GCU Transnet Graduation Ceremony
Esselenpark
6thDecember 2016
- Vice Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, Professor Pamela Gillies
- Representing the CEO of the Institution of Railway Operators, Mr Piers Connor
- Professor Daneel Van Lill, Executive Dean, Faculty of Management, University of Johannesburg
- Members of the Transnet Board of Directors
- Members of the Transnet Group Leadership Team
- Graduands, families of the graduands
- Members of the media
- and distinguished guests
Just down the road from Transnet’s offices in the Carlton Centre is an enduring testament to Scottish ingenuity and engineering skill.
Housed in the Sci-Bono science museum is a giant turbine from the early part of the twentieth century. The inscription still proudly says “Made in Edinburgh”.I myself, as a proud holder in Gold, of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award can recall with romantic achievement what Edinburgh might hold for our youth and the future of our country where see ourselves in the service of our communities and fellow humanity.
The above inscription at the museum recalls a legacy of a time whengreat feats of engineering drove a nation forward.
Scotland has –since the industrial revolution – produced a remarkable range of innovators, scientists and thinkers who have left an indelible mark on our world.
What has been astonishing about the Scottish contribution to global knowledge has been the sheer practicality and longevity of these inventions.
There were men like Thomas Telford, whose engineering marvels in the bridges that he built are still standing today.
Robert Stevenson, acivil engineer and famed designer and builder of lighthouseshad his lighthouse templates used for South Africa’s equally tempestuous coastline – for example,Slangkop Point lighthouse near Kommetjie.
For those of you who don’t speak Afrikaans, Slangkop means Snake Head! Nearer to the topic of today, George Stephenson was a pioneering railway engineer and inventor of the Rocket, the most famous early railway locomotive! He was born in 1781 near Newcastle_upon_ Tyne. He worked at a number of Coalminer in England no Scotland and gained a reputation for managing primitive steam engines. The first public railway at Stockton and Darlington was overseen and operated by him in 1825, and his invention, the rocket locomotive won a prize in 1829 for achieving a record speed of 36 miles per hour while pulling heavy loads over long distances.
We share our mutual histories in other ways and the ties between Scotland and South Africa run deep.
Missionaries from the GlasgowMissionary Societyestablished the Lovedale Institutein the Eastern Cape. The iconic South African institution, the University of Fort Hare, was also founded by Scottish missionaries. It wasour continent’s leading university for Africans - a beacon of hope on our benighted continent.
Illustrious alumni from these two venerable institutions include Nelson Mandela, Ellen Kuzwayo, Prof Mangaliso Sobukwe, Chris Hani, Mwalimu Nyerere, Desmond Tutu, Govan Mbeki and Steven Bantu Biko.
Both Lovedale and Fort Hare were closed by the apartheid government in the 1950s.
One of the many Scottish immigrants to South Africa was Thomas Pringle, who came here in 1820. He was a writer, poet and abolitionist. Together with another Scotsman, John Fairburn, he established the first independent newspaper in South Africa, the South African Commercial Advertiser.
Pringle was an early victim of the oppressiveness of the South African government and resigned in protest at the censorship of his publication.
As the French journalist and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same!"
I was glad to note that just last month Glasgow Caledonian University celebrated and honoured Black History month with an exhibition featuring the archives of the Scottish Committee of the Anti-ApartheidMovement.
For those of you who are too young to remember, the Anti-ApartheidMovement – which was based in London – played a major role in ensuring that South Africa under apartheid remained in the world’s conscience. The people of Glasgow and the University have always been unstinting in their fight to support the anti- apartheid movement.
Ladies and gentlemen, earlier I mentioned the Industrial Revolution – which was essentially the first industrial revolution from 1760 to about 1840.
We are in the throes of another revolution – just as enthralling, tumultuous and exciting as the Industrial Revolution.
This is the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Stunning advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and computing will fundamentally change the way we both work and live. Disruptive innovation has become a new buzzword – and with good reason. It is innovation that creates new markets, displacing established market-leading firms, products and alliances. We have seen this with Uber, Airbnb and of course social media. There is a new digital world which aims to simplify the manner and way in which we transact, do our work and eliminate the use of paper in international trade.
As the Economist magazine pointed out last week, in the logistics space – in which we play – we now have “reverse logistics.” In a current logistics chain, a manufacturer's product normally moves through the supply chain network in order to reach the distributor or customer – such as we are doing at the moment.
But what happens when goods are returned – as in the increasing case of web businesses like Amazon?
They need reverse logistics to manage this process and in the U.S it has become a 400 billion dollar business including the last mile and the entire value chain.
As can be seen from the current milieu, “each generation must discover its mission , fulfill it or betray it in relative opacity’, as espoused by Frantz Fanon in his book , The Wretched of the earth. This is in the context of Our colonizers who left a trail of blood, hardship , oppression in their wake when they conquered and took over our land. Many of the luminaries I have mentioned such as Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, MangalisoSobukwe lived through these brutal periods and grappled with many challenges as they took the baton to create freedom in their life time for our great country. They fought to defeat the demon of apartheid discrimination, the exploitation and oppression visited on them so that they could free the minds of the people in a new and democratic South Africa. The challenge of the graduands and this generation is to craft a way that begins to to stretch our imaginations and champion new inventions that will make the world a better place than we found it . We have already witnessed in this generation young South Africans such as SiyaXuza who created an energy intensive fuel which is safer and more effective than what NASA ( National Aeronitics and space Administration) used to use in propelling its rockets into outer space . As a result , a planet has been named after this young pioneering South African. There have been others before him, such as Dr Chris Barnard who pioneered the first heart transplant, Eric Merrifield and Aubrey Kruger were South African railways and harbors engineers who designed and developed the dolosse, a structure designed to break wave action at Harbour entrances and now used all over the world. South Africa also pioneered oil from coal and Sasol is the world’s first and largest oil from coal refinery .Pratley’s putty is the first South African invention that was used to hold bits of the Apollo mission’s Eagle landing craft together on the voyage to the moon in 1969. The Cameroonian , Arthur Zang is a Cameroonian engineer who invented the CardioPad, a touch screen medical tablet that enables heart examinations like ECG to be performed at remote locations. The challenge we all face is that some of you become innovators in your own right to propel Transnet forward. We have started our innovation center at the CSIR in Pretoria where we expect and are testing various railway engineering innovations that can be commercialized and create a better world . Much is expected of the investment we have made in your development, not only by your families but also by your country. Transnet desires to be at the cutting edge of logistics innovation.
Last month for example, we partnered with global digital industrial leader General Electric (GE) to create a smart freight digital solution that will seamlessly connect shippers and transport operators, enabling the efficient movement of goods.
In line with the unprecedented global changes that are taking place, Transnet is repositioning itself as a vastly different company than it has been for the last sixty years or so. We see our future as a 4PL company - where we extend our services to incorporate other value-added services in the entire logistics supply chain.
At Transnet, we have an environment that is ripe for change in the digital sphere. Equally importantly, we have the people to do so.
What is more important however, is having a vision to take our company forward in the digital sphere.
In this regard, we can partner with innovative institutions such as the University of Johannesburg, which has been at the forefront of transportation and supply chain management in South Africa for a number of years.
We must build new capabilities, particularly in advanced manufacturing, digital and advanced analytics to enable the shift in our business model. We need to up our game in investing in our people and processes.
This means inculcating a spirit of intrapreneurship within ourselves. Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. It means risk-taking and innovation in the workplace.
With our partners here today in this magnificent hall, we can achieve just that!
In 2009 we approached the Institute of Railway Operators in the UK, Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Johannesburg to develop and offer an internationally recognized qualification to our selected employees.
This became the Railway Operations Management Programme. The programme was implemented in 2012 and is designed to provide grounding in railway operations as well as consolidate skills required in all railway operations.
It is a work-based programme and is delivered through GCU’s on-line learning environment.The programme provides the opportunity for students to gain a good understanding of the principles of railway operations while maintaining learning on the job in a practical way.
It allows our colleagues to explore, evaluate and apply innovative and relevant solutions for real-world challenges facing railway operations. Participants are exposed to a wealth of new ideas and approaches in operations. They are able to translate knowledge and skills gained into immediate action on the ground.
The benefits to us as a company are immediate and tangible –skilled colleagues save us time and money - and improveperformance and productivity.
We are proud to say today that a total of 396 students have graduatedsince 2012. This is including the 145 who are graduating today.
Today, we honour those contributions in our partnership with the Glasgow Caledonian University, the Institute of Railway Operators in the UK, and the University of Johannesburg.
It is up to us to take advantage of this unique opportunity and ensure that we improve our skills.
We must do this, not just for our country but for our continent as well. There is a serious dearth of such skills in Africa.
We have to address this.To whom is bestowed a crown, there is great expectations.
In addition to the studies that we encourage, we need to make sure that we disseminate the knowledge that we have gained, far and wide across our continent. Our people need to become evangelists for education and knowledge.
Only then will we be able to grow the knowledge-based societies that we desire – only then we can become the digital society we aspire to.
We hope that some of you graduating here today will become teachers and votaries for rail – spreading knowledge in the same way, planting seeds for future generations to nurture.
You need to go out there and sell a vision of what a prosperous, educated and stable Africa will look like!
Tragically, there are two of our colleagues who passed on before they could get the chance grow their knowledge and become wiser citizens of our nation.
They are Khanyisa Madubedube and Dennis Kamen Daas.
Our deepest condolences go out to their colleagues at work, friends and family.
Let us have a moment of silence for our departed colleagues.
Ladies and gentlemen, that steam turbine in downtown Johannesburg I mentioned earlier has no history attached to it. It sits nobly amongst the crowd of curious youngsters who play on top of it – our new generation of engineers, scientists and thinkers.
You are the lucky ones. Today you are graduating.
So I say to you – in the words of the great English critic, Kenneth Tynan, “Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.”
Above all, make Transnet proud.
Thank you.
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