or of engineers, or of people who can build things. What it lacks is the follow-through that turns a working prototype into an industry. He gave three examples that should trouble every university: a fully-built South African electric vehicle that was never brought to market; a small modular nuclear reactor that could not attract the capital to promote commercially; and a place in a European aerospace manufacturing programme that South Africa simply abandoned. In every case, the engineers who built these things did not disappear — they left the country to pursue projects elsewhere in the world, taking with them value this country paid to create.
    That is not a research failure. It is a nation-building failure — the very failure this evening’s theme asks us to confront. A case study that Dr Mjwara referred to, drawn from a satellite-monitoring and land-use programme he has helped run with rural communities in the Mbhashe municipality not far from here, is a glimpse of what the third wave looks like when it works: local farmers, university researchers and a state space agency mapping grazing land and crop viability together, indigenous knowledge sitting alongside satellite data, with the explicit aim of moving subsistence maize and pineapple farming toward an export economy. It is a small programme. But it is exactly the kind of unglamorous, patient, jointly-owned work the New Struggle actually requires — and exactly the kind of work that dies if a university tries to do it alone, without a state and an industry willing to walk the last mile with it.

The new economy
Looking to the future, we need to develop not only technical competence in traditional fields, but we have to prepare students for the new, 21st century economy. 
    To quote Advocate Norman Arendse, speaking in a recent address on the Higher Education Act, our universities were designed for an era in which “qualifications were relatively stable, information travelled slowly and the boundary between education and employment was more clearly defined.” However, he says, “We now inhabit an economy shaped by artificial intelligence, platform technologies, cybersecurity threats, automation, climate transition, digital inequality and rapidly changing patterns of employment.” That means we need to educate people “not merely for their first job, but for a working life in which the nature of work itself may repeatedly change.”

Moral leadership
I now turn to the issue of values.
    Fourteen years ago, at my inauguration as Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, I argued that education must aim beyond the mere accumulation of information toward something closer to wisdom. We need to develop the discernment that allows a graduate to engage constructively with the world. Such an education must include the promotion of moral leadership.
    I have spoken often, in other places, of what I call the New Struggle — the long, unglamorous work of building equality of opportunity that must follow, and is harder than, the struggle for political liberation. Equality of opportunity is not won in a moment. It is built, generation upon generation, brick upon brick, largely in classrooms and lecture halls and laboratories and libraries. Every student who walks through Drostdy Gate carrying a scholarship that a poor household could never otherwise have afforded is a brick laid in the New Struggle. Every research programme that turns its gaze toward Makhanda’s own broken municipal water systems, rather than only toward publishable papers in the Global North, is nation-building. Every academic who chooses to stay and teach here, on this soil, rather than take the well-worn road north or overseas, is nation-building.
    Unless a university education includes a component promoting moral leadership, we are in danger of producing graduates whose values the underlying objective of making as much money as they can without regard to the interests of the community. 

Learning Ubuntu, Not Just Reciting It
For a nation is not simply an economy or a set of institutions; it is a moral community, a shared story people are willing to tell about who they are to one another. And that is where universities carry a responsibility too few of them still take seriously. 
    We South Africans are fond of invoking Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — I am because we are. But Ubuntu is not a slogan; it is a discipline of formation. An education that trains its graduates only in individual competitive achievement, that measures worth by rank and salary, is quietly teaching the opposite of Ubuntu. A country cannot be built by people, however brilliant, who feel no obligation beyond themselves.

Courageous Conversation
Universities, and this one especially, have another related vocation in nation-building: to remain places where courageous conversations are still possible. We are living through a time in which public discourse increasingly rewards certainty and punishes complexity; in which people retreat into information environments that confirm what they already believe; in which disagreement is treated as betrayal rather than as the raw material of a shared future. I have long drawn on the practice of indaba — not as a decorative African metaphor, but as an actual epistemology: the discipline of sitting in a circle until every voice, including the one you find hardest to hear, has been genuinely heard, not merely tolerated.
    A university that trains people to sit in the discomfort of real disagreement — about land, about race, about history, about the names on its own gates and buildings — and to keep talking anyway, is doing nation-building of the deepest kind. The debates that have surrounded this university’s own name are not a distraction from its academic mission. Argued honestly and without either bitterness or defensiveness, they are itself a curriculum in nation-building — a live seminar in how a country reckons with an inherited, compromised past without being paralysed by it.

Generosity as a Theology of Nationhood
I want to add one more theological note, because I cannot leave it out of any serious reflection I offer. I have written about a Theology of Generosity, rooted in the  conviction that the deepest truths of a common life are not secured by what we withhold from one another out of scarcity and fear, but by what we are willing to give away.
    Nation-building, on this account, is fundamentally an economy of generosity. A university takes part in it not only through bursaries and outreach programmes, worthy as those are, but through the posture it teaches its graduates to carry into the world: are they being formed to hoard advantage, or to share it? Are they being formed to see a rural school in the Eastern Cape, an informal settlement on this town’s edge, a neighbouring struggling institution, as someone else’s problem — or as their own unfinished business?
    And it is worth remembering, finally, that a university is not one thing — not only its Vice-Chancellor, not only its Council. It is all of us: every scholar, every student, every graduate, choosing, in ways large and small, whether to close that distance or merely to describe it. Faith sees further. Justice reaches further still. So, I have come to believe, does the university — when it remembers what it is truly for.
Thank you.

*  *  *  *  *