South Africa’s growing scrutiny of foreign academics may deliver quicker gains in representation while weakening the expertise needed to develop the country’s next generation of scholars.
Localisation determines who occupies existing opportunities. Development determines how many opportunities can exist. South Africa risks advancing the first while neglecting the second.
Universities are questioned about the foreign academics they appoint—but rarely about the vital expertise they choose not to recruit.
When universities make appointments according to what the political climate will tolerate, rather than the capabilities they need, they begin reproducing the country’s stagnation.
Prof. Joseph Sekhampu warns that rationing scarce academic opportunities may provide immediate political rewards while imposing costs on future students, researchers and universities.
Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School.
By Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School.
Something is beginning to change in the way South Africa thinks about opportunity. It is visible in arguments over jobs, immigration and procurement, and now in the growing scrutiny of foreign academics at public universities. These debates arise in different institutions but increasingly revolve around who should occupy positions for which too many people are competing.
Persistent economic stagnation is changing the political meaning of transformation. Because opportunities are not expanding fast enough, transformation is increasingly becoming a contest over whose claim should take priority within the opportunities that already exist. The debate over foreign academics reveals a deeper contradiction: localisation can redistribute positions to South Africans while weakening the expertise required to produce the South African academics who should occupy more of them in future.
South Africa entered the second half of 2026 with an official unemployment rate of 33.6%. This figure cannot tell us whether a foreign professor displaced a South African candidate, but it describes the wider economy in which competition for professional positions occurs. Universities have expanded qualifications and aspirations, while the economy has struggled to generate comparable opportunities.
A foreign academic makes this structural problem politically visible because slow growth and weak labour absorption offer no identifiable competitor to someone seeking an academic career. An economic problem can consequently acquire a distributional interpretation, shifting attention away from why opportunities are limited and towards who receives them.
However, foreign appointments can involve genuine displacement, and universities should justify international appointments where suitable domestic expertise exists. Public universities also have an obligation to develop South African academics rather than rely indefinitely on imported expertise.
South Africa does not start from nothing in this regard. The national government already funds programmes such as the New Generation of Academics Programme, the Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme, the University Staff Doctoral Programme and the Future Professors Programme to develop the domestic academic pipeline. The relevant question is therefore not whether South African academic capacity is being developed, but how that investment can be strengthened by expertise already available within the global academic system.
Localisation determines who occupies existing opportunities, while development determines how many opportunities can exist. A country can make significant progress on the first while making almost none on the second.
Universities complicate this distinction because academics do more than occupy jobs. A foreign professor can train South African scholars, build research capacity and connect them to international networks. Candidates may compete for one post, but the expertise brought into that position can create capability far beyond it. Transformation should therefore be judged not only by who holds academic positions today, but also by whether universities are expanding the domestic capability needed to fill them tomorrow.
Localisation becomes self-defeating when representation advances faster than the academic system can reproduce expertise. More South Africans may occupy academic positions today, but the costs may emerge later through weaker doctoral supervision, diminished research capacity and fewer opportunities for younger academics to acquire specialised expertise.
This creates an asymmetry in institutional accountability. A university can be questioned today for appointing a foreign professor, while no comparable moment of accountability exists for the expertise it decides not to recruit. The first decision has an identifiable beneficiary and an immediate political constituency, while the consequences of the second are dispersed among future students, research programmes and academics who may never know what capability was absent.
The time horizons are equally unequal. Localising an appointment produces an immediate and measurable change in representation, while building academic capability can require a generation of postgraduate training, supervision, publication and institutional learning. Political pressure therefore favours outcomes that can be demonstrated now, even when a university’s developmental obligations require investments whose beneficiaries will become visible only years later.
Greater political scrutiny has already made international recruitment a more cautious institutional choice. Universities do not need to be instructed to become more conservative in their appointments. Selection committees anticipate the questions that will follow, and institutions learn which decisions are easier to defend. Formal policy can remain unchanged while the incentives beneath it shift. The consequences will emerge later, when the expertise not recruited today manifests as missing supervision, diminished research capacity and absent academic networks tomorrow.
The more consequential change may occur inside the university itself. When institutions begin making decisions according to what a constrained political climate can accommodate, rather than the capabilities they need to build, stagnation acquires an institutional life of its own. Universities then cease merely to endure the limitations of the country and begin to reproduce them.
