The ANC has caused much ruin to public education and now proposes to wreck it completely. This will certainly be the outcome of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA), 2024, and might in some subconscious way be the intention. Most South African children come near the bottom of world standards of literacy, maths and science – behind many poorer African countries – and BELA will make this worse.
It will also add more to South Africa’s horrible inequality, with poor black children becoming further impoverished by having very low skills when they leave school, while rich ANC ministers, SADTU leaders, and EFF commanders will send their children to expensive private schools to avoid BELA.
BELA is quite a long act (64 pages in total, including English and Afrikaans versions) and complicated. A lot of it is unobjectionable, although written in convoluted legalese phrases. The law must be precise and comprehensive but surely it can be written in plain, readable language? But certain sections are highly controversial, and it is these that will cause harm and are raising such hostility from parents and schools.
This is why the DA has suggested that BELA might be a deal-breaker as far as GNU is concerned. These sections are to do with political control of schools and language policy. Basically BELA wants politicians – heads of government educational departments – to decide almost all school policies and to over-ride the wishes of parents, pupils and school-governing bodies (SGBs). BELA does not want child-centred education, it wants politician-centred education. (Throughout this article I am going to refer to “pupils” and “teachers” and not to “learners” and “educators”, which I find derogatory.)
The IRR has given a “Submission to the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education, regarding the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill of 2022”, which is thorough, detailed, objective, and sensible, quite unlike my article here, which is simply my own reflections on the ideology of this bill and its likely consequences. It is now an act, signed into law by President Ramaphosa last week.
Political control
On political control of schools, section 4 of BELA says this: “the Head of Department, after consultation with the governing body of the school, has the final authority.” In this case it refers to the authority to admit pupils to public schools. Elsewhere it gives them authority over practically everything else. Why does the ANC want to control schools completely?
There are two answers. First, the ANC, being socialist, is obsessed about total state control (meaning ANC control) of everything, including education. It cannot bear it when it sees people doing what they want to do rather than what it wants them to do. Second, it is in hock to SADTU, the all-powerful teaching union, which in practice probably controls six out of our nine provincial education departments. This is according to a previous DA shadow minister of education, Gavin Davis, who writes of “clear evidence” of this. So political control of the schools by ANC politicians mostly means control by SADTU, their most important political supporter.
SADTU has not the slightest interest in the children its members teach. It only cares about maintaining political and financial power by appointing and controlling the teachers at its schools. It only cares about their salaries, rights and dependence on it. It guarantees that any SADTU teacher, however useless, lazy, and callous, however much he or she fails the children, can never be dismissed. This is the main reason for unqualified, inexperienced, uncaring, ill-disciplined teachers at so many of our state schools. In 2016, after a survey of schools in KZN, Davis gave a speech to parliament entitled “Smash the SADTU protection racket”. Extracts:
In most provinces, the MECs are not in charge of education.
Because, in most parts of the country, the South African Democratic Teachers Union – SADTU – is in charge of education.
Three weeks ago, Madam Speaker, we visited rural schools in KwaZulu-Natal.
Government officials there told us how SADTU teachers drop their own children off at former Model C schools and then go on strike for the day.
We heard how, in the Ugu District, there was no teaching for 7 months over the last two years because of a dispute between SADTU and the District Director. 7 months; no teaching.
We visited Bhekisizwe High School in the Umzinyathi District. We heard how teachers go on holiday two weeks before the term ends, and come back two weeks after the new term starts. And they get away with it.
At Dumaphansi Secondary, 146 learners have written matric maths in the last three years, but not one learner has passed. And guess what? Not one teacher has ever been fired for underperformance.
(My emphasis above.)
BELA will give SADTU more power to wreck our education system. President Ramaphosa fawns before SADTU, as his grovelling panegyric to it at their gala dinner in 2017 attests.
“Combat racism”
One of the aims of BELA is to “combat racism” in schools. This has a very specific application. ANC is not interested in racism at the state schools, which the vast majority of our children attend – nor is it interested in the terrible schooling and appalling conditions there. It is only interested in those few schools that give a very good education to rich black children. These are the formerly Model-C schools, which have mainly white teachers and which receive additional payment from parents as well as from the state.
They are excellent schools, getting very good matric results, including in maths and science. These schools are now under constant attack from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity (DEI) mafia, who demand enormous payments for invading the schools, cursing all the white teachers as evil racists, telling the white pupils to be ashamed of themselves and the black pupils they are helpless victims of white racism, demoralising the staff and ruining the lives of decent, dedicated teachers with not a racist bone in their bodies. Recently, at St Mary’s DSG, Pretoria, 20 out of 40 teachers resigned, including the whole maths department, because of DEI assault. A very telling case also happened recently at Pretoria High School for Girls (PHSG).
In this case, as in all matters of what he calls “school capture”, I strongly advise you to read any of Richard Wilkinson’s essays or other writing. He has been a cool hero here, exposing the terrible false scandals rocking our best schools. In July this year, white girls at PGHS were accused of racism in a WhatsApp group and black girls spoke of their terrible suffering because of this. Immediately the mass media, with the Daily Maverick leading the charge (natch), condemned this awful white racism at PHSG without bothering to find out what the white girls had said or to collect any evidence at all of their racism.
The Gauteng Education Department (GED), led by MEC Panyaza Lesufi, was even worse, demanding sanctions against the girls and the teachers without providing any facts or reasons. Twelve white girls were suspended. In early August, a panel chaired by a legal practitioner found that the twelve pupils, eight of whom were prefects, were not guilty and would therefore be reinstated. In other words, the whole racism scandal was a pack of lies. However, the GED is still unhappy about it all and wants a further enquiry at PHSG. Under BELA 2024, he would get further powers to hold one.
Take away all power
BELA wants to take away all power from SGBs and give it to government heads of department, including such as Lesufi, who would probably then be able to over-rule the legal panel and find the girls all guilty of racism with having to provide any evidence at all. The white girls must not only to be assumed guilty until proven innocent but assumed guilty after having been proven innocent. This is all very strange, since none of the ANC leaders who are accusing the “white schools” of racism would dream of sending their children to “black schools”, to state schools where 93% of the teachers were black in compliance with the Employment Equity Act. They seem to be saying, “We demand white teachers for our children, and then we demand to call them racist!”
Even stranger, perhaps, is the ANC policy towards language at schools. Couched in abstractions, waffly language, and bogus respect for all official language, BELA is actually an attack on Afrikaans. The ANC elite cannot bear to see white teachers teaching in Afrikaans. It knows full well that Afrikaans teachers are dedicated and well-qualified and that Afrikaans schools are excellent. It just cannot bear it.
The ANC elite demands that its own children be admitted to Afrikaans schools and then be taught in English and finally that all teaching at Afrikaans schools be only in English. In other words, the ANC leaders, forever bellowing against the evils of British colonialism, are demanding the most important conquest of the British imperialists, the English language. Cecil John Rhodes, the arch-imperialist, would be delighted. He loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that British culture was far superior to African culture and, above all, the English language was far superior to the primitive African languages. He wanted English to be the universal language. The ANC elite agrees with him completely.
ANC leaders do not want teaching in black African languages despite the proven advantages of mother tongue education; they want teaching in the language of Rhodes. The ANC and Rhodes also have the same views on Afrikaners and Afrikaans: they both look down their noses at the people and the language. Rhodes, with his calamitous Jameson Raid, sparked off the Boer War, in which the Boers, a handful of farmers, took on the might of the British Empire and came close to beating it at one stage, certainly striking it a blow from which it never recovered. Rhodes hated them for this, and so it seems does the ANC.
Sense of shame
I believe the black elite’s resentment at Afrikaners comes from a deep sense of shame. The Afrikaners are proud of their language and want to maintain it. The ANC elite seems embarrassed about its own black languages (which are very beautiful, I believe) and wants to denounce them, but it feels ashamed of doing so and resents the Boers for loving their own language. Using BELA, the ANC hopes to abolish Afrikaans entirely at our schools.
As far as I understand, BELA will only affect completely state-funded schools and partly state-funded schools (Model-C schools) but not purely private schools, such as Bishops and Herschel, to which Dr Naledi Pandor, a former minister of education, sent a son and a daughter. It will probably reduce Model-C schools to the level of our awful township state schools. The rich will then leave Model-C schools for purely private schools if they can afford them. The schooling for most South Africans will deteriorate further and only the super-rich will be able to get a good education. Inequality in South Africa will get worse.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pixabay