For how much longer will government indifference, petty political infighting and bureaucratic incompetence continue to blight millions of South African adults who cannot read or write their own names? And how does one calculate the personal and national costs of the country’s shockingly widespread illiteracy more than a third of adults?
Minister of Education Kader Asmal is a past master of the fluent rhetorical flourish, the deft verbal parry, the suavely polished phrase. No illiterate he. And as many a wincing journalist can testify, he is unforgiving in his pinpointing of the errors to which the media are prone. But he has now got it wrong and badly so.
Last June his rhetorical fireworks soared and sparkled when he launched the South African National Literacy Initiative (Sanli). “The prison of illiteracy is an immediate affront” to our constitutional right to dignity, he thundered. “Language is a vital compass for intellectual navigation, for meaningful movement,” he averred. In his customarily allusive manner, he ranged widely: Shakespeare, Sol Plaatje, Nadine Gordimer, the Qur’an, the Bible, George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, Nat Nakasa, and the first Emperor of China all were harnessed to the minister’s moving and impassioned hymn to literacy. No, no illiterate he.
Half a million adult learners and 50 000 trainers would be signed up within nine to 12 months, Asmal vowed. But where are these learners? There aren’t any. Trainers? A derisory 2000-odd. (See page four.)
Literacy levels affect a vast range of national priorities: unemployment, HIV/Aids awareness, small-business development, environmental education, tourism training, parent/child relationships, primary health care interventions, land resettlement programmes, workplace productivity, human rights and democracy education the list is very long. So why the foot-dragging? Why the pitiful levels of government funding? Where is the political will to make Sanli work as a high-powered, top-priority, genuinely national literacy campaign?
With a perceptible fizzling-out of the rhetorical fireworks, Asmal now says: “It is hoped that by 2002 April a nationwide campaign will be instituted.” But that’s what we all thought he was doing in June last year. His three-and-a-half page reply to this newspaper’s questions cast dim and unconvincing light on the delay.
Urgently accelerate fund-raising, settle squabbling among government bureaucrats, draw on expert experience and put literacy right at the top of national priorities. South Africa has waited long enough.
SACP can justly feel proud
In international communism’s chequered history, the South African Communist Party is one of relatively few parties that can claim genuinely to have been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom waged by the majority of its compatriots. In the process, it has been a flag bearer of some of the finest traditions of the struggle against apartheid. Primary among them was the quest for non-racial unity in action against racism. The party also produced many of the most dedicated, and effective, fighters against racism in that long struggle.
South African communists had the good sense to recognise early last century that, without understanding the experience, hopes and strivings of the majority, their cause would make little progress. Although they believed class struggle underlay the struggle in this country, they recognised that the majority of South Africans experienced this conflict as one primarily of national oppression. And they adapted their theory accordingly, in the process becoming almost indistinguishable from the African National Congress and the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
Since its unbanning in 1990 the SACP has tried to detoxify itself of the Stalinist practices that contrasted so sharply during the struggle years with its political message one that promised a new quality of humanity to most South Africans. Its detoxification appears, ironically, to have been more successful than any similar process undertaken in the ANC.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the SACP achieve power along with the ANC just as the international communist project collapsed. The party’s attempts to develop a distinctive political programme in response to the new situation has been less successful than its introduction of a measure of internal democracy.
As the SACP celebrates its 80th anniversary this month it can justly feel proud. But it needs to ask itself whether the time has come for it to strike out on its own. For the challenge of the time internationally is surely to develop a credible alternative to the neo-liberal economic consensus, which the ANC has embraced. Domestically, the impending strikes across the mining, metal and energy sectors with the frustrations of millions in need of houses and land seem to carry a clear message: there is a need for an assertively independent and credible party of working people and their allies to put forward a clear left agenda. Doing so will require courage, but no more than earlier generations of communists have been willing to show.
@The G8 play God in Genoa
opinion
Salih Booker
The agenda for the summit in Genoa this week of the seven richest countries joined by Russia to make the Group of Eight (G8) will include issues from both sides of the global economic divide. Preoccupied with their own economic well-being, they nevertheless wish to be seen as compassionate about the global poverty at their door that they can no longer ignore.
Those seated around the table represent little more than one-eighth of the world’s 6,2-billion people. But they account for almost two-thirds of the world’s annual income. Together they have a decisive influence over international financial institutions, including direct control of 46% of the votes in the World Bank and 48% of the votes in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The G8 members similarly control other powerful international institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
In short, the G8 represents a sort of global minority rule, largely dictating the architecture of the world’s political economy. The European Commission also participates in these meetings, giving representation to some smaller European countries. Asia’s only representative is Japan. And the rest of Asia, Latin America and Africa are entirely unrepresented, though these regions comprise the majority of the world’s population and nearly all of the world’s poor those earning less than $2 a day.
Although their decisions may mean life or death for tens of millions with no seat at this table, there is no global body that can demand accountability from the rich-country leaders. Increasingly, however, world public opinion is monitoring the words and actions of the “Global Eight”. Spurred by demonstrations, global civic networks and press coverage of topics such as Aids and debt, an international movement for global justice is emerging to provide a counterweight.
African countries, equal in population to the G8 but with only one-fortieth of their income, will be watching the Genoa meeting closely for action on cancelling poor-country debt, supporting greater global investment in health, education and other public goods, and addressing developing country concerns on international trade rules.
Despite their impoverishment and in the face of the worst plague in human history, sub-Saharan African countries are nevertheless paying out more than $13-billion in debt service a year to wealthy creditors. Meanwhile, the debt reduction initiative launched by the G8 two years ago in Cologne has shown negligible results. The key to making more resources available in Africa to fight Aids is cancelling the debts owed to the World Bank and the IMF. So far the rich countries have evaded the issue of cancellation.
The same rich countries have also demonstrated a brutal unwillingness to finance the war against Aids. Total pledges for the global health fund proposed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan may top $1-billion by the end of the G8 summit. But much of that is for future years and so the commitments still add up to much less than one-tenth of the estimated $10-billion a year needed to fund prevention and treatment efforts that could end the pandemic. The richest countries do not yet consider making public investments in addressing global problems as obligations to provide their fair share for the common good.
The rich countries have repeatedly promised to provide 0,7% of their gross national product for overall official development assistance for poorer countries. Although five small European countries now meet the target, not one of the G7 members reaches even half that figure.
The United States ranks at the bottom, with only 0,1% of gross national product going to development assistance, and the Bush administration plans even further decreases in US commitments.
Amazingly, the mantra of the G8 is simply that greater world trade will eventually benefit everyone. African and other developing countries are divided on whether the WTO should open a new round of trade talks. But they are united in their concern that issues of intellectual property rights and patents not be allowed to cripple efforts to cope with the Aids pandemic and the wider global health emergency.
Whatever happens in Genoa, these issues will not go away. The same rich countries will also be the key players in the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington later this year, the WTO meeting in Qatar in November, and the meeting on global development finance in Mexico in March. Increasingly, whenever and wherever they meet, the question posed will be whether the G8 will respond to the needs of the world’s majority or whether it is merely a vehicle for exercising minority rule within a system of global apartheid.
Salih Booker is the executive director of Africa Action, incorporating The Africa Fund, the American Committee on Africa and the Africa Policy Information Centre
@Literacy plan comes to nought
Two years ago Kader Asmal made literacy one of his department’s top priorities, yet a third of South African adults remain illiterate
David Macfarlane
Not one person has yet benefited from the literacy campaign Minister of Education Kader Asmal launched more than a year ago.
Shortly after taking office in 1999 Asmal identified literacy as one of five high-priority programmes. And in June last year he launched the South African National Literacy Initiative (Sanli), formally part of the Department of Education.
In the year since then, little has been done other than to set up and maintain the Sanli bureaucracy “and not one person has been made literate” in the process, says one insider. Asmal set targets that now look decidedly embarrassing: 50 000 trainers to deal with 500 000 learners as of March this year.
Asmal now says 2 080 trainers are currently registered; and “institutional capacity challenges” mean that “we are not in a position to meet the demand” of the “overwhelming response [from] volunteer educators and learners”.
He declined this week to tell the Mail & Guardian how much money has gone into setting up Sanli and ducked the question of how many learners have benefited from any Sanli-initiated programme.
More than a third of South African adults (15 years and older) are illiterate, says Professor John Aitchison of the University of Natal’s school of education. Nearly eight million are functionally illiterate: they might be able to write their names, but cannot, for example, fill out an application form for a bank account. And between three and four million adults have never been able to read or write.
Sanli got off to a promising start last year when Asmal appointed John Samuel, formerly head of the African National Congress education desk and widely respected for his work in education policy development, to lead a team responsible for developing a nationwide implementation plan.
By June last year Samuel and his team had produced a detailed planning document that Aitchison describes as “imaginative and expansive”.
On the basis of the Samuel plan, the government invited tenders from NGOs and others for materials to support the literacy campaign.
And then the wheels came off. Aitchison says “things went steadily downhill, as the national Department [of Education] regained control of the process, halted the production of materials, reverted back to the idea of working through the provincial departments of education and finally settled on a two-province pilot that looked increasingly and suspiciously like the warmed-up leftovers” of previous and far smaller literacy projects.
By the second half of the year, Sanli was both “stalled and dubious”, Aitchison says a view widely echoed among NGOs.
“Sanli won’t work,” says Khulekani Mathe, director of Tembaletu, a KwaZulu-Natal adult education NGO. He lists fundamental problems: the “pure incompetence of Sanli staff”, who mostly have “no track record in or understanding of literacy matters”; the absence of any coherent planning; and “power plays in the Department of Education”.
Another NGO representative elaborates: the Samuel plan looked as though it would operate independently of the education department there was even talk at one stage that it would register as a Section 21 company. At that point, “the department’s bureaucracy fought back and slapped down Samuel”.
Asmal says the plan was “theoretically sound” but “needed to be reconsidered” as it was “too ambitious. For an example 500 000 learners had to be in the system by March 2001 when [Sanli] had not yet been fully established.” He confirms no tenders were awarded and refers to “technical reasons” concerning “provincial strategies” that must reflect “learners’ … needs and their daily lives”.
Mathe comments that the department’s Adult Basic Education and Training (Abet) directorate “put a spanner in the works” by insisting that no literacy campaign could be conducted without the directorate’s involvement. Samuel’s initiative was at that point killed. And, absurdly, Sanli and the Abet directorate now co-exist within the department but have not integrated their activities.
Asmal comments that Sanli “is a campaign for adults who have had no schooling experience at all within the context of informal education while the Abet directorate focuses on formal adult education”.
But “the government is not committed to the campaign”, says Mathe. “It has committed peanuts to it. And there is no political will at the highest level.”
Sanli’s personnel salary budget alone for its first year was pegged at R93-million. Its four-year total projected budget, including salaries, activities and infrastructure, is more than R2-billion.
Through the poverty alleviation fund, the government has “earmarked R15-million for the literacy project”, Asmal says. He says there are “commitments of R35-million from the European Union, R5-million from Danida [Danish International Development Assistance] and R500 000 from MTN to kickstart the campaign. However due to some technicalities the funds are not immediately accessible.”