EDUCATION: Shattered school windows and poor relationships … PWV MEC for education Mary Metcalfe faces a tough task. But she is not daunted. By Gaye Davis
SATURDAY morning at Mapetla Secondary School, Soweto. Parents, teachers, pupils and members of community organisations sit in the stifling heat of the cramped classroom. No one bothers to open a window, which are all smashed anyway.
On a dirt-smeared wall a bored hand has penned: “All day I dream about soccer”. The sun beats through the tin roof, the ruins of the collapsed ceiling. Faces etched with concern and expectation focus on Mary Metcalfe, PWV MEC for education — and symbol of hope and salvation of a new order.
Metcalfe has rushed here from opening a conference in Germiston. She called the meeting after receiving a report on the school, its author expressing “the more than ordinary hope that your office is going to give this problem the immediate attention it deserves”.
Mapetla pupils wrote no June exams; there are no typing or duplicating facilities, let alone enough textbooks. If they come at all, teachers and pupils arrive late and leave early; classes, if they happen, start at 9am and finish at 11am. Most of Mapetla’s 800 pupils must stand to be taught; winter saw desks and chairs stolen for firewood. Crime is rife. Strangers defecate in the ruined classrooms; pupils are sick of cleaning up the mess.
As people rise to speak, Metcalfe’s personal adviser, Robinson Ramaite, chalks a growing list of problems on a worn blackboard. Bitter divisions emerge. Some teachers support the acting principal (absent today) appointed by “the minister of favouritism and nepotism”; others, passed up for promotion, want him out.
The parent, teacher, student association (PTSA) “acts clandestinely”, says a teacher; a PTSA member slams staff who don’t attend meetings. Teachers drink and sell drugs, says a parent; not all of us, retorts a teacher. Trapped in the morass of a failed administration, people turn on each other.
As voices rise to a crescendo, Ramaite holds up his hands to restore order. “We can all have different points of view,” he says, “but we are all faced with one problem.” At the top of his list he writes the word “governance”.
For, as Metcalfe explains: “This building with its broken windows and collapsed ceiling is a sign of collapsed relations at the school.” Without an effective PTSA, none of the problems will be solved.
“If parents stop meeting, if the PTSA stops operating, if today’s meeting is the last of its kind, is there any point in the government bringing books, furniture and equipment? Who will take care of it?” she asks.
“We have to work together to make this school a place that the community loves, defends and protects. It can no longer be a school of Bantu education. It’s a school where we want to see our young people empowered to take their rightful place in South African society, to grow as young people should… If we fail, then our nation cannot succeed. So the responsibility that made you come today is a responsibility not only towards your child but to the nation.
“We will play our part, but we ask you to play your part together with us.”
By the meeting’s end, the PTSA’s authority to run the school has been reaffirmed; there’s a new energy. Pupils and teachers will discuss a code of conduct; plans are laid for a clean-up day. For her part, Metcalfe will arrange for the delivery of desks, chairs and equipment so exams can go ahead.
MECs like Metcalfe arguably have the toughest — and least understood — jobs in the new government. They function at the coalface, on the cutting edge of the expectations and fears of the population at large. It is at their doors that the toyi-toyis halt; they who must do battle with bureaucrats resistant to change.
Yet, while shouldering enormous responsibility, they have no powers. In the nature of constitutional change, apartheid laws are still on the statute books; until they go, budgets allocated for the administration of those laws still go to the old departments — and decision-making rests with them.
“I had a delegation of tremendously well-organised parents with a carefully prepared memorandum and quite simple demands,” Metcalfe says. “To say it was heart- breaking would be overstating it, but it was difficult because I’ve been arguing that parents have to get involved in running schools. I had to tell them I’d speak to the Department of Education and Training to see what could be done — their horror was extreme.”
Central government will assign provinces their powers only once their administrations are up and running; rightly so, says Metcalfe. “I can hardly manage the volume of work that covers my desk at the moment. If it were to increase enormously — because I’d then be responsible for every function designated a minister in law — I could just not cope …”
Put simply, her job is to pull together into one house by January 1 next year the four different departments responsible for black, white, coloured and Indian education. But as she points out, creating a single education department is not the same as forging a single system of education.
Each department runs by its own rules and ethos; out of them must come a single framework informed by an overarching political vision. It’s like nailing a blancmange to the ceiling while still building the ladder.
“You try to introduce something you think will help deal with an immediate crisis and at the same time provide a framework for a single system. Then you get a department saying this will limit our particular powers or functions — so you’re kind of being held back by the defensiveness of, particularly, the white department. I think they have the sense that if they could just run the whole system it would be simplest.”
It’s a hugely complex task, with no room for mistakes. A five percent error in putting the region’s teachers on a single payroll, for example, would mean 7 000 not getting their salaries.
Most of the administrative reconstruction would normally be handled by a director general; Metcalfe is doing it herself while awaiting a decision by the Public Service Commission (“those who currently hold the power”) on her request to appoint an acting head of department.
“To handle a political transition of this magnitude at the same time as a total administrative transformation is just crazy. Someone told me the only historical example of this they could think of was Napoleon, and it took him 15 years.” It would have been easier with a unitary, rather than federal, system of government — but that fight was long ago conceded.
For Metcalfe, the single biggest battle looming is with the bureaucrats. Their jobs constitutionally guaranteed, they will have to be negotiated out of office. Because head offices of the old departments are in the PWV, Metcalfe will be awash in senior bureaucrats. The budgetary implications of easing them out are obvious, but the political battle she’ll have to win will be negotiating out sufficient numbers of high-level staff to make room for the new blood she so desperately needs.
It’s difficult; she believes many of the old guard genuinely want to work in the new system, “and will feel that willingness and commitment not to be valued”. But she needs people with the right kind of experience as well as the expertise.
Restoring shattered relationships between teachers, parents and pupils at schools like Mapetla High is just one aspect of her job. But for Metcalfe, it lies at the heart of it.