Hon Chairperson, the MF fully supports the hon Minister in his plans to give financial assistance to tertiary education. I don't think that anybody with ability and talent should be denied the opportunity of advancing in higher education.
The MF would like to know what the relationship is between bursaries that are to be offered by higher education institutions and learners in rural and disadvantaged institutions. How are they being attracted? Surely, it cannot be on the basis of qualifications and the best symbols. At the same time, what we require is a tremendous amount of discipline on the part of students as well as student organisations. We also have to look at how we retain skills in rural areas, otherwise rural areas will never be developed. You cannot get a single teacher to go to the rural areas, and this is the responsibility of higher education.
What is the role of teacher training? What programmes do they have? When is teacher training supposed to start? In KwaZulu-Natal, for example, we have 14 000 unqualified people, but there is no systematic training in higher education to produce teachers.
I want to make an appeal that education knows no nationality, no race, no colour and no barriers; and that, after 16 years, the admissions policy moves away from being based on racial quotas, because we are losing a lot of highly educated people from South Africa. Recently, there was a meeting of all MBA graduates in Paris who have left this country. The purpose of the meeting was to get them to return.
Adult basic education and training falls within the higher education sphere. The conditions of service for those educators are supposed to be dealt with and developed there. Whilst the responsibility for funding, housing, and determining their conditions of service resides with higher education, their actual contract of employment falls under basic education, which places them in a grey area. You don't know who is responsible for them, so clarity must be sought. The right to education includes the right to adult basic education, and there is neglect in this area.
The issue of further education and training has to be clarified. Is it going to reside under basic education or higher education? This is because the bargaining council has been established within the sector. Its future has to be clarified, because it plays a critical role in the development of skills and, if it is not correctly located, then we have a huge problem.
The MF is concerned that the education system is not linked to economic and industrial growth, and that begins to explain the huge problem of unemployment, even amongst graduates. That's because there is no proper alignment of the educational structure.
The MF suggests that more tertiary, technical and medical institutions be established in provinces. I suggest that the hon Minister take a leaf out of India's book, as it has produced 400 million professional, middle-class people from a massive injection of public and private capital into tertiary education.
The MF will support the Budget Vote. [Time expired.] [Applause.]