‘Stop the xenophobia’ — South African researchers sound alarm on eve of election
South Africa’s scientists want the next government to halt declining funding and urge universities to do more to protect international researchers from attacks
South Africans will head to the ballot box on 29 May for a general election at which, for the first time in 30 years, the incumbent African National Congress (ANC) party’s majority is in question. Scientists hope that the next government will stoke South Africa’s faltering economy and reverse its declining trend in research funding. But researchers have also told Nature that they are concerned about the xenophobic rhetoric used during campaigning. Among other things, they worry that these attitudes are making the nation less welcoming to researchers from other African countries.
Scientists voice concern over xenophobia
For years, South Africa has been grappling with violence against people from other African and Asian countries. Universities often look abroad to fill posts, and one out of 10 researchers in South Africa is from another country. Now, scientists are warning that xenophobia is rising on university campuses.
Xenophobia “is targeting our top scientists, particularly [those] from the African continent”, says Jonathan Jansen, an education researcher at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and former president of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF), based in Pretoria.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch cautioned political parties to avoid using xenophobic rhetoric, which could stoke further violence. At an ASSAF round table last year, participants flagged encounters involving verbal and physical hostility towards Black African university staff and students who are not from South Africa.
Even when based in more welcoming academic environments — usually ones where there are already a high number of international researchers — academics from other African countries and their families do not feel welcome on occasions when there are flare-ups of xenophobic rhetoric, says Vukosi Marivate, a computer scientist at the University of Pretoria. “It’s great when you’'re in the halls, when you’'re in the academic bubbles, but as soon as you leave that bubble, you get affected by it,” he says.
Science is not an election issue
South Africa’s three largest political parties — the ANC, the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters — all mention research in their manifestos. Some of the top campaign issues, such as improving the country’s relatively weak economic growth and bettering basic-education outcomes have direct consequences for science. But research and science have not been priorities during campaigning.
“In South Africa politics, the last thing people debate about or talk about is science, right? We’ll be talking at very material levels about what people need who are desperately poor,” says Jansen.
Over the past decade, the country’s economy has been faltering, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita falling from US$8,737 in 2011 to $6,766.50 in 2023. Last year, according to World Bank data, more than 60% of people lived in poverty — defined as those earning below $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle-income countries. One in three adults is unemployed. Frequent power cuts are needed because of a 17-year-long energy crisis.
A mixed report card for research
The ANC has been in power since 1994, when Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa’s liberation struggle against the country’s previous apartheid rule, became its first democratically elected president.
Before the party took power, the majority Black population was overwhelmingly excluded from the 22,000-strong scientific community, according to 1991–92 data. That has since changed.
According to 2021 data, Black South Africans accounted for 43% of researchers; 40% were white, and the gap is continuing to narrow. There are also slightly more women than men in South African academia, but not at senior levels. Black women, the largest demographic group in South Africa, make up only 7% of its professoriate.
The ANC inherited a science system with historical strengths in optical astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, clinical medicine, mining and nuclear technology. Military research and development (R&D) was also a strength.
Public and private spending on R&D has been declining since 2017–18, and sits at under 35 billion rand (US$1.9 billion) for 2020–21, the most recent period for which data are available. That accounts for 0.61% of GDP, below 0.76% in 2017–18 and less than halfway to the government’s target of 1.5% by 2030.
In the short term, the funding situation for South Africa’s researchers is expected to worsen. In February, the government’s Department of Science and Innovation — which supports its main research funder, the National Research Foundation — had its budget slashed by three billion rand over three years, owing to the country’s “serious fiscal constraints”. The value of the rand is continuing to fall against major currencies, making imported equipment and scientific consumables more expensive.
Apartheid's legacy
Several people whom Nature spoke to also lamented academia’s ‘leaky pipeline’ as universities are struggling to attract and retain talent. The problem, they say, starts with basic education.
Four out of five ten-year-olds in South African schools are unable to understand what they read, according to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.
Keeping young people in the education system is also a challenge. A survey by Statistics South Africa, the national statistics agency, found that, in 2021, nearly 10% of 17-year-olds had dropped out of school. According to some estimates, between 50% and 60% of students drop out of university after the end of the first year of an undergraduate course.
Researchers show resilience …
In spite of these setbacks, the country’s researchers are “punching above their weight”, says Himla Soodyall, executive officer at the ASSAF.
South Africa has a number of landmark scientific achievements. In 2021, a team of researchers in South Africa and Botswana alerted the world to the new SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron. South Africa is a hub for palaeoanthropology: its researchers have unveiled two new hominin species, Australopithecus sediba in 2010, and Homo naledi in 2015.
Since 2018, its 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope has been capturing the Universe in unprecedented detail, including the chaotic region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The country is one of the hosts of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. MeerKAT will eventually form the heart of the SKA’s mid-frequency array.
Moreover, the number of South African research publications continue to grow. In 2021, its researchers published 27,052 journal articles indexed in Web of Science. This is an increase from 3,693 in 2000. The country now ranks 30th globally in terms of the number of scientific papers produced annually. Countries with similar levels of output include Portugal, Mexico and Malaysia. Egypt is the continent’s leading producer of research, with 32,283 articles in 2021.
“If you look at the publications of South African researchers relative to other international researchers where the GDP is much higher, I think we are doing reasonably well,” says Soodyall.
… and must collaborate to survive
Overall, however, South Africa’s research community is shrinking. There are about 34,000 researchers, down from a peak of 36,200 in 2017–18. Partly as a result, and to remain competitive, the country’s scientists are collaborating with researchers in richer countries and universities are seeking talent from other countries on the continent.
“In some fields, such as health sciences, astronomy and high-energy physics, foreign collaboration now typically comprises more than 90% [of papers],” according to the 2023 South African Science, Technology & Innovation Indicators Report by the National Advisory Council on Innovation. In addition to the SKA, the country is also a collaborator with CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.
“We are increasingly relying on international collaborations,” says physicist Azwinndini Muronga, dean of science at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. “If one was to cut that lifeline, we probably would be in a very dire situation.”
Jansen is also concerned that rising attacks could have a similar effect on international recruitment. “Colleagues [from other African countries] tell us outright: ‘We don't see a long term future for ourselves here’, given this creeping xenophobia on campuses as well as in the broader community.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01547-x
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Sarah Wild
