BELA: The ANC uses education and schools as battlegrounds for electoral purposes
16 May 2024
After the ANC used its majority to approve the controversial Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill (BELA), it is now in President Ramaphosa's hands to ratify the Amendment Act.
Time and again, the ANC has ascribed its urgency in completing the process to the need for transformation. However, transformation requires more than just the ANC's racial numbers game. Transformation requires quality education and training. Quality education cannot be dictated through central interference – it requires partnerships between school governing boards, parents and communities. However, the ANC's transformation requires that officials from within the department must determine what is in the best interest of the school, the learner and the community. With this, the ANC has long shown its true colours.
The urgency ahead of the elections with the BELA Bill as well as the National Health Insurance clearly demonstrates the ANC's panic. Before 1994, the ANC's cry was "Liberation before education". Thirty years into the new democracy, this has translated into political power at all costs. Sacrificing quality education is the price exacted by the regime for the preservation of political power.
President Ramaphosa can now either ratify the Bill or have it referred back to the National Assembly. With his signature, he can disregard the rights of language and cultural communities, to determine the right to decide on the language and admissions policy of a school. And this is not a race issue, as the ANC pretends. President Ramaphosa must decide today whether he will honour his own undertakings or whether he will choose not to practise what he preaches – all for the sake of short-term electoral gain.
We remind President Ramaphosa of his own words:
"To be able to speak one's mother tongue, to have one's children taught in their mother tongue, is the most fundamental of human rights." President Cyril Ramaphosa on Human Rights Day at the George Thabe Sports Grounds, Sharpeville on Tuesday, 21 March 2019.
According to the President, therefore, being taught in Afrikaans, isiZulu, Tshivenda or any of the other official South African languages is a fundamental human right. The validity of this principle has, moreover, been repeatedly substantiated by international research and by Unesco:
- Currently, 40% of the world's population do not have access to education in their mother tongue. With the BELA legislation, South Africa closes its eyes to reality.
- According to UNESCO, six years of mother tongue education is required to reduce learning gaps for minority-language speakers. Anglicising education is one of the biggest betrayals that the ANC government has yet committed against the people of this country.
The ANC continues to use every opportunity to cover up its own failures. Centralisation is now on the table, because the ANC's embarrassment with education and the more than 80% dysfunctional schools keeps growing. The functional public schools must now be centralised too, because it is the Afrikaans schools that have become islands of excellence in the quagmire of educational decay. The ANC would rather have the entire system become dysfunctional by making everyone comply with their misplaced transformation.
Despite one failed basic education policy after another, it is clear that the ANC leadership is once more prepared to gamble with education with a view to the 2024 elections. The question is: Will President Ramaphosa be man enough to stand up for the fundamental right he defended in 2019, or will he succumb in 2024 to his party's ill-considered push for central control to gain votes in the elections?
The right of governing bodies to determine language and admission is now at stake. The Afrikanerbond will accordingly support other organisations and communities that want to stop the nonsensical, ill-considered and unworkable legislation through litigation.
Issued by Jan Bosman, Chief Secretary, Afrikanderbond, 16 May 2024
