By Johnathan Paoli
President Cyril Ramaphosa and Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Blade Nzimande have paid tribute to late education minister Prof Sibusiso Bengu. saying that he was a trailblazer in education.
“Prof. Bengu was a pioneering leader of our democratic dispensation and administration who led the transformation of education in a democratic government… where deep divisions existed about how far this transformation should go,” Ramaphosa said on Thursday.
Bengu, who was South Africa’s first democratic education minister and then the ambassador to Germany, died earlier this week. He was 90.
Ramaphosa praised the Education Act formulated under Bengu’s leadership as a cornerstone of the liberation project in addressing the legacies of the past.
He thanked the former minister for his patriotic and visionary service in developing the educational landscape.
“His legacy is entrenched through the Sibusiso Bengu Development Programme which seeks to advance the development of historically disadvantaged institutions in higher education as strong, socially embedded institution in a diversified post-school education and training system,” Ramaphosa said.
Nzimande praised Bengu’s role as vice-chancellor of Fort Hare University and playing a leading role in dismantling the apartheid edifice of South Africa’s education sector.
“As part of the Cabinet of president Nelson Mandela, he led the introduction of a number of foundational laws that helped to shape the policy and institutional architecture of South Africa’s school and post-school sector in the decades following the collapse of the apartheid system,” the minister said.
He praised Bengu’s facilitation of the South African Schools Act of 1996 and the policy recommendations of the National Commission on Higher Education that guided government’s efforts to reconstruct and transform the apartheid higher education system.
In addition, Nzimande welcomed Bengu’s role in the transition from the Tertiary Education Fund of South Africa to the now National Students Financial Aid Scheme.
In 2022, Nzimande approached the former minister on behalf of government to accept the renaming of what was then known as the Historically Disadvantaged Institutions Development Grant to be the Sibusiso Bengu Development Programme.
The programme is aimed at decisively redressing the inequalities that have negatively impacted the development and sustainability of institutions and seeks to enable them to respond to cross-cutting imperatives, including decolonisation in higher education, indigenous knowledge systems, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and digitisation.
“In Prof. Bengu our country has lost not only one of its most committed educationists, but also a model public servant and patriot, who even when his own health was waning, continued to serve his country and people with dignity and integrity,” Nzimande said.
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