The ANC goes and digs up some good ideas

The African National Congress has a habit of taking the bloody obvious, wrapping it prettily, and then presenting it with fanfare. Only on closer examination does one realise that this apparently thoughtful gift has been retrieved from the dustbin where the ANC had discarded it in the first place.

In the past couple of months there have been a couple of recycled ideas that the ANC hopes won’t be remembered, since they originated with the despised National Party.

In 1994 the government switched off South Africa’s electrified border fence because it was considered an affront to neighbours who had supported the liberation struggle. It also withdrew the army from border patrols.

Three million illegal immigrants later, the soldiers are back. A month ago government funds were quietly set aside to erect an electric fence between SA and Lesotho.

Then there is schooling. Apartheid wrought its greatest damage through a deliberate policy of discriminatory education spending but paradoxically, Afrikaner Calvinism demanded strict accountability.

Teachers, even in the underfunded “Bantu” education system, were expected to be on the premises and perform to measurable standards, enforced by a network of infamously stern school inspectors. After 1994, the school inspection system fell apart because the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) declared schools to be “no go” areas to the inspectors.

The results were predictable to everyone except the ANC. SA performs near the bottom of every international marker for literacy and numeracy, including those for the African continent — not a region renowned for its quality schooling. This is despite SA spending a fifth of its national budget, R190-billion a year, on education.

The problem lies with concepts that are demonstrably foreign to the unionised teaching corps: accountability, commitment and competence. According to the government’s National Planning Commission a fifth of teachers in public schools do not show up for work on Mondays, rising to a third at the end of the month.

In any given year, SADTU is responsible for the lion’s share of strike activity. Again according to the NPC, it is the norm in public schools for teachers to attend to SADTU business during teaching hours, in defiance of departmental regulations. Others run businesses from their classrooms, that is, when they are not busy screwing the teenagers under their care.

These militant teachers would better serve their learners — and their own future — if they spent this off-time hitting the books. A few years back an educational trust tested Grade Four maths teachers on a Grade Four test and the average score was 25%. Miserably unimpressive, but in a society as warped as ours, probably well above the skills level needed to rise to executive level in the ANC Youth League.

Add to this recipe for mediocrity a generation sacrificed on the altar of the now withdrawn outcomes-based education system, and one can understand why SA’s youth has been short-changed in terms of the skills necessary for employment. As Kanthan Pillay, YFM managing director, said to a former education minister, the late Kader Asmal, “Congratulations. You’ve succeeded where Verwoerd failed — you’ve turned black people into hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

SADTU has successfully stymied all government attempts at reform and continues to blame all the failures in public schools on apartheid. This tired litany is tolerated because in a precariously balanced tripartite alliance no one in the ANC dares cross SA’s most militant public service union.

But Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga thinks she might have a solution. School principals and their deputies should have to meet performance targets based on pass rates and teaching quality. That, of course, implies meaningful school inspections.

Gosh! What brilliant idea! Whoever would have thought it?

And why not aggregate this rush of good ideas to the head? While Motshekga’s at it, let’s electrify school perimeters and post army patrols to stop those indolent SADTU teachers from skiving off.