The dismantling of South Africa's apartheid-controlled education system after 1994 brought with it unprecedented policy complications, among them the question of how best to integrate the desiderata of access and merit in school education and tertiary sectors. For the higher education sector, institutional mergers became an increasingly visible policy tool with the advent of the Asmal Ministry in 1999. Mergers promise better quality programs with improved access, accelerated integration, and ? most importantly ? greater resource efficiency. The fact that mergers played an initially muted role in South African education policy and planning is due in large part, I argue, to the failure of an anticipated "massification" in the late 90's. This unexpected result forced out the need for a quick and decisive economic streamlining of the higher education system. As before, the goals of merit and access were energetically proclaimed. Now, however, the driving principle seemed increasingly to be one of demand-side cost efficiency. This reshuffling of the policy deck tells us something important about the respective stages of education policy, planning, and implementation, but also provides a link between post-apartheid school education and tertiary reform in the Republic. Both higher education mergers and school education local control measures enact a form of "centralized decentralization." Policymakers concentrate power all the more effectively by appearing to share its benefits among all relevant stakeholders in matters of equity and merit for South African education.