The landmark government review of its school financing policy and practice, released in the first week of March, responds to a need widely articulated well before Minister of Education Kader Asmal announced the review in September last year.
The problems are now well known. However progressive in its promotion of redress and equity, official policy has all too often failed to produce equally progressive practice. And in some cases — school fees, for instance — policy itself has come under fire.
Ongoing and massive inequalities in the system disadvantage many and especially marginalise the poor.
So the mere fact that the government has responded is thoroughly welcome, if overdue. It is also welcome to have human rights so unmistakably on the agenda: some of the report’s strongest language is reserved for abuses of rights as in the public humiliation of children because their parents are too poor to afford fees.
The review is now on offer for public comment. But there are already grounds for concern about the degree of criticism officialdom will actually entertain.
When the Department of Education released the review on Monday, high-octane pre-emptive measures radiated ominously from the government. ‘This is quality stuff,†said education director general Thami Mseleku, ‘it couldn’t get better†— an introduction seemingly designed to close down debate before it had commenced. Asmal referred admiringly to ‘our research — I emphasise real researchâ€.
This is work conducted by ‘professionals who care about educationâ€, he said.
The implication was not hard to discern: all other research, including presumably work that has for a long time highlighted problems now central to the government’s report, is somehow inferior.
It is an unavoidable fact that major role players — including the country’s largest teacher union, education experts and some communities — are disappointed with the review in very serious ways. We report elsewhere in this edition on some of the reasons they give.
The government surely has to engage with these critiques in good faith. This was not evident when Asmal strangely observed, ‘It is not only some people who have the prerogative to find certain problems [in education] unacceptable, they don’t have a monopoly. So do we.†But if the government equally finds such problems unacceptable — and we believe it does — why such puerile point-scoring?
There are powerful pressures on the government to deliver — in all spheres. Consultation with all players will promote education delivery rather more profoundly than will rhetoric apparently cued exclusively to next year’s general election.
Use the ‘golden share’
That Telkom’s initial private offer went off with barely a squeak of protest merely underscores the disorganisation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu) feeble communications affiliate. Labour’s objections, articulated by Cosatu when the IPO was first mooted, still hold water.
Privatisation is not inherently evil, as the far left would have us believe. But the policy has to be assessed case by case in terms of its costs and benefits. Because of depressed conditions in the global telecommunications market, the Telkom share offer brings barely R4-billion to the fiscus. Hardly a king’s ransom, given initial estimates of R30-billion. The listing may have some symbolic effect on investor perceptions, and service to high-end users will no doubt improve. But what will happen to jobs and to Telkom’s public service obligations now that private shareholders have a much enlarged interest?
Already there are reports — which Telkom denies — that 10 000 more jobs may be cut in an effort to improve efficiencies. This has prompted an expression of alarm from the African National Congress, which, in another guise, as the governing party, has driven the IPO. What could well happen is that employment will shrink in a piecemeal, low-profile way over a period, in the same way that thousands of workers have been discreetly shed over the past five years. The government continues to boast of two million new phone connections, despite the fact that the bulk have been disconnected, apparently because users cannot pay. To the detriment of low-income South Africans, Telkom has reversed the policy of using international tariffs to cross-subsidise local calls.
Telkom faces quite different challenges, and is answerable to a different kind of constituency from its counterparts in the rich countries. It operates in a Third World market, where a large part of the population lacks jobs and basic services, including telephones. The government must use its ‘golden share†to ensure that South Africa’s deprived millions do not slip further down its agenda.