But will he be good for science?

South African scientists are greatly concerned about Jacob Zuma becoming President of our country. Is the fear justified? Zuma’s comments about disposing of a viral infection by taking a shower indicated breathtaking ignorance and a stunning lack of judgment: he then used his lack of education as a defense in a rape trial!

South Africa is Africa’s technologically most advanced nation. We deserve a leadership that can take us forward in science and technology, not backwards. Our endowment of universities, research laboratories, biotechnology companies and government’s science council sector must be able to grow, flourish and advance.

The people deserve a leadership that must think about all the ways and means of using science and technology to combat poverty, build houses, lay sanitation pipes, supply clean water, deal with disease, grow food, promote nutrition, dispose of environmental waste, promote the use of recyclable materials and find alternative sources of energy.

The experience with President Thabo Mbeki has been frustrating. He has been good on some issues like astrophysics and awful on others like molecular virology. His support for Minister Manta Tsabalala Msimang compromised the relationship between the Presidency and the medical science community.

Science and Technology Minister Mosibudi Mangena recently received an A grade from a well-known weekly newspaper. He deserves it. He has systematically and significantly grown the budget, influence and impact of science and technology in our society. He approaches his Ministry’s work like a mathematician and we are the better for it.

As the same newspaper points out, his work is hampered by poor matric science and mathematic results and then, having also to work with the Ministry of Health when it comes to biomedical science applications in health care. The relationship between education, health and science is a deeply troubled and inappropriately a political one.

Take high school biology: the curriculum is fine when it comes to descriptive, functional and developmental biology. When it comes to evolutionary biology, teachers can choose between fact and fiction: they can tell the story about what science has generated as fact or the Bible’s story of creation, as both equally credible accounts of life’s origins.

At good schools with competent biology teachers, science will triumph over myth in the minds of the young because they are taught to think. At inferior schools having no or incompetent biology teachers, we know well enough the shameful content of what passes as knowledge. In a modern society this is simply unacceptable.

Our children have the right to know the most modern science of our place in the universe. They cannot be held hostage to this or that politician’s hang-ups, whims or religious inclinations. Do not complain about poor high-school science results when school-going scholars are fed misinformation about how genetic inheritance works.

On the science and health front, look at diabetes: the unusually high incidence of diabetes mellitus among South African Indians is well known. M. Omar and A. Motala wrote in 1996 about the ‘high prevalence in migrant Indians compared with native Indians’ all over the world that they settled (Int. Journal of Diabetes in Dev. Countries v.16 p.45).

One would think that we are investing in finding answers to what is now widely regarded as an epidemic affecting many individuals beyond the Indian community, but no, there is little foundation research at sufficient scale. The combination of hypertension, diabetes and obesity is a recent deadly cocktail found also among urban black Africans.

At the forefront of diabetes biotechnology are not South Africa, but Denmark, France and Germany, the companies Novo Nordisk, Ipsen and Fresenius respectively. If not insulin manufacturing or diabetes care, perhaps then the new regime in molecular diagnostics, but no, we are not there either.

Will Jacob Zuma advance the cause? Yes, if he leaves Ministers like Mangena to continue to do the job with a bigger budget and having a credible cross-departmental partnership with Education, Health, Trade & Industry, not too mention the National Treasury. And yes, if he rapidly becomes a modernist or at least open to it when it comes to policy.

For the grave worry is that his greatest supporters COSATU was the very organization that objected to the inclusion of evolutionary biology in the outcomes based education curriculum. We will continue to pay dearly for our ambivalence towards the framework that has informed all of modern-day biology across the world’s hospitals, laboratories and universities.