SADTU REPLIES TO HELEN ZILLE
17 May 2013
Zille and the DA reactionaries want to turn the clock back to before 1994
SADTU notes that the leader of the main opposition party in South Africa, Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, has exploited and misrepresented the publication of the recent NEEDU report so as to launch an attack on SADTU.
This gratuitous attack on SADTU appeared in the DA newsletter, "SA Today", and also on the Politicsweb web site (15 May 2013).
The requirement for NEEDU - the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit - was first formally articulated in a resolution passed at the 52nd (Polokwane) conference of our liberation movement, the African National Congress, in December 2007.
SADTU has actively and publicly supported NEEDU from its conception.
Zille wants to exploit this report, but is actually unable to avoid writing that "There is never a simple answer to a complex question. There are many variables at work, including children's home circumstances."
Somehow, this undoubted truth - which is still not the whole truth - does not prevent Zille from drawing all sorts of generalised conclusions about SADTU.
The whole truth would have to include the dilapidated state of school buildings, the slow provision of all other resources and the quality of leadership of the Department of Basic Education.
The whole truth would include the necessary development of the teachers, requested by SADTU, which is a matter upon which the NEEDU report spends considerable time. Zille reduces NEEDU's careful presentation on this crucial matter to the following (Zille's words): "A large proportion of South African teachers can't teach, and many won't make the effort required to do so."
Zille wants to blame the teachers; more especially SADTU teachers.
We as SADTU are able to see that the DA under Helen Zille is aiming for something else, and not for the Quality Public Education that SADTU stands for.
Helen Zille and the DA want to roll the South African clock back to before 1994. In the process they are finding fault everywhere, and blaming everyone, except themselves and the apartheid legacy of which they are a part, for every difficulty.
SADTU teachers, with all the problems that they bravely face each day, are from Zille's point of view only some useful pawns in her DA game of denigrations and insults, all with the aim of turning the South African clock back to white supremacy, Western-Cape style.
SADTU is proud of being part of the liberation movement of South Africa.
We say to the DA: Know your SADTU!
We are the South African Democratic Teachers' Union founded in the presence of Nelson Mandela, with his blessing and with his participation. We are not among those like the DA who would wish to air-brush over their nasty past, and try to re-decorate it with false claims, lies, and borrowed or stolen histories.
The reactionary DA of Helen Zille wants to destroy the liberation movement, the one that stands for People's Education for People's Power, entirely.
Helen Zille and the DA would bury the entire labour movement if they could, and the African National Congress with it, and sit on our graves crowing and boasting pretending that the DA has taken on our Liberation Movement's shape and its life.
The DA wants to wipe out our movement and to bring back white minority rule. This is the message Helen Zille is sending.
The DA under Helen Zille has become odious to righteous people. There is not even a fragment of democracy in them.
We will never forget how Zille called the black children of South Africa "refugees" so as to make them feel unwelcome in their own country.
Statement issued by the SADTU Secretariat, May 17 2013
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