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26 May 2006

Madame Speaker
Honourable Members
Members of Science Councils and Entities
Vice Chancellors
Presidents and CEOs of our Councils
Officials from the Department and Science Centres
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

Our five-year old granddaughter moved in with us recently, and she keeps us on our toes in more ways than one.

The other day she asked me: “Grandpa, why is your beard black and white?” She then asked me if she could touch it and I said, “Yes”. She ran her fingers over the beard, and exclaimed: “Yoo, it’s rough!”

She offered to make it nicer, and I asked how she planned to do that, and she replied, “I’ll just pull it”. Needless to say, the offer was declined.

She and many others of our young, at different levels of their development, will inherit this country, its wealth and institutions from us. We currently hold South Africa in trust for them.

The other day I met a young businessman who spent six months in Malaysia undergoing some training, and he said he could not help noticing how industrious the Malaysians were. He said that one day he asked some of them why they worked so hard. In reply, they said: “We do it for our children; we are building a better Malaysia for our children.

Those are exactly our sentiments! We are doing our best to build a better country for our children, so that even those who are still fascinated by black and white beard will find, when the time comes, that they have opportunities to thrive.

In the 2004/05 financial year, my department spent 99,9% of its budget, and received a clean and unqualified audit from the Auditor-General. In the financial year ended in March this year, we also managed to spend 99,84% of our budget, and are anticipating another clean audit. This is a demonstration of the hard work and discipline on the part of officials in my department. They try hard to stick scrupulously to plans and budgets, and the Deputy Minister and I are immensely proud of them. We hope they will continue the good work.
We have moved the department’s headquarters to the new state-of-the-art building within the Scientia Complex, which also houses the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). We would like to thank National Treasury, the Department of Public Works and the CSIR for their support and contribution to make the move possible. We are now part of an extended science and technology precinct that includes, among others, the South African National Biodiversity Institute, the Innovation Hub, and the Council for Geosciences. We hope this will provide a pleasant working environment for personnel in my department, and that in the near future, will please those who presently still believe they can make scruffy black and white beard better, by simply pulling it.

Speed is required to accelerate our competitiveness as a nation, and alleviate the plight of the needy and marginalised.

Technological and scientific innovations lie at the heart of our hopes because they can act as accelerators for South Africa’s economic growth. The more we can innovate, and the faster we can do it, the richer our lives can be, and the sooner will the goals of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa – AsgiSA – be realised.

Over millennia, and particularly in today’s world, speed and the capacity to innovate have been and are what count. Those who cannot develop the necessary acceleration, run the grave risk of being left permanently behind. And there are no prizes for those who choose not to compete.

In economic terms, our intended “speed” for economic growth of at least 6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is to a great degree dependant on innovation – the introduction of new products and services, and the mastery of key technologies by our society.

My department’s view of our present and future activities can be summed up in one word: partnerships. Science, in many of its manifestations, can become self-centred to the point of obsession. As a country we cannot afford the indulgence of seeing science merely as a love for exploration and discovery. Business, government and civil society share a vision for a successful future, and we must share all the material and human resources that can turn that vision into a reality.

The use and development of technology must address the needs and aspirations of our people. South Africa’s immediate need is to attain technological self-reliance, tailored to bring about swift and tangible improvement in the living conditions of all our people. Our scientists and technologists must always be alert to even the smallest developments that can better and make affordable South Africa’s materials, services and work processes.

My department is responsible for ensuring that South Africa maintains and strengthens its competitiveness by increasing our investment in relevant research and development (R&D0 initiatives. Our intermediate goal is to dedicate 1% of our gross domestic product to research and development by 2008. Indications are that national expenditure on research and development, which had declined by 1994 to 0,69% of GDP, has now begun to pick up significantly. In 2003/04, South Africa’s public and private expenditure on research and development was 0,81% of GDP, and it is anticipated that the 2004/05 survey will show a further increase, putting us on course to reach the 1% target by 2008.

Over the Medium Term Expenditure Framework, Government funding for research and development to my department has increased by R1,2 billion. This increase largely funds core science and technology infrastructure, such as the Centre for High Performance Computing, nanotechnology centres, astronomy and space science.

Attractive tax incentives to boost R&D are now being put in place. I’m sure you will recall that when my colleague, the Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, addressed the house earlier this year, he announced the creation of a more favourable regime for arresting the depreciation of R&D capital, and an increase in the deduction allowable for current R&D expenditure from 100 to 150%.

These are indeed welcome developments to a very positive conclusion of Phase 1 of my department’s efforts in this area of work. The tax incentives effectively reduce the real cost of a company’s investment in R&D, thus stimulating the investment climate by rewarding inventiveness, which in turn raises returns and bolsters the economy as a whole. And when companies invest in research and development, they create work for more scientists, engineers and technology experts. Phase 2, which begins this year, involves my department’s working with the South African Revenue Services to ensure that industry understands how to access the incentives, and encourage more small and medium-sized businesses to invest in R&D.

Our ageing national equipment infrastructure is rapidly becoming obsolete, and our ability to timeously and routinely replace out-of-date equipment has been a cause for considerable concern.

We cannot work at the cutting edge without constantly sharpening our tools. Our attempts to obtain a more substantial budget for replacing the ageing equipment infrastructure have generated a commitment of R211 million to higher education institutions and science councils over the Medium Term Expenditure Framework.

South Africa’s bilateral and multilateral science and technology initiatives are also experiencing spirited growth. This positive atmosphere is largely due to our resolve to keep South Africa and the continent abreast of international developments. By 2001/02, international funding of R&D in South Africa had grown to 6% from near zero in 1994, and by 2003/04, foreign funding stood at 10% of total R&D funding. International breakthroughs include South Africa’s increased participation in the European Union’s sixth framework programme and in the implementation of Africa’s Consolidated Science and Technology Plan of Action, in which South Africa has played a leading role.

In our sub-region, South Africa is playing a key role in developing a vibrant science and technology platform. We now have a Southern African Development Community Ministers’ Council on Science and Technology, which is leading in the development of a SADC protocol. This protocol will guide the implementation of the sub-regional science and technology plan.

In line with our theme of speed, one of our flagship projects is the development of a high-speed broadband network in the region. This is the UbuntuNet project, which we will link through the South African National Research Network to Europe via the Geant connection, giving South Africa and its research community a high-speed network. The first phase of implementing this network has begun with a total funding of R178 million over the Medium Term Expenditure Framework.

I am pleased to report that South Africa continues to register remarkable progress in the field of astronomy and space sciences. The astronomers of the world have discovered our top-notch resources, and the country is increasingly seen as a strategic provider and developer of next generation ground-based observation facilities. This should not be seen as an indulgence, but an imperative.

Working in these areas provides an excellent long-term platform that we hope to use as a training ground for our young scientists in the areas of mathematical and computational modelling. Even those who are still curious about black and white beard, will find in the future, that we did lay a good foundation in science and technology for them.,

South Africa is also poised to be a leader in African space and astronomy programmes. We are establishing a South African Space Agency to unite the work of several institutions and harness these capacities to leverage billions of rands through which we hope to boost the economy and create more jobs. We plan to obtain cabinet approval to formalise this new partnership later in the year.

These initiatives follow a number of recent high-profile and crucially important developments, which include:

1. The construction of the most powerful optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, the South African Large Telescope, located at Sutherland in the Northern Cape, which was officially opened by the President in November last year. The telescope is now fully operational.
2. Establishing the high-energy stereoscopic system observatory in Namibia – the most powerful cosmic ray instrument in the world.
3. Bidding to host the $1,5 billion Square Kilometre Array radio telescope – the largest in the world – also in the Northern Cape. If successful, this will translate into foreign investment of R9 billion with a spin-off of major contracts for engineering companies in South Africa.
4. Building the Karoo Array Telescope in the Northern Cape. The Karoo Array Telescope will become operational in 2009 and is a partnership between my Department and the Northern Cape provincial government, operated through a dedicated innovation team.
5. We will launch South Africa’s second low-earth orbiting satellite this year. This is a R26 million project that will again expand our satellite-engineering capabilities. This programme is managed by Stellenbosch University as part of a joint effort between the university, the DST, SunSpace and the CSIR Satellite Application Centre. We are doing this at a time when both Algeria and Nigeria have procured such micro-satellites and are discussing with us a programme to develop a cluster of satellites called the African Resource Management Constellation. The vision is to develop and build in Africa satellites which can assist in disaster prediction and mitigation, projection of crop yields, tracking urban and rural development, and a host of other applications. Other industrial applications are likely to spin off from this process.
6. Signing bilateral agreements with the Russian Space Agency, which has expressed an interest in launching satellites from South Africa.
7. Signing partnerships and co-operation agreements with the European Space Agency, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, among others.

We have also drafted a new policy on intellectual property rights from publicly funded research. This was approved by Cabinet in January for public consultation, and is intended to ensure that we derive maximum benefit from the R2,8 billion that government invests annually in research at universities and science councils. The policy aims to unify the myriad approaches that the South African institutions have taken to protect their researchers’ ideas, and to share the benefits derived there from.

While patenting by publicly funded institutions has grown worldwide in the past decade, this has not happened in South Africa, partly because of the lack of a coherent policy and well-defined incentives and obligations.

Public workshops have been undertaken in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town to elicit the views of researchers, industry, universities and science councils. Once this process has been completed, the policy will be refined, and legislation drafted.

In collaboration with National Treasury, my department has structured a framework for reporting on science and technology expenditure across government. This framework includes a survey instrument with internationally benchmarked definitions. It will allow science and technology expenditure reporting by all government departments to be integrated into Estimates of National Expenditure reports, after which the department will be able to analyse such expenditure and give a comprehensive view of the trends, intent and scope of science and technology spending.

Appropriately, the Department has been given the lead role in developing promising and emerging areas of science and technology. We also support other government departments to make informed decisions involving the sciences, innovation and technological applications to support their service delivery initiatives.

Among the pressing national challenges we face is the alarmingly small human resource pool in science and technology. In this regard we note with relief that the 2005 State of Skills in South Africa released by the Department of Labour shows that the vast majority (more than 95%) of engineers and medical scientists find employment after graduation within six months. This finding is a key pointer of how we can deal with the growing challenge of graduate unemployment. My department is conducting a follow-up survey of the science graduates who were not included in the survey.

We continue to face a basic problem both in the quantity and quality of entrants to higher education programmes in the sciences and engineering. We also find that those who succeed at the undergraduate level seldom enter post-graduate research. We have to bring larger numbers of younger researchers into the system, and ensure that they develop viable research careers. This is a key focus of my department.

We intend to work more closely with the Department of Education in building the capacity of our institutions to produce more scientists and engineers, and improve the attractiveness of academic careers, and increase the time spent by young academics on research.

Having highlighted the challenges in human capital development, I would like to address some of my department’s interventions in this regard:

1. Through the Research Chairs Programme we intend to produce 210 new and highly relevant research professorships by 2010. These research chairs will underpin the renewal of higher education research founded on our national needs. This is intended to spawn a substantial increase in the number of new entrants into the National System of Innovation in order to develop sufficient capacity to increase our output in the critical science and technology areas identified by the National Research and Development Strategy.

2. The Department has also established a common value system for the Centres of Excellence. Six centres were launched in 2004 with a budget of R25 million, and they will be funded for a 10-year cycle. A seventh centre, the South African Centre for Epidemiology, Modelling and Analysis, was recently established. It will focus on research and human capital development in mathematical modelling of HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis on the African continent.

3. We are confident that these measures, including the Research Post-Doctoral Fellowships Programme, will begin to increase the number of highly qualified South Africans in critical areas of science and technology. However, we need new efforts to ensure success.

4. We have initiated Phase 2 of the special internship programme in science and technology at our research councils and the Tshumisano Technology Stations.

5. The Youth into Science Strategy will be presented to Cabinet this year. We hope it will attract dedicated resources to complement the expansion of the Dinaledi Programme by providing career guidance and extending the Network of Science Centres Programme. The implementation of the Strategy will also provide an effective tool for tracking young people with potential, and introducing new measures to alleviate the financial burden on successful undergraduate students to enable them to pursue post-graduate research on a full-time basis.

Embedded in all these programmes are measures to ensure that the participation of Blacks and women in science and technology is intensified.

From the technology sector perspective, the decisions we are required to make in the field of nanotechnology are interesting and typical of the complexities characterising the entire field of science and technology.

We have now published our Nanotechnology Strategy. Nanotechnology, and its building block, nano-science, promise to produce smaller, cheaper, lighter and faster devices with greater functionality that use fewer raw materials and consume less energy. Nanotechnology will drive the business revolution into the 21st century. We are determined to ensure South Africa joins the international competitiveness race that Nanotech expertise promises to provide. Possible areas in which nanotechnology can find application include:
1. development of “intelligent” drugs that allow for slow release of medicine into the body for the treatment of diseases such as TB or HIV
2. programmable nano-machines that can clean up waste dumps, or even human arteries
3. nanosensors that can measure changes in the environment, such as moisture levels and temperatures.

In the area of information and communication technology, we will establish the Centre for High Performance Computing. This national resource will support a diverse base of researchers and scientists, and facilitate the collaboration and multidisciplinary approach needed to solve today's complex computational problems. Its research objectives are to provide high-end computing and computing expertise for all research in South Africa in natural science, medicine, engineering and social sciences. Its first major capacity will be located at the University of Cape Town.

The centre will function as a national innovation platform and deliver a significant return on investment for the country by harnessing the application of high-performance computing for positive social impact, particularly on research on major infectious diseases, such as HIV and AIDS, and promoting advanced manufacturing technology.

The Centre for High Performance Computing and the South African Research Network, which I mentioned earlier, form the backbone of an emerging cyber-infrastructure in South Africa. This infrastructure will support research initiated in other elements of our science and technology infrastructure, such as the Square Kilometre Array, the National Bioinformatics Network and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

The biotechnology sector is also attracting a fast-growing portion of R&D funding. Funding for genetic engineering grew by 360% between 2002 and 2004. Investment growth in related fields – biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, microbiology, genetic engineering, and biotechnology - exceeded 46%. South Africa has a very high level of commitment to biotechnology, underpinned by a vibrant research sector.

In this regard, we are also committed to developing biotechnology on a continental level. On 5 August 2005, the CSIR, representing South Africa, initiated a southern regional hub of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) African Biosciences Initiative. Research related to agriculture, human and animal health, environment and industry is being prioritised.

Between 1996 and 2000, South Africa produced 222 scientific articles on genetics and 459 scientific articles on microbiology. By comparison with other African countries, Kenya came closest to this level of research output with 53 and 173 scientific articles, respectively. In terms of patents, South Africa appears in the list of countries with more than 100 European Patent Office applications during 2000. We are the only African country on the list, and 3% of our patent applications are related to biotechnology. Singapore leads the list, with 12% of its applications specifically relating to biotechnology.

Biotechnology is a very promising field of activity, and our successes in this area have encouraged us to bid to host the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. The South African candidate host institution for the centre is the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town, which is co-ordinating South Africa’s efforts in this network. Our national bid will be submitted next week, on 31 May. This network will provide a unique environment for research and training of African scientists on issues that have a direct impact on the well-being of the African population.

In line with the critical importance of energy supply, my department has devoted major attention to securing the future energy mix required to support South Africa’s long-term economic and social development. We have partnered with the Department of Minerals and Energy in scoping the National Biodiesel Initiative and the establishment and programming of the South African National Energy Research Institute.

My department has also taken the lead in the development of the Hydrogen Economy initiative, which will harness aspects of the SASOL technology, pebble bed modular reactor technology and fuel cell technology to create a globally competitive energy mix. The Hydrogen Economy will be supported by the development of a fuel cell technology platform that contributes to the beneficiation of platinum, while positioning South Africa to develop cutting-edge research.

We have been working to direct South Africa’s technological know-how into real solutions for the plight of the poor. In the area of essential oils, we have had some success in establishing technologies for small farmers to beneficiate their products and increase their output to achieve commercial scales. The development of widely applicable “platform” technologies, through which, for example, we might reduce the cost of housing, or strengthen health care delivery, remains our priority.

Speeding up the development of social-impact technologies, and forming suitable partnerships for sustainability and service delivery, is a key focus. We need new institutional capacity in the research councils to deliver on these special partnerships.

I am pleased to announce that the second biennial International Science, Innovation & Technology Exhibition (INSITE) will be hosted at the Sandton Convention Centre from 24 - 27 September 2006. INSITE 2006 will showcase our country’s achievements in science and technology, and provide a platform for our international partners to tantalise us with theirs.

The deployment of Dr Rob Adam, after six and a half years as Director-General of Science and Technology, to the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa, has left a huge gap within the department, which will take some time to fill. However, it is pleasing to note that Dr Adam has not been lost to us, and we hope to continue to work with him to develop our national system of innovation.

We heartily welcome Dr Philemon Mphathi Mjwara as the new Director-General. Dr Mjwara is a distinguished scientist and former member of the executive of the CSIR. As head of the CSIR National Laser Centre, he was instrumental in establishing the African Laser Centre. I am confident that Dr Mjwara possesses the right mix of skills and expertise to speed up our responses to national imperatives.

In closing, we wish to reiterate that speed gained equals time gained. To live in the past is to deny the existence of the future. We challenge all young people to join in the great struggle for careers in science, engineering and technology. Your parents laid the foundations for a great nation in this land. Now it is up to you to use your minds, your skills and your talents to make us a winning nation. Fortunately, there are no speeding fines on the road to progress and prosperity. We can go as fast as we like. This includes those who still marvel at black and white beard.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
26 May 2006