Pandor calls privately funded Afrikaans university a danger to South Africa
Naledi Pandor, Chair of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Chancellor of Nelson Mandela University, has described the construction of a privately funded Afrikaans medium university as a danger South Africa should not ignore. The institution she is describing, Akademia, takes no government funding or subsidies. Her remarks came on the African Renaissance podcast with Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, where she also argued that people who once held power now retain it through intermediaries, and criticised what she called conservative liberalism. She never named the university, and she raised it herself in a stretch of conversation about international funding and international politics.
What she said
Speaking on the African Renaissance podcast with Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Pandor said the fact that a university intending to be Afrikaans medium is being built, backed by what has been reported as R3 billion in private funding, is a danger that should not be ignored. She said the rest of the country has stayed quiet about it, and called that silence too complacent with freedom.
She did not name the institution. She did not need to. Akademia, built by the Solidarity Movement outside Pretoria, is the only new Afrikaans university under construction in South Africa in more than 3 decades.
Akademia has confirmed that it receives no government funding or subsidies. The campus is paid for by the movement and its supporters.
Why the university exists
To understand the remark, it helps to go back about 10 years.
From 2015 into 2016, one historically Afrikaans university after another moved away from teaching in Afrikaans. Stellenbosch, Pretoria, the Free State and Unisa all shifted their language policies during that period.
Gelyke Kanse took Stellenbosch to court over its 2016 policy. In 2019 the Constitutional Court ruled that the policy was constitutionally justified.
Akademia was founded in 2011, as that shift was already underway. The community that lost access to Afrikaans instruction at public institutions went and funded its own.
Who speaks Afrikaans
Census figures complicate the framing of an Afrikaans university as a project of retained white power.
Roughly 56% of Afrikaans home language speakers in South Africa are coloured. Around 40% are white. The remainder are black and Indian South Africans. More coloured South Africans speak Afrikaans at home than white South Africans do.
The state’s own record
When Sol Plaatje University opened in 2013, then Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande described it as the first new university South Africa had built since 1994.
That means for 19 years of democracy, the state built no new university, in any language, anywhere in the country.
The Department of Higher Education and Training also maintains a public register of private higher education institutions. There are well over 100 of them operating in South Africa, funded privately and teaching in English. None has been described in these terms.
The unnamed threat
Pandor went further than the university itself. She claimed that people who once held power find new ways to keep it, including recruiting entrepreneurs to act as their tools, working against transformation while everyone believes those entrepreneurs are working toward it.
She named no entrepreneur and gave no example.
Conservative liberalism
She then turned to what she called conservative liberalism, saying people who hold that view have a negative opinion of the ability of Africans to manage a democracy. She said conservative liberals push the idea that black South Africans are tribal, divided and unable to manage development or an economy, and that this is why people holding capital refuse to invest it. That capital, she said, was gained illicitly through colonialism and imperial dominance.
She said that if South Africans understood this properly, AfriForum would have no currency left.
Set against 32 years of ANC governance and the state of the economy and the education system over that period, the question of whether investor hesitation is about race or about the governing party’s own record is a fair one to put.
The sequence in the full recording
The clips circulating from the podcast leave out where the Akademia comment sits in the conversation.
Ndlozi did not ask her about Akademia. She raised it herself, immediately after being asked about AfriForum’s campaign spending in the United States, and immediately after telling him that the Nelson Mandela Foundation lost funding once it took its position on Gaza, and that the University of Cape Town lost over R250 million in donor funding after passing a resolution on the same subject. The R250 million figure is her own account on the podcast.
An Afrikaans university in Pretoria surfaced in the middle of a discussion about international funding and international politics.
Her own record
In 2007, as Minister of Education, Pandor said she strongly supported Afrikaans and other indigenous languages as media of instruction. She holds a Master’s degree in linguistics from Stellenbosch.
The position
The public universities closed the Afrikaans door, lawfully and with the Constitutional Court’s endorsement. The community paid its own way and built a new one. That is now being described as a danger.
No minister, no foundation chair and no chancellor holds the constitutional authority to decide which political viewpoint keeps its currency in South Africa.
