The Solidarity Movement spent twenty years building what the state could not
Akademia now runs independently with five faculties, a satellite campus and a study trust, which is what a real alternative looks like.
Sign up for my Substack daily AI newsletter https://johanosteyn.substack.com
Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanosteyn/
South Africa certified about 615,000 National Senior Certificate passes in 2024, roughly 337,000 of them bachelor passes, and had approximately 200,000 first-year places across the entire higher education system for the 2025 intake. The University of Johannesburg alone received well over half a million applications for about 11,000 first-year spaces. Those are the public universities' own figures, not an outsider's complaint. A country that qualifies more young people for university than it can seat has a provision problem, and provision problems are solved by building. East of Pretoria, a community has spent two decades doing precisely that, and is now putting up a campus with its own money while the argument is about whether it should be allowed to continue without it.
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
The public system has not grown into the gap. Enrolment has stood at roughly 1.1 million for a decade, growing at between zero and 1.6% a year, while private providers grew at 6% to 7% and now teach over 350,000 students, close to a third of the cohort. Participation among 18- to 24-year-olds sits near 22% against a 30% national target.
Akademia exists because a door closed in the public universities and the courts declined to reopen it. In Gelyke Kanse, in October 2019, the Constitutional Court upheld Stellenbosch's language policy, finding that maintaining the previous level of Afrikaans tuition was not reasonably practicable. The judgment did not prohibit Afrikaans instruction. It declined to compel it, and declining was enough.
INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS
What follows is the part the argument misses. This was never a building project. Writing in January 2026, Solidarity Movement chairman Flip Buys described an ecosystem built over two decades, whose visible end is the campus: an institution his movement founded that now operates autonomously, open to all Afrikaans students, with five faculties, a campus in Paarl, and a study trust supporting roughly 1,200 students with more than R70 million at a 99% repayment rate. The first phase is costed at about R1.8 billion and opens in 2028. Akademia is registered under the Higher Education Act as a private higher education institution, number 2011/HE08/005.
Consider what that trust means. Students at private institutions are barred from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme despite studying programmes the state itself accredited. This community funds the public universities through its taxes, receives nothing for its own students, and pays again to subsidise them.
I have previously written about this in The AI Education Race Has Started and South Africa Has Not Left the Building, where the argument was that waiting for national policy is itself a decision. Akademia is that argument executed in concrete.
The strongest objection deserves stating. A society that answers institutional failure by building parallel institutions risks ending with parallel societies, and language-defined institutions accelerate that. It is serious, and it has an answer. Fragmentation is caused by institutions that fail, not by communities responding when they do. Nobody loses a seat when a private campus adds several thousand. The remedy for division is a state that can admit its own matriculants.
IMPLICATIONS
The message to government is one concrete reform. Make the bursary follow the student. Young people at accredited private institutions are barred from state funding while studying programmes the state accredits, at institutions it registered, often because it could not seat them. That punishes students for a shortfall which is not theirs. The state can barely fund the students it has, so portability should begin with those who would have qualified for aid had a public place existed. The department should also stop planning as though a third of the system did not exist, since it cannot reach its own participation target counting only the providers it funds.
The message to the public universities is friendlier than expected. They did not author the lottery. Universities South Africa notes that institutions draw around 60% of their grant income from teaching input subsidies, so a university taking half a million applications for 11,000 places is operating a funding formula rather than an admissions policy. They should say so far more loudly, and articulate properly with private providers: when a third of students study outside the public system, credit transfer and postgraduate access are welfare questions, not competitive ones.
Section 29(3) belongs to every community, and the sequence is available to anyone: trust, faculties and accreditation first, over twenty years, and the campus last.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
The argument about Akademia has been conducted in symbolism, while the institution answered in arithmetic. One side produced opinion pieces. The other produced five faculties, two campuses, a bursary trust that gets repaid, and room for several thousand students who would otherwise join those qualifying for places that do not exist. A sector whose institutions converge on one mission and one language will produce communities that build their own. Institutions that want to remain the default have to be places communities do not need to leave.
Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence's impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan's work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net
Comments