Charting a course for science and technology: who is the pilot?

South Africa is an anomaly on the African continent. It is the only country that generates significant amounts of nuclear power (and has the bomb), accounts for 40% of continental GDP, and has produced a number of Nobel laureates in science, medicine, literature and peace. Like other States, it displays huge disparities of wealth, and, after Brazil, has the second highest recorded Gini coefficient. Under apartheid, mission-oriented research received generous funding and was paralleled by generous individually focussed allocations that allowed the pursuit of personal research agendas. This may be interpreted as a dual strategy-on the one hand to prosecute warlike aims, and on the other to maintain an atmosphere of normality. The transformation since 1994 has taken the country along a new path, and unsurprisingly the role, position and management of state-funded science and technology development is also an evolving and contested area. This paper considers how the S&T research agenda is being shaped and managed with reference to the conceptual frame of a national system of innovation. It uses the newly created Innovation Fund to mirror the transformation of the system and shows the limits of such intervention when budget is politically contested and small to begin with.