ANC to split education ministry

Cape Town - The ANC government that is installed after the election will overhaul the education ministry, splitting it into two - possibly three - separate ministries under different ministers.

Aside from allowing one minister to focus solely on the schooling system, this would also allow specialised focus on the tertiary education institutions which will include reversing former education minister Kader Asmal's mergers of key institutions.

This has been confirmed by ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe who says that having one ministry of education makes for an unwieldy situation that does not allow proper focus and attention from the minister in charge.

"We can't go on with business as usual in education," Mantashe told a gathering of business people in Cape Town during a meeting of the ANC's somewhat controversial fundraising initiative, the Progressive Business Forum.

While Minister of Education Naledi Pandor is likely to remain in charge of one of the ministries, South African Communist Party general-secretary Blade Nzimande is tipped to be added as a minister overseeing one of the education ministries in ANC President Jacob Zuma's cabinet.

The ANC is expected to unveil further details of this refurbishment to the department of education next week. But Mantashe said that it was critical to get the system working so that matriculants were ready to enter tertiary education institutions and so that tertiary education institutions were churning out the quantity and quality of skill that the economy needed.

Mantashe said that universities in predominantly black areas should be the very ones churning out black engineers and doctors. He noted that 15 years after the advent of democracy, not one former black university had an engineering faculty and that Medunsa University's output of doctors had dropped following former Minister of Education Kader Asmal's plan of merging key universities.

- Fin24.com