Mosibudi Mangena is one cool customer. He did not mention he had been involved in a hair-raising, five-car pile-up shortly before our meeting. Explaining this deliberate oversight, he says it's about focusing on the job at hand. Focus, he says, is key to the successful juggling of his multiple responsibilities: minister of science & technology; president of Azapo; parliamentarian; husband; and father of two grown-up children.
Mangena has held the science & technology portfolio for nine months now. In that time he has overseen its split from arts & culture and has worked on the reconfiguration of the science sector.
And he has seen to it that the big research institutions, such as the CSIR, have begun to re-examine their funding models. "We want them to be doing more basic, strategic research." Most of this is a continuation of the strategy implemented by the previous minister, Ben Ngubane.
It is one that Mangena fully supports. "The department has a higher profile in the government system than ever before, and this will get higher still. We will raise the profile and pace and extent of SA's involvement in science and technology," he says in his quiet way.
Mangena is at home within the department. His passion for science was instilled as a schoolboy growing up in the Limpopo province. "Science taught me to question everything, to interrogate things until you find their essence; to recognise that accepted reality may be wrong."
This quest for answers led him on parallel paths. One culminated in an MSc degree in applied mathematics from Unisa. The other, stemming from his belief that all people have a right to dignity, to self-determination, to make and shape their own history, led him on a personal journey to black consciousness and political activism. "Remember, black consciousness is defined as a way of life, as an attitude of the mind," he says.
Today Mangena is Azapo's parliamentary representative.
He has an unswerving belief in the role science and technology can play in eradicating lingering feelings of inferiority and alienation that afflict some black people. "Through the deliberate building of an unequal society, through repetition and practice, there are many blacks who do not think science is for them. We have no black role models. With a robust science system, role modelling will be easier and more black people will enter the system."
SA's shortage of skilled technologists and scientists - of all sorts, but of women and blacks in particular - is a problem that worries him greatly. "The Dinaledi programme, which has created 102 specialist schools for maths and science, is showing signs of progress." But, he says, "The schools are in a terrible mess. How can you build science labs and fill them with equipment when the school has no running water?"
The human resources challenge will occupy much of his and his department's attention this year.
The solution requires multiple interventions. One such intervention will result in Mangena establishing a pact with business, government and the public science sector. "To develop skills and raise our research outputs we need to make it easier to move human resources around the system. This means we must break down barriers between the public science sector and the business sector.
"For instance, we should allow the academics who move into government or business to teach part-time. In that way scarce resources are not lost to the science system when they leave. Our director-general [Rob Adam] is a physicist - yet he is lost as a scientist." Similarly, young academics leave universities for private business. Business should allow them to work in universities and teach. "It creates dynamic relationships where both sides can benefit."
Mangena does, at times, seem to despair at the lack of interest that some in business and government show towards research and science and technology in general.
"The big thing is the reorientation of the entire psyche. Science & technology does not whip up passion - people do not see the importance of people in white dust-coats. But they will. Next year we will start feeling the pinch of the energy shortage."
It seems others in government are beginning to hear him. Mangena admits that government is considering tax incentives for companies that invest in research in SA.
Perhaps one day, beating the science drum won't require as much effort. Then he may be free to pick up the pen and add another book to the three he's already had published.
