Chairperson, hon members, most of us accept with satisfaction that our country has reached a consensus on the crucial importance of research, development and innovation for our nation. We have reached this consensus because we don't want to remain a developing country forever. We have aspirations to become a developed country one day. We know that those countries that dominate others - economically, militarily and in other areas of human endeavour - are those countries that have been able to harness knowledge to develop new technologies, products and services.
We want to modernise our economy and our society to move away from relying too heavily on raw materials and natural resources such as minerals, which, in any case, will be exhausted one day. We want to produce goods and services containing our own intellectual property with which we can trade with the rest of the world. To do this we need strong research, development and innovation arrangements at our universities.
For that research arrangement to be meaningful we need to do the following. Firstly, we need to build and maintain strong research infrastructure at our universities. Secondly, we need to keep our senior researchers in the country through the provision of challenging research projects. As we know, by virtue of the fact that they are knowledge workers, they tend to have itchy feet and a roving eye for opportunities. If opportunities do not exist here, they will seek them elsewhere. Thirdly, we need to use the senior researchers to train and mentor young researchers and academics to ensure that we have a dependable pipeline to develop a skilled and knowledgeable population.
Fourthly, we need to have a strong system of registering, protecting and exploiting our intellectual property generated through research at our institutions. That would mean, inter alia, strengthening intellectual property management offices at our universities. Fifthly, we need to align the research work at universities with research activities at science councils, state-owned enterprises and the private sector so that we have a less fragmented South African research, development and innovation system.
Sixthly, we need to identify research priorities for our country, the region or the developing world to which we would direct an important portion of our resources. This could, for example, be diseases prevalent in our country or region such as malaria, HIV or TB, or areas of advantage in renewables such as solar energy or wind energy.
Seventhly, we need to fund research as adequately as possible and on a sustained basis. The last point cannot be overemphasised. We will not be able to create the desired knowledge economy if we are given to short-term and start-stop activities in research, development and innovation. We need focus and staying power or stamina if we are to turn our knowledge into more "Sasols" in our country.
The scaling down of work at the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, PBMR, after investments of around R8 billion, and at a time when nuclear energy is globally reasserting itself, is just the kind of thing we should not have done. One is almost certain that the nuclear scientists and engineers who worked on the PBMR will be snapped up by the rest of the world, leaving us poorer. A few years down the line we could find ourselves importing pebble bed modular reactors and related services from the rest of the world at great cost. This kind of leakage in intellectual property, expertise and human resources should not be mildly countenanced.
Our country is certainly not where it should or can be in investments, in research and in development. As the Minister is aware, South Africa spends around 0,95% of GDP on research, development and innovation. We need to have this at at least 1% of GDP, and then push it up to 2%. Institutions of higher learning are critical in this regard.
We look to the Minister to keep research, development and innovation robust at our universities through sufficient funding and political support. We are glad that in his speech the Minister asserted that his Ministry will continue on this path. Perhaps as a quid pro quo, these institutions should undertake to teach the Minister how to use this clock. Whether or not they will succeed is another matter. [Laughter.] We can only pray for them. Thank you very much.