Scarcity is changing the transformation debate

South Africa’s debate over foreign academics is often framed as a contest for scarce university posts. Professor Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School, asks a more consequential question: what academic capability will today’s appointment decisions leave to the next generation?

His starting point is the pressure created by prolonged economic stagnation. South Africa entered the second half of 2026 with an official unemployment rate of 33.6%. That figure does not establish whether a foreign professor has displaced a South African candidate. It does, however, describe the economy in which graduates and aspiring academics compete for too few professional opportunities. Universities have expanded qualifications and aspirations, while the economy has not produced opportunities at a comparable rate.

In that setting, transformation can become a contest over who should receive existing opportunities rather than a programme for expanding the country’s capacity to create more of them. A structural problem of slow growth and weak labour absorption is then recast as a distributional dispute focused on the identity of the person who secures a post.

Localisation and development answer different questions

Professor Sekhampu draws a distinction between localisation and development. Localisation determines who occupies the opportunities that already exist. Development determines how many opportunities can exist in future. A country may improve representation within a fixed number of posts while making little progress in building the academic system that could create more posts, stronger research programmes and a larger pool of qualified scholars.

This does not remove the need for accountability. Foreign appointments can involve genuine displacement, and universities should justify an international appointment when suitable domestic expertise is available. Public universities also have a duty to develop South African academics rather than depend indefinitely on imported expertise.

South Africa already funds the New Generation of Academics Programme, the Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme, the University Staff Doctoral Programme and the Future Professors Programme. The question is therefore not whether the country is developing domestic academic capacity. It is how that investment can be strengthened by expertise already available in the global academic system.

One appointment can create capability beyond one post

Universities make the distinction between localisation and development especially important because academics do more than fill jobs. A foreign professor may supervise South African scholars, develop research capacity and connect colleagues and students to international academic networks. Candidates compete for one appointment, but the expertise brought into that position can extend well beyond the person who holds it.

Transformation should therefore be judged by two linked outcomes: who holds academic positions now, and whether universities are expanding the domestic capability required to fill more of those positions later. If representation moves faster than the academic system’s ability to reproduce expertise, the immediate gain may carry delayed costs. Those costs can appear as weaker doctoral supervision, reduced research capacity and fewer opportunities for younger academics to acquire specialised knowledge.

The expertise not recruited is difficult to measure

Accountability pulls in only one direction. A university can be called on today to justify appointing a foreign professor, but it is almost never asked to account for the expertise it chose not to bring in. The first decision has a visible beneficiary and a ready political audience. The cost of the second is spread thinly across future students, research programmes and academics who will never know what capability was missing.

The timelines are just as lopsided. Localising an appointment changes the picture of representation immediately and visibly. Building academic capability can take a generation of postgraduate training, supervision, publication and institutional learning. Political pressure rewards what can be shown now, while a university’s developmental duty calls for investment that will only pay off years later.

Professor Sekhampu warns that closer political scrutiny is already making universities more cautious about recruiting internationally. No formal instruction is needed. Selection committees can see the questions coming, and institutions quickly learn which decisions are easier to defend, even when the policy itself has not changed.

The price of that caution may only show up much later, when the expertise not recruited today becomes missing supervision, weaker research capacity or academic networks that were never built. By then, the cost will fall on people who had no part in the original appointment decision.

The deeper risk is institutional. If universities decide on the basis of what a tense political climate will tolerate, rather than the capabilities they need to build, they risk reproducing the very stagnation they are meant to help the country escape. The challenge, then, is to pursue representation and capacity building at the same time, and to judge every decision by what it does for both access today and expertise tomorrow.