On 4 November the Parliamentary Communication Services issued a media statement about the Gauteng Department of Education’s investigation into racism at the Pretoria High School for Girls.
The release was made on behalf of the Chairperson of the Select Committee on Education, Sciences, and the Creative Industries, Makhi Feni.
As I understand it, parliamentary committees don’t usually issue public statements about issues that are not before it. This was an ill-advised exception.
It was an ignorant, one-sided and, frankly, racist view that serves the Select Committee badly and the chairperson, Mr Feni, even worse.
The IRR issued a press release on 8 November about the very poor handling of the investigation that the GDE so obsessively pursued, when the MEC of Education released his crowing press release about all the allegations the “independent” investigator found to charge the principal and deputy principal for misconduct.
If Mr Feni had paid any attention to the outrage in the media concerning PHSG, in particular, and the GDE’s handling of the matter, he would have been wise not to have said anything in his parliamentary capacity, or any capacity whatsoever.
Mr Feni welcomed the outcome of the GDE’s investigation. The media release stated:
“Mr Feni said the outcomes clearly showed that racism was still rampant in white schools where everything possible was done to block the integration of our learners.
“’This outcome gives not only the Pretoria High School for Girls but all [former] white schools an opportunity to reflect on how they are integrating black South African learners into what they perceive to be their spaces.
“’It does not help to deny racism in institutions as often it is the victim who knows how it feels to be alienated. School Governing Bodies and principals need to accept that South Africa is a diverse country with a history of institutionalised racism.”
The media release went on to state: “The Pretoria Girls High was in the news a few months back for racist tendencies that included the establishment of a Whites-only WhatsApp group, as well as white educators not greeting black educators. This is only one incident in white schools that caught the media’s attention this year.”
Whether the inclination to use the phrase immortalised by Julius Malema was actually something Mr Feni said or whether it was merely the exuberance of the Committee’s spokesperson, Sibongile Maputi, it was just plain embarrassing.
In pursuing disciplinary charges against the 12 girls whom the GDE accused of racism, the GDE showed itself to be racist, unprofessional and its officials to be bullies.
The GDE’s case fell apart when all the girls were found not guilty of racism, a finding that neither the MEC, Matome Chiloane, nor spokesman Steve Mabona, really accepted and, hence, the rush to launch an immediate investigation into the “culture of racism” at the school.
Our press release noted that if there was anything remarkable about the findings, it is that the issues mostly appeared to be retreads, about alleged misconduct that is eventually bound to be found not to have been misconduct, and an astonishing lack of allegations of a “culture of racism”.
Accordingly, the IRR called on the GDE to publish the full report of the investigation, as well as the extended mandate to the investigating law firm that the GDE alleges it gave to the investigator.
According to the Parliamentary website, the functions of the committees, which are staffed proportionately to the vote parties receive in the National Assembly, include “one or more” of the following functions:
- They monitor and oversee the work and budgets of national government departments and hold them accountable
- They consider and amend Bills, and may initiate Bills
- They consider private members’ and provincial legislative proposals and special petitions
- They consider international treaties and agreements
- They examine specific areas of public life or matters of public interest
- They take care of domestic parliamentary issues”
In other words, Mr Feni as the Chairperson of the Committee acted completely outside the scope of the Committee and expressed his embarrassing and ill-informed views without the authority to do so.
The IRR hopes that the members of the Committee recognise that, if they hope to be trusted by the South African public, in whose interests they are meant to serve, they will refute the contents of this media release, if they even know about it, and repudiate its publication.
[Photo: Parliament.gov.za]
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