The ANC is the party of grand plans, grand rhetoric, and grandstanding but it lacks substance. This is highlighted by two related instances currently reported in the media.
First, the Dept of Higher Education is considering compelling university students to include an African language into their academic curriculum. As someone who learnt both German and Xhosa at University level, I know how difficult it is to learn a foreign language at that stage of one's life.
My daughter on the other hand, studied Xhosa from primary to high school and the language became second nature to her. Surely Blade Nzimande, Minister of Education, and a former professor of Industrial Psychology, knows that language is best learnt at primary school level.
African languages are not just difficult for non-African speakers, but also for African students. Just do the arithmetic and see how many African students study indigenous languages at universities?
The small numbers are surprising but they show that even African students find the linguistic, literary, and grammatical aspects of the language difficult. The same applies to any other non-mother-tongue language instruction.
In recent years, language departments at universities have been merged and amalgamated because students no longer pursue foreign languages in big numbers as when I studied German in 1972. In my class alone, at the time, there were about 400-500 students at first year level.