As director-general of science and technology in South Africa during the period when the major programmes reviewed in your News Feature were initiated (Nature 463, 726–728; 2010), I strongly believe that we should still be championing big science projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope.
When the African National Congress government began reshaping South African science after apartheid, we asked ourselves what resources we had that might attract good scientists from abroad. One is the night sky: astronomers from the Northern Hemisphere need access to observations from the Southern Hemisphere (unless they study neutrinos, which go straight through the Earth). Southern Africa has excellent viewing sites, in all three wavelength bands detectable from Earth.
This sparked an ambitious programme that resulted in the construction of the High Energy Stereoscopic System telescope in Namibia (γ-rays) and the Southern African Large Telescope (visible light), and we have now made our pitch for the SKA (radio waves). The aim is to become the premier global astronomy hub.
If the SKA and the MeerKAT telescope project were to be eliminated, then the money being poured into them would not be diverted to other scientific ventures — funding doesn't work like that. The Department of Science and Technology's budget would simply decrease by 14%.
You take former president Thabo Mbeki to task for apparently having failed to achieve his own vision of an African science, but Mbeki had a different vision: that Africa should become world class.
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See also South Africa: telescopes raise the nation's sights.
See also South Africa: big science should stay on the agenda.
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Adam, R. South Africa: aiming to be premier global astronomy hub. Nature 464, 30 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/464030b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/464030b
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