In his address on 15 October 2015 to the Higher Education Transformation Summit in Durban, Deputy President Ramaphosa made the following statement:

“Though we have made a decisive shift from the fragmented, inefficient and inequitable higher education system of the apartheid era, we still feel its effects. Had the apartheid rulers not been so thorough, so methodical, so malevolent in the denial of education to the black majority, then South Africa would today be on a completely different developmental trajectory. We would be a more equitable nation, a more prosperous nation. We would have an advanced, diversified, more inclusive economy.”