Blame schools, not universities, for educational failures
There is probably no greater threat to our South African future than the failure of our education system. It is not producing the skilled people our economy desperately needs. Without them, we shall fail as a nation. Without them, mass poverty will grow, and more and more of our young people will be unemployed and unemployable. Without skills, we shall fall further and further behind nations such as South Korea, China and India, all once poorer than us. We produce about 1,400 engineering graduates a year. South Korea, with a population about the same as ours, produces 30,000 a year, over twenty times more. We need about 21,000 new teachers a year. We produce only 5,000 a year. Only 15% of our maths teachers are suitably qualified. We have massive shortages of doctors, nurses, accountants, artisans and every other professional and technical grade.
It is deeply alarming to see that the new ANC government, instead of facing up squarely to the reasons for this national disaster, is avoiding them and resorting to its usual tactics of racial blaming; of elevating ideology above reality.
Prof Jonathan Jansen, the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State, is an educationalist. Controversial and abrasive, yes. But prepared to call a spade a spade in the interests of dealing with our country's core problem. Recently, besides making telling observations about our education system, he described the new Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshetga, as a "lazy and incompetent minister, if one takes into account her record as MEC in Gauteng". He might have been referring to the fact that she had attended Jacob Zuma's court trial when she should have been in an education meeting; that she had taken no action against a union member who had beaten up a teacher in Eldorado Park for refusing to take part in the union's political campaign; and that she had done nothing to stop the union taking teachers out of the classroom.
In a furious public rebuttal, Jessie Duarte, the ANC National Spokesperson, demanded a public apology from Prof Jansen (see here). She compared him with "Apartheid ideologues" and suggested he was a racist. She said Mrs Motshekga had "committed herself to the transformation of our education system". In other words, as usual, her theme was racial blaming, and the elevation of race above the requirements of improving the quality of education. She ignored Prof Jansen's arguments about the failures in our schools. She warned him that the University of the Free State was "subsidised by the ANC-led Government". This was clearly a threat that the University had better do as the ANC says.
One of Mrs Motshekga's first actions upon becoming Minister of Basic Education was to use taxpayers' money to buy herself two new cars, a BMW 730D and a Range Rover Sport TDV8, at a combined cost of R1.7 million. Both are fully imported. Neither was made in South Africa. Her new cars cost the taxpayer ten times as much as a teacher's annual salary. This is presumably the kind of "transformation" to which Jessie Duarte was referring? When we came into office in the Western Cape, the Cabinet took the decision to not buy any new vehicles, and to use only those vehicles already available.