Akademia: Who Is Afraid of an Afrikaans University?

Watch: Akademia: Who Is Afraid of an Afrikaans University? (The Riaan Roux Show)

Akademia, the private Afrikaans university, is rising out of the ground east of Pretoria, and on Sunday, 18 October, Daily Investor published the photos. A R3.2 billion campus on 220 hectares, 4 residences, a glass dome 33 metres across, and about 600 workers on site every day. Not 1 cent of it comes from the state.

And yet the loudest reaction to it this year was not applause. Naledi Pandor, a former minister of higher education, said on a podcast that an Afrikaans-medium university “is receiving hundreds of millions of rands” and that “the rest of us remain quiet”. Professor Jonathan Jansen called it a degree in isolation. Carl Niehaus of the EFF called it an Afrikaans fortress built on privilege and said, “I reject it utterly.”

So the questions I keep seeing are these. Who is paying for this campus? And how does a building that takes nothing from the taxpayer become a threat to democracy?

In this video I show you what is being built at Mooiplaats and how far it has come, who is paying the bill, and what the critics leave out: that Afrikaans was removed from the public universities one court case at a time, and that the Constitution itself told this community what to do next. Build your own, at your own expense. That is exactly what is happening. In my view, what the critics object to is a community that no longer needs permission.

What is rising at Mooiplaats

On Sunday, 18 October, Daily Investor published a set of construction photos and a render of Akademia’s new campus. The site is 220 hectares on Boschkop Road at Mooiplaats, east of Pretoria, about 8 km from Solomon Mahlangu Drive. The first sod was turned on 28 November 2025, in the rain, and construction started on 12 January 2026.

The newest milestone is the dome at the centre of the campus. The concrete ring beam was poured on Friday, 9 October, and a week later the team started tensioning the cables that hold it up. Francois van Vuuren, Kanton’s real estate director, said the dome gets an 850 square metre glass roof carrying 20 tonnes of glass, with 280 tonnes of concrete to support, and a span of 23 metres across the front of the amphitheatre stage. The spire will stand 25 metres high and the ring beam is 33 metres across.

MyBroadband visited the site on 23 September and reported about 600 builders and contractors on site every day, rising to about 1 000 at the peak. The residences, the student centre, the library, the cafeteria, the staff offices and the lecture halls were already several floors up, and the concrete work was due to finish this month, October.

Phase 1 costs R1.8 billion and delivers 85% of the academic core: lecture halls, laboratories, research space, 4 residences with 750 beds, a 2 500 square metre student centre and an amphitheatre for 1 500 people. Kanton wants the occupancy certificate from Tshwane in December 2027 and classes in January 2028, with about 3 500 students on campus in the first year. The full plan adds 8 residences with 1 500 beds, sports fields, a library and an agricultural faculty with its own trial farm.

Marthinus Visser, Akademia’s managing director, said in a social media post in July that the contractors had the project a little ahead of schedule and below budget. In September, Henk Schalekamp, Kanton’s managing director, told Maroela Media the project was on time and within budget. That is not a sentence you hear often about a R1.8 billion build in this country.

Who is paying for it

The whole master plan costs R3.2 billion. The developer is Kanton, a property investment company set up to build and hold property for Afrikaans institutions. Kanton calls itself a partnership between culture and capital: investors get a financial return and what it calls a cultural dividend. It built the Sol-Tech college campus in Centurion during Covid, and a 400-bed residence there in 2024, before it took on this one.

The money comes from 3 places. (1) Kanton bought the land in August 2019 for R50 million, when Akademia had 700 online students and no campus at all, and it started the bulk earthworks with its own resources. (2) On 13 July 2026, Kanton registered R1.4 billion in financing from what Schalekamp called a prominent pan-African bank: R900 million for the campus, R450 million to refinance existing debt, and the rest as share capital. (3) The Afrikaans community gives through the Toekomsbouer campaign: once-off gifts, monthly debit orders, bequests, and donations earmarked for a building. A vintage car club auctioned 1 Morris Minor twice and handed over R500 000.

By the end of July 2026, about R470 million had been spent. Nothing in that list is a government grant, a subsidy or a bailout. Daily Investor, MyBroadband and BusinessTech all report the project as privately funded, and Kanton says the same.

There is 1 fair point for the other side, so I will make it. Akademia is a registered non-profit, and donors get a Section 18A certificate, which is a tax deduction. So the tax base carries a small share of every donation, the same way it does for any registered charity in the country. That is the whole extent of the public’s contribution.

That is what Pandor’s “hundreds of millions of rands” is. A bank loan and donations. That is how every private building in this country goes up.

And if you wonder why Daily Investor writes the word university in quotation marks: Akademia is registered and accredited as a private higher education institution, and the law has only allowed a private institution to be designated a university since October 2025. That is paperwork for once the place is built.

What the critics say

Jonathan Jansen started it. On 24 July 2026 he wrote a column in News24 under the headline “A degree in isolation: Afrikaans-exclusive education endangers us all”. He wrote, “An exclusive Afrikaans university denies you those broader educational experiences, because it is not simply the language into which you are inducted, you are also inducted into an ideological narrowness where your own culture, education and belief systems are reinforced rather than challenged.” He also wrote, “Most of the students and lecturers around you are white and Afrikaans-speaking.”

Marthinus Visser answered him on 30 July. He wrote that Akademia works openly from a Christian and classical philosophy of education, and that “intellectual diversity is determined not primarily by the race, language, or culture of the people in a lecture hall”. He wrote, “Diversity is valuable, but it is not the highest goal of a university.”

Then came Naledi Pandor. On 10 August she spoke to Mbuyiseni Ndlozi on the African Renaissance Podcast, and she said:

“You know, the fact that a university that intends to be Afrikaans medium is being built, and is receiving hundreds of millions of rands, is just something, you know. And the only person who comments, Jonathan Jansen. The rest of us were quiet. We’re too complacent with our freedom.”
Naledi Pandor, African Renaissance Podcast, Episode 39, 10 August 2026 (video, 46:14)

The danger she describes is a campus built with donated money and a bank loan. And she said, “If we understand that, then AfriForum won’t have currency.” Flip Buys, the chairperson of the Solidarity Movement, told MyBroadband, “We are not bothered by her remarks. We simply continue building.”

On 21 August, Carl Niehaus of the EFF went further. He said, “AfriForum and Solidarity’s Akademia project is the clearest current expression of that toxicity.” He called it “the construction of a parallel world that apartheid once enforced by law, now pursued with private capital”, and he said, “I will not watch a new generation educated into isolation.” Kallie Kriel of AfriForum said Niehaus has little support.

All 3 objections share 1 feature. Not 1 of them says the degrees are weak, that the money is dirty, or that the law is being broken. The objection is that Afrikaans speakers are building something of their own.

The part they leave out

Afrikaans did not leave the public universities on its own. In March 2016 the University of the Free State dropped Afrikaans as a parallel teaching language and made English the primary medium. Jonathan Jansen was the rector of that university at the time. AfriForum and Solidarity fought the decision to the Constitutional Court, and on 29 December 2017 the court refused to hear the appeal. Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng wrote that the use of Afrikaans had unintentionally become “a facilitator of ethnic or cultural separation and tension”.

In January 2019 the University of Pretoria went English only. Naledi Pandor was the Minister of Higher Education and Training in that year. On 10 October 2019 the Constitutional Court upheld Stellenbosch University’s English-first policy. Only at Unisa did the community win: on 22 September 2021 the court found Unisa’s removal of Afrikaans unconstitutional, and it said it was a misconception that Afrikaans is “the language of whites”, because Afrikaans is spoken mostly by black South Africans.

So the community did what the Constitution says it may do. Section 29(3) gives everyone the right to establish and maintain, at their own expense, independent educational institutions that do not discriminate on the basis of race, are registered with the state, and keep standards no lower than comparable public institutions. It is registered, it is accredited, and it is privately paid for.

Jansen says most of the students are white. Akademia says its doors are open to anyone who wants to study in Afrikaans. And the Constitutional Court settled the premise in the Unisa case: it is a misconception that Afrikaans is the language of whites, because most Afrikaans speakers are black. An Afrikaans university is not a white university. If Jansen wants to argue otherwise, that case is his to make.

In my view, this is the pattern. First the language is removed from the public universities, with the courts’ blessing, and the community is told the public space is for everyone. Then the community builds its own space with its own money, and the same voices call it a fortress. You cannot hold both positions. Either Afrikaans belongs in the public universities, or Afrikaans speakers may build their own. Pandor was the minister in charge of higher education in the year Pretoria’s university went English only, and she now objects to the alternative.

So, who is afraid of an Afrikaans university?

So who is afraid of an Afrikaans university? In my view, not the people who use the public universities. Their campuses lose nothing. The fear is political. A community that funds its own institutions, on time and on budget, stops asking the ANC-led government for anything, and that is a loss of leverage for a government that is used to being asked. Akademia asks nothing from you. The public universities still get your taxes. The dome goes up in 2027 and the first 3 500 students arrive in 2028. That is the answer to the critics, and it needs no permission.

Sources

Daily Investor, ‘Photos of the new R3.2 billion Afrikaans ‘university’ rising from the ground in Pretoria’, 18 October 2026: dailyinvestor.com
Daily Investor, Bianke Neethling, ‘South African developer raises R1.4 billion for new Afrikaans private university campus’, 29 July 2026: dailyinvestor.com
Daily Investor, Bianke Neethling, ‘South Africa’s new R3.2 billion private Afrikaans university being built from scratch in Pretoria’, 6 July 2026: dailyinvestor.com
MyBroadband, Hanno Labuschagne, ‘We visited the construction site of South Africa’s biggest private Afrikaans university campus’, 25 September 2026: mybroadband.co.za
MyBroadband, Hanno Labuschagne, ‘Milestone for R3.2-billion Afrikaans private university construction project’, 26 August 2026: mybroadband.co.za
MyBroadband, Hanno Labuschagne, ‘Photos show site of new Afrikaans university coming to the Western Cape’, 10 October 2026: mybroadband.co.za
Maroela Media, Tania Heyns, ‘Kyk | ‘Ons het net bly glo’: Akademia-kampus verrys’, 13 September 2026: maroelamedia.co.za
Maroela Media, Jhua-Nine Wyrley-Birch, ‘Video | Akademia-kampus omgespit: ‘Ons bou, maar God voorsien’’, 28 November 2025: maroelamedia.co.za
BusinessTech, ‘New R3.2 billion Afrikaans university rising in South Africa (photos)’, 14 September 2026: businesstech.co.za
Akademia, ‘So much more than just bricks and concrete’, 27 March 2026: akademia.ac.za
Akademia, Overview: akademia.ac.za
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Akademia, ‘Veteraanmotorentoesiaste óók passievolle toekomsbouers’: akademia.ac.za
Akademia, Marthinus Visser, ‘Akademia and isolation: What is the debate about?’, 30 July 2026: akademia.ac.za
Kanton Beleggings, portfolio: Akademia: kanton.co.za
Solidarity Movement, Flip Buys, ‘Akademia’s new campus was made possible by a cultural ecosystem’, 14 January 2026: solidaritymovement.co.za
TimesLive, ‘Private institutions get official recognition as universities’, 21 October 2025: timeslive.co.za
it-online, ‘Policy for recognition of SA higher education institutional types implemented’ (Gazette 53515, 17 October 2025): it-online.co.za
African Renaissance Podcast (Thabo Mbeki Foundation), Episode 39, ‘Dr Naledi Pandor: Leadership, Education And South Africa’s Future’, 10 August 2026: youtube.com
PoliticsWeb, ‘Naledi Pandor on liberals, Akademia and UCT’, 12 August 2026: politicsweb.co.za
News Day, ‘ANC stalwart says it is unacceptable to build an Afrikaans university’, 11 August 2026: newsday.co.za
Briefly, Mbalenhle Butale, ‘ANC’s Naledi Pandor slams R3.2 billion Afrikaans university project’, 11 August 2026: briefly.co.za
News24, Jonathan Jansen, ‘A degree in isolation: Afrikaans-exclusive education endangers us all’, 24 July 2026 (premium): news24.com
Toverview, Phakamisa Mayaba, ‘‘Degrees in isolation’: Jonathan Jansen stirs a hornet’s nest’, 1 August 2026: toverview.co.za
JoburgETC, ‘Carl Niehaus calls Akademia an ‘Afrikaans fortress built on privilege’’, 21 August 2026 (citing The Citizen): joburgetc.com
News24, ‘Minorities were lied to in 1994: AfriForum on UFS ConCourt ruling’, 29 December 2017: news24.com
Daily Dispatch, ‘English only, ConCourt instructs UFS’, 30 December 2017: pressreader.com
Daily Maverick, op-ed, ‘Language, knowledge and the Stellenbosch dilemma’, 21 April 2016 (Jansen on the UFS policy, second-hand): dailymaverick.co.za
Wits Vuvuzela, ‘In plain English: Tuks has dropped Afrikaans’, 23 January 2019: witsvuvuzela.com
BusinessTech, ‘Constitutional Court approves Stellenbosch University’s English language policy’, 10 October 2019: businesstech.co.za
TimesLive, ‘ConCourt rules for AfriForum in five-year battle over Afrikaans at Unisa’, 22 September 2021: timeslive.co.za
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, section 29(3).
Wikipedia, Naledi Pandor (Minister of Higher Education and Training, 27 February 2018 to 29 May 2019): en.wikipedia.org
Wikimedia Commons photos: Pandor commons.wikimedia.org).jpg | Jansen commons.wikimedia.org | Niehaus commons.wikimedia.org).jpg | Buys commons.wikimedia.org
OpenStreetMap, Mooiplaats / Boschkop Road: openstreetmap.org
Photos: construction photos and render by Kanton, as published by Daily Investor, 18 October 2026; site photos by Arno Venter/Maroela Media (13 September 2026) and Jhua-Nine Wyrley-Birch/Maroela Media (28 November 2025); satellite frames Google Earth / Airbus via MyBroadband (26 August 2026). Naledi Pandor: U.S. Department of State / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Jonathan Jansen: Discott / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Carl Niehaus: Economic Freedom Fighters / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0. Flip Buys: Blom06 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Map: © OpenStreetMap contributors.