Opinion article by Pikolomzi Qaba, PhD Fellow, Higher Education & Human Development Research Group (HEHD), University of the Free State

On 24 June, Parliament’s portfolio committee on higher education met the Department of Higher Education and Training to discuss who are teaching in South Africa’s lecture halls and where they come from.

The numbers, once you look at the data, are unremarkable. DHET’s own figures put South Africans at 92.26% of the higher education workforce and foreign nationals at 7.74%, most of them (82.89%) teaching and researching rather than sitting behind admin desks. That is nowhere close to the 77% figure circulating on social media and in some committee exchanges, a gap Universities South Africa (USAf) has flagged in its own submissions.

But the numbers were never the point. Beneath it sits an older question Professor Melanie Walker and colleagues in the Higher Education and Human Development Research Group at the University of the Free State (UFS) have long asked: what does it mean for a university to belong to the people it serves?

American philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach offers a way in. For Nussbaum, development is not just what a person has, income, infrastructure, access, but what they are genuinely free to do and be: their capability to reason, to affiliate, to shape the world around them. Walker and South African educational researcher Elaine Unterhalter extended this into higher education, arguing that a university’s true measure is not enrolment or graduation rates but whether it expands the real freedoms of those who pass through it, because who sits in the seminar room shapes what students believe is possible to study.

Seen this way, the parliamentary question stops being about migration and becomes one of epistemic justice: who defines the problems worth researching, and whose lived experience shapes counts as relevant knowledge. A scholar who has never queued at Home Affairs or watched a municipality fumble its equitable share transfer can still teach brilliantly, but something is lost when most people interpreting South Africa’s problems have never lived them.

The same logic holds for race. White academics still occupied 67% of professor posts nationally in 2018, against 19% for black African academics, a share merely doubled from eight percent since 2000. A senior professor gatekeeps publication and decides who joins a research niche, so a narrow demographic among those training the next generation slows a representative academy’s growth.

None of this is only principle. The Employment Equity Act obliges universities to set numerical targets favouring black people, women and people with disabilities, and section 8 of the Employment Services Act requires employers to confirm no suitably qualified South African is available before hiring a foreign national. Yet MPs heard that Critical Skills List applicants can score full marks and bypass that test, lecturer posts included. The law protects local candidates; the question is whether it is enforced.

There is a second risk, though. Rhodes University’s Centre for Postgraduate Studies has warned that xenophobic framing shrinks universities’ intellectual horizons, and a Daily Maverick piece argued that retreating into narrow nationalism abandons South Africa’s promise to be a continental knowledge hub. USAf argues that competitive universities recruit internationally as standard practice. Both can be true: South Africa needs more of its own doctoral graduates in permanent posts, and to stay part of global scholarship. Only 48.8% of academic staff held a doctorate in 2021, against a 75% target for 2030, and the country produced fewer than 3,700 doctoral graduates in 2022, against a National Development Plan target above 5,000. International scholars fill gaps in scarce disciplines and supervisory capacity; and cutting that pipeline would only leave the gaps unfilled.

Representation and internationalisation are not rivals. Both are, in Nussbaum’s terms, conversion factors for the same goal: knowledge production that answers to the society that funds and needs it. Growing “our own timber”, in Mamphela Ramphele’s phrase, means funding doctoral pipelines and fixing the workload conditions pushing young researchers out of research, not treating every foreign colleague as a threat.