Zwelinzima Vavi's Speech to SADTU Eastern Cape Education Indaba, 8 March 2012, East London International Convention Centre (ICC)

I am grateful for this opportunity to address at this important Education Indaba.

It is even more important given yesterday's successful general strike which saw thousands and thousands of workers across the country taking to the streets against labour brokers and the e-tolling system.

Thousands and thousands of workers, the unemployed and the poor rallied behind the red flags of COSATU and declared - enough and no more! We refuse to be taken for granted! We are the people and the buck stops with us!

Comrades, there are some who say that they do not understand the links between the campaign against labour brokers and the commodification or privatisation of our roads and the broader class struggle in South Africa.

There is no doubt that these campaigns are interlinked with the struggle to salvage the working class from a further assault on its living standards.

Comrades, despite the political and social gains scored since 1994, the working class in this country continues to reel under the pressure of neoliberalism and the legacy of apartheid/colonialism. Poverty, unemployment and inequality are the three principal challenges facing the working class in the current period.

We recognise the major advances our country has registered under the ANC government. This includes delivery of basic needs, which has meant millions having access to housing, water, electricity, education and healthcare, etc.

However, most of these gains have been undermined by the slow pace of transformation in the economy as well as the rampant commodification pursued through privatisation and other neoliberal programmes including the user-pay principle.

Today, South Africa takes the first prize in terms of being the most unequal society in the world. The richest decile is earning about 94 times more than the poorest decile. Africans, who constitute 79, 4% of the population, account for 41, 2% of the household income from work and social grants, whereas whites, who account only for 9, 2% of the population, receive 45, 3% of income. The poorest 10% of the population share R1, 1 billion whilst the richest 10% share R381 billion. Our country is trapped in a developmental paradigm that has simply reproduced these conditions for 18 years now.

The apartheid spatial development agenda will also be entrenched by the commodification of our roads via this e-tolling system. COSATU can guarantee workers across the country that if we allow it to happen in Gauteng, then government will roll it out across the country in no time.

KwaZulu Natal has been identified as the next target for the profit-thirsty SANRAL. No one will be spared from this deliberate attempt to further deepen our marginalisation as the working class.

The e-tolling system amounts to economic apartheid and will actually perpetuate apartheid's discrimination of the black working class which has been systematically removed from major economic centres and dumped in the townships.

Yesterday, the entire country joined in COSATU's tune that says that government must not pass its failure to build a safe, affordable, efficient and reliable public transport system on the shoulders of the poor.

The thousands of marchers that gathered across 32 centres in the country had a simple message: - We are the producers and the creators of wealth. This country stands on the shoulders of our sweat and toil. Never ever take us for granted!

Today I want to speak exclusively about what I consider to be the greatest challenge we face as revolutionaries of our generation - the education crisis and our role as revolutionaries in solving this unfolding human tragedy.

Let me commend SADTU for hosting this important Indaba which is aimed at confronting the education crisis in this province head-on.

This Indaba carries significant importance as it shows that teachers are a critical component in the transformation of our schooling system in the province and the rest of the country.

Let me repeat one of my favourite quotes from one of the African intellectual giants who once said: "each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it".

By calling this Indaba, SADTU is heeding Frans Fanon's call and charting its own mission towards the transformation of education in this country.

This Indaba is even more important given the right-wing agenda aimed at eroding hard-won workers' rights by portraying teachers as the "monsters in the room" in terms of our ailing education system.   

Comrades and friends, our education system is in a crisis. In fact calling it a crisis is an understatement. This is a catastrophe. Every day children of the working class and the poor are being condemned into a deep black hole with minimal chances of escape. 

Through this Indaba, SADTU must demonstrate that indeed teachers carry the revolutionary shield that can spare the working class from the daily ideological onslaught meted out by the bourgeoisie.

Every child and every human being develops from the tutelage of teachers, who occupy a special role in our quest to change the world and do away with the evils of the capitalist system and oppression.

We know only too well that without a critical mass of teachers, armed with revolutionary theory and commitment, our revolution would be greatly compromised.

Indeed if we did not have a revolutionary teacher's union such as SADTU, many of the contradictions that the capitalist schooling system imposes in the classroom would go unchallenged.

It is now common knowledge how the apartheid state suppressed teachers from dissenting from an apartheid curriculum which aimed at instilling in the black mind the ideas of white supremacy and black servitude. Apartheid education infused black learners with the notion that whites are superior and that blacks should serve as nothing more than cheap labour to be utilised in creating wealth for a few white South Africans.

Under apartheid, the whole idea that the role of teachers is to empower their students to question existing racial and class power relations was significantly suppressed.

Instead teachers were expected to teach their students to accept their unequal and inferior place in a racialised capitalist education system and to learn the art of abiding by the rules and discipline of the powers that be.

It was in direct opposition to this that the struggle for people's education was born. The struggle for people's education was geared at democratising the education system and using it as one of the driving forces for social transformation.

It was in utter rejection of using the concept of professionalism to demobilise teachers from having a critical approach to the system of apartheid and the gross violations that characterised it.

Decades have since past since the vision of a people's education was first articulated in this country. Part of what this Education Indaba gathering must do is to reflect on some of the advances made in the transformation of education in the post-1994 period.

It is crucial to emphasise that the children of the working class are still at the receiving end of an unequal education system that is marked by unequal access to resources such as libraries, laboratories, learner support materials and even teachers.

Whilst we have made tremendous progress in many areas, such as improving infrastructure, delivery of books, enrolment of children, in particular the girl child, improving access by opening more no-fee schools, etc. we have not succeeded in transforming the education system in both quality and quantity.

Apartheid fault-lines remain stubbornly in place in our education system. Children born to poor parents remain trapped in an inferior education with wholly inadequate infrastructure; 70% of our schools do not have libraries and 60% do not have laboratories; 60% of children are pushed out of the schooling system before they reach grade 12.

As you know 70% of (matriculation) exam passes are accounted for by just 11% of schools, i.e. the former White, Coloured, and Asian schools [1].  What is of major concern is that 12-year olds in South Africa perform three times worse than 11-year olds in Russia when it comes to reading and 16-year olds in South Africa perform three times worse than 14-year olds in Cyprus when it comes to mathematics[2]. It is estimated that only 3% of the children who enter the schooling system eventually complete with higher-grade mathematics. Nevertheless, white learners perform in line with the international average in both science and mathematics, which is twice the score of African learners. 

This crisis manifests itself more profoundly in this very province, the Eastern Cape. The Eastern Cape basic education system is simply dysfunctional. The province is a home to 395 mud schools, which collapse at the mere idea of heavy rain. Approximately a hundred thousand learners in this province are subjected to walking long kilometres to schools due to the inefficiency and poor management of the scholar transport system. 

At some point last year tens of thousands were going hungry because the School Nutrition Program in the Eastern Cape was stopped due to lack of funds. Political hyenas have identified even this Nutrition Programme as a feeding trough. This was particularly disheartening given that the province's under spending in previous years.

Last year, 6000 temporary teachers arrived at schools to find that their contracts had not been renewed because the department could no longer pay them.

Working-class children in rural schools were hardest hit by the education crisis in this province. Many of these children had to pull themselves through as the experience of a classroom without a teacher was becoming increasingly normal.

The Eastern Cape Department of Basic Education has been receiving qualified reports from the Auditor General since 2005. This simply means that the education department in this province, much like all others, is haunted by a reality of financial mismanagement.

How can the nation and the world expect learners produced under such circumstances to score top marks and secure entry into the country's higher education system when the playing field is so unequal? Today the Eastern Cape Province competes with the bottom three worst performing provinces in the country. This is enough to make Mathew Goniwe, SEK Mqhayi and Enoch Sontonga, educationalists who hail from this province, to turn in their graves.

Comrades and friends, let me emphasize that we simply cannot expect teachers to produce miraculous results in this kind of situation. This is more so since this bleak picture is also replicated in the working environment for thousands of teachers in this province.

We know very well that this situation has meant that many teachers in Tsomo, Butterworth, Idutywa and other places in the province have become social workers and psychologists at the same time. We must continue to salute the teachers who have been consistent in raising the plight of poverty-stricken children with the provincial education department and those teachers who continue to provide a revolutionary service to the poor despite these morbid circumstances.

The consequences of this education crisis are that we have a demoralised cohort of teachers, 55% of whom would leave the profession if granted the opportunity to do so. This is also symptomatic of an ineffective and dysfunctional education system.

This is the crisis that our education system faces! Let us again emphasize that if we don't reverse this situation then for many liberation will be without any value.

Whilst this disaster is unfolding, the children of the rich are in private schools. The children of the middle class, who are now joined by a minority of blacks, are in former Model C schools. Both private and former Model C schools are in varying degrees far better than the schools where working class and black children find themselves.

The connection between the high failure rates in schools and youth unemployment needs to be emphasized.  Of the unemployed 72% are below the age of 35 years. The majority of those unemployed do not have standard seven or matric. In fact 95% of all people who are unemployed do not have tertiary education. This is what we have called a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. Already that bomb is exploding in many parts of the country through violent service delivery protests.

We must continue to demand:

Free, quality public education for all;

A deliberate programme to upgrade infrastructure in public schools;

The elimination of mud schools and the reinstatement of the feeding scheme and the scholar transport system and

Increased training and support for teachers in rural and township public schools.

However, the critical question all of us must answer in this Indaba is:  what is the role of a revolutionary trade union movement in making a contribution towards resolving this crisis? A collective effort is required to work together to overhaul the situation in our schools. We need a change of mindset among teachers, learners and parents to ensure quality education delivery for learners, particularly in poorly performing schools.

Today out of our own understanding of the extent of the education crisis, we gather in this SADTU Eastern Cape Education Indaba appeal to teachers, as amongst some of the most important public servants to commit to the provision of good and quality teaching and uphold ethical and professional behaviour at all times. We must adopt zero tolerance towards teachers who arrive late for class and leave early.

Those who prey on young girls and treat them as objects of sexual lust must find no space amongst us. Let us be both objects and subjects of change. Let us campaign to ensure that teachers do not abuse their power in society by impregnating school kids and often infecting them with HIV.  As a revolutionary trade union, we must expose and isolate such gross acts of misconduct.

We have a responsibility to inculcate a revolutionary morality which seeks to radically alter the status quo.

A revolutionary morality derives from a yearning to build something different, something new and something that is opposite to what exists. It is zeal to incite the forces of change in the struggle against the terrible state of things. It is impossible for teachers to breed a new generation of anti-capitalist fighters unless we inspire learners from a young age and show them and their parents that we really do have their best interests at heart.

This is the essence of a revolutionary morality - the realisation that overthrowing exploitation will require a struggle waged in different but interconnected terrains.

It is now time that we cease to sloganise and roll up our sleeves to mobilise and galvanise not only SADTU members but the entire society behind a campaign to save our collective future as a nation.

The works of the great teacher and music composer Enoch Sontonga and the dedicated teacher and ardent revolutionary Mathew Goniwe must inspire us to motivate those we teach in the present for generations to come.

COSATU urges all of you to reignite your souls and ensure that the work of these great giants lives on through your deeds, your teachings and your revolutionary commitment.

We wish you best of luck and that your endeavours for the sake of this province which is the home of the international icons such as Nelson Mandela, OR Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Chris Hani. 

Thank you for the invite again.

Issued by COSATU, March 8 2012

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