The prospect of state schools closing their doors to the nation’s children next week is undoubtedly the biggest crisis this country has faced in four years of democratic government.
The signs are everywhere that education has come off the rails; should there be a strike now, this schooling year might just as well be written off. It is also hard to overstate the political danger to the ruling party. Its main opponent, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), is one of its strongest allies. Their battle is over a principle that stretches across the public service: mass retrenchments – and it is one that could quite easily split the tripartite alliance.
We are at the most a year from the next election, and it must be tempting for the African National Congress to try to defer the showdown until next year, when its two-thirds parliamentary majority and its provincial grip are affirmed.
Talks must continue, of course, and late this week both sides were hinting that some deal was in the offing. But if there is no last-minute reprieve, the government must dig in its heels and win.
The ministry has wasted too much time in the past four years worrying about keeping labour happy, and too little time worrying about the children. It is often forgotten that the pay-off scheme that led to thousands of our best teachers quitting – for which Minister of Education Sibusiso Bengu is regularly slated – was something the unions and other professional teaching bodies insisted upon as a sop to their worried members.
With union power so rampant, the provinces have had neither the will nor the means to trim staff budgets. So what should be priority items, like textbooks, buildings and training – the backbone of any education system – have fallen by the wayside.
Naturally there is public support for the teachers’ plight. The majority of them are hard-working professionals. If the axe is to swing, the first in line should be bumbling bureaucrats, especially in the provinces, before those in the teaching profession, where class sizes of 100 or more are not uncommon.
But any public sympathy for teachers will quickly dissipate once hundreds of thousands of children are put out on to the street – something Sadtu is painfully aware of.
If the government rolls over, it will be a signal to every other public service union that they need only down tools to ensure that the bloated public service – the main obstacle to this country’s transformation – remains bloated. For tens of thousands of public servants, no one will notice, because they do nothing anyway. And if the government does cut a deal – something along the lines of “let’s talk some more, at least until next year” – they must know that the trade-off is continued damage inflicted on the education of children.
Everyone knows what needs to be done. The government must get on with it.
Aiding disaster
Little more than a year ago, international media agencies sent teams of reporters and camera crews to cover the overthrow of President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and the installation of the victorious Laurent Kabila as the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Last month, at the first anniversary of the changeover, there was hardly a reporter to assess the long-term meaning of that event, which has brought little relief for the people of that country. This is an example of a syndrome that Africa – from Somalia to Rwanda – has become familiar with: how human misery can become a “story” overnight and be demoted to a brief item a week later.
It is not just a problem for the media. The aid agencies themselves are asking: are disaster appeals a disaster? The plea from Britain’s International Development Secretary, Clare Short, for aid agencies to break an “endless cycle” in which the spotlight is switched on crisis areas, and then off again, has added to the debate on humanitarian aid. The aid agencies and many journalists involved have had doubts about whether the current approach is effective or even ethical.
Few aid agencies would accept the argument that emergency appeals should be stopped altogether. In the short run that would either mean failing to get the food or blankets where they were needed, or it would force the agencies to dig deeper into reserves with no guarantee of replenishment.
Part of the problem is that the focus of the aid agencies has changed radically. They now need to adopt a higher and more competitive profile and find themselves embroiled in the business of news management – as reflected in a recent controversy over whether or not to launch an appeal for southern Sudan. Is it right that they should become, by default, “arbiters of the needs of suffering populations”?
The point is that humanitarian aid is no substitute for development: most famines and disasters are made by man, not by nature; war and conflict fill the space that should be occupied by development.
The problems that need to be addressed are profoundly political and structural, and require a much greater analytical depth and perspective both in reporting by the media and in policy formation by agencies and governments, including our own.