January 2024 9 Leading Article • Where are you going to get the teaching staff from? • You can’t establish a Veterinary faculty in the “Bundus.” • We don’t want to lower standards. • Why do you need a second faculty? • The existing single Veterinary Faculty caters for the country’s needs adequately. Having been in the middle of several attempts to initiate a second Veterinary school in the country for years, one gets the feeling that either the “naysayers” have had an upper hand in this area, or we are stuck in our “History” and refusing to move on despite developments like AI currently in our faces. I remember in my previous article on this subject in this Newsletter, I said that the second Faculty proposal is experiencing a “KODAK MOMENT”, basically highlighting the fact that if we don’t become more innovative, we will be overtaken by circumstances the way Kodak was trumped by digital photography. There are several compelling reasons why the creation of a second Faculty in the country is really” a no-brainer.”: • High demand for veterinarians: South Africa has a shortage of veterinarians, especially in rural areas where most of the livestock and wildlife are located. According to the South African Veterinary Council, the current vet-to-client ratio is far below the international standard of one veterinarian per 10,000 animals. The State Veterinary Services in the country have relied mainly on veterinarians from Zimbabwe to gap-stop this glaring challenge, especially in the rural provinces like the Eastern Cape, Limpopo, and Northern Cape. Fast-forward to now, many of these expatriate colleagues have had their services terminated because Home Affairs is not renewing their work permits. This affects the quality and availability of veterinary services and the health and welfare of animals and humans. • Limited capacity and resources of the only veterinary faculty: The only veterinary faculty in South Africa is the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Pretoria. The faculty can only admit about 200 students per year and has a limited number of staff and facilities to cater for the diverse and complex needs of the current veterinary profession. The faculty also faces challenges such as ageing infrastructure, budget constraints and staffing. The steps this faculty has taken post-1994 to reinvent itself has done very little to change its standing in the country or perception about it from various quarters of the community in South Africa. Diversifying the teaching body, increasing the size of the intake, and opening accessibility to all community groups in South Africa as well from other countries, has really done very little to address the current challenges in this area. • Benefits of having more diversity and competition in the field: Having a second veterinary faculty in South Africa would increase the diversity and representation of the veterinary profession, which is currently dominated by one population group, regardless of gender. A second veterinary faculty would also create more opportunities for collaboration and innovation, as well as healthy competition and quality improvement, among the veterinary institutions and stakeholders. Further, the cultural and social relevance and responsiveness of the profession to the needs and expectations of society would be enhanced. Endeavour to attract and retain qualified and motivated students and staff, especially from disadvantaged and rural backgrounds. To this end, we should cast our nets wide and stop recycling ourselves in the narrow belief that good veterinarians cannot be trained from elsewhere or from somebody else. Up to now, Onderstepoort is seen as“THE VET SCHOOL” by most South Africans, and rightly so, because it is the only one in the country but unfortunately had limited pre-1994 access to collaboration with other veterinary schools in the world (other than in UK or Australia) because of the then prevailing politics. We must acknowledge the accolades this Institution has notched up over the years, without a doubt, but it’s high time we moved on and looked at veterinary training in the country in the bigger picture and context. Collaborations with other veterinary training faculties both in Africa and Europe ( East included) and the Americas should no longer be “Taboo” and should enrich our professional product, “blinkers off”. A second faculty in the country will exactly achieve this with little effort. How would a second faculty be set up: • This could be done by establishing a second veterinary faculty, as proposed by some experts, or by creating satellite campuses or partnerships with other existing universities or colleges in the country and elsewhere. This could for example obviate the challenges in infrastructure or teaching staff. In terms of infrastructure, taking the example of a faculty in the Eastern Cape would be to make use of the already established medical and agricultural facilities at Rhodes, Nelson Mandela, and Walter Sisulu Universities. All pre-clinical subjects which need laboratories could be done at one of these institutions leaving the clinicals to be done at Fort Hare which has an abundance of animals and facilities in the commercial and rural setups. By the way, Eastern Cape has currently very successful twinning programmes with various countries including several Veterinary schools in Germany which are ready to support a second faculty in the province. The opportunity here >>> 10
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