> A nice man I met from SA noted that education in SA was still heavy on religion, and all his friends aspired to comfortable government jobs that are easy,

I can confirm this from a second-hand account as told by one of my best friends. He worked as a sub-contractor in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years for a big European air/defense firm and he told me that the technical education of his Saudi colleagues was sub-par, to put it mildly, mostly because they were still taught the Quran during engineering school.