BELA Act: DA side-hustle with Solidarity and AfriForum will test GNU 

29 November 2024

Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube’s breathless announcement of having reached agreement with the Solidarity Movement on implementing the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Act should be taken with a pinch of salt.

While Gwarube hailed her pact with Solidarity as demonstrating the power of cool heads, she appears to have overlooked the fact that it is the DA’s coalition partners in the Government of National Unity she must convince on proposed changes to the law – not Afrikaner nationalist organisations outside of government.

A few weeks ago, while her party agreed to a BELA negotiations process under the auspices of the multi-party GNU clearing house, the DA signaled its contempt for this process by joining a group of like-minded organisations, Solidarity, Afriforum and the Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysunie, among others, in a protest march against the Act in Tshwane.

The contentious clauses of the BELA Act relate to the powers of School Governing Bodies to determine language policy.

On the one hand, there’s a strong feeling that School Governing Bodies have used language policy as a mechanism to maintain schools’ historic demographics and block transformation. On the other hand, the Afrikaans community fears that introducing second languages at their schools will emasculate their language and culture.

The key clause in Gwarube’s “breakthrough” announcement is that the interests of the community in the immediate vicinity of the public school must be taken into account.

While, on the face of it, that might appear reasonable, in fact, it is a mechanism to use the spatial injustice of the old Group Areas Act to continue to separate South Africans. It creates room for the same “not-in-my-backyard” attitude that the middle-class has used to block the development of affordable housing in areas previously reserved for white citizens.

According to Gwarube’s department, she’s taking her “breakthrough” directly to the President, avoiding the necessity for further discussions with the GNU partners.

These tactics appear deliberately designed to weaken the concept of the multi-party GNU problem-solving mechanism, the so-called clearing house under the leadership of the Deputy President.

Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General, 29 November 2024