‘An educationist should never be made a minister of education, just like a military person should not be made minister of defence,” Kader Asmal, then water and forestry minister, told the Sunday Times in 1996.
“They bring their own activist ideas, but there is more to it than that [activism].”
President Thabo Mbeki, who has in the past said he does not read newspapers, must have missed the story, for he named Asmal, the educationist and intellectual maestro, minister of education in his first Cabinet in 1999.
For the past week, his tenure as education system political head has come under sharp scrutiny. His announcement last week, to much fanfare, that the number of learners who passed the 2003 matric exams was higher than it has ever been (73% compared with 69% the previous year) unleashed a torrent of analytical debate and scepticism about the meaning and reliability of the results.
The contrast with the acclaim that his appointment to education’s top job elicited could not be starker. He inherited a system ravaged by apartheid, and only faintly improved by his predecessor, Sibusiso Bengu. The main bequest of Bengu, many say, was sheer confusion, epitomised in the totally incomprehensible new school Curriculum 2005. To his eternal credit, Asmal bit the bullet and ordered a review of that curricular mess. He took immense political flak, especially from Bengu acolytes — but the result of the review was spectacular: a user-friendly curriculum that, if teachers are trained adequately (a big if, that), has every prospect of being the most progressive in the world.
“Asmal was a model minister, an extremely hard-working minister,” Anna Mkwena, a former water and forestry ministry consultant, told the Mail & Guardian as a way of explaining what she sees as a turnaround in education, particularly matric.
“He was extremely hard working and made everyone around him work as hard when we worked on the water law review team called the policy and strategy team.
“We worked well into the next morning. At bosberaads he would make us read Bills, word for word, paragraph after paragraph.
“He ensured that the portfolio committee knew what was going on in Schoeman Street [the Ministry of Water and Forestry headquarters]. We consulted with everyone, from the farmers to the captains of industry. From Bloemfontein to Mankweng. We had close to 40 national workshops,” said Mkwena.
But since he relocated down the same street, to the education ministry, across from the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, the jury remains out on whether the former law academic has been a success at his post.
As with his term as water and forestry minister, Asmal is still plagued by accusations that he rushes projects through without properly weighing the consequences.
Asmal’s detractors say his rush to reduce the number of tertiary institutions, after the 1990s policy commitment to “massification” of higher education, has not won him many new friends.
And his decision to make seven, instead of six, the age at which children would start school — only for the decision to be reversed following a Constitutional Court case — caused him to lose face with thousands of parents who saw their children lose a year in their education careers.
But he appears to have as many fans as detractors.
Asmal was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize in August 2002, “for putting human and environmental needs above commercial and political interests when he was minister of water affairs and forestry”.
Dr Guy Preston, the national programme leader for the Working for Water Programme and Asmal’s former adviser, described the education minister as a “visionary, a hard task- master and output-oriented”.
“He deals with detail, reads quickly and interrogates everything put before him. Most of what he did at water affairs and forestry has been lauded all over the world,” said Preston.
“For example, the Working for Water Programme is the biggest conservation programme in Africa and has won 38 awards. “It got off the ground because of Kader Asmal,” said Preston.
He added that the accusation that Asmal was obsessed with “delivery-now and sustainability-later approach” was simplistic.
“Professor Asmal’s water legislation was all about sustainability in the management of water resources. Sustainability is a process, something that one builds towards. But of course we can’t foresee everything. Certainly there are decisions we took in Working for Water, that, in retrospect, were not optimal. But that does not mean the programme is not relevant or sustainable,” said Preston.
Andrew Miller, the CEO of Project Literacy, said while the past 10 years had seen an improvement in policies regarding adult education, “actual delivery was found wanting. Adult education remains the smallest funded, with between 1% and 2% of provincial education budgets.
“When he gets questioned about that, he says the national department makes policy, it is provinces who implement. But his leadership style is such that he has been forceful where he has wanted to push things.”
A senior official in the education department told the M&G that it is this leadership style for which Asmal is now being criticised, despite its being the reason the media had punted him to be education minister.
“In 1999 when there was speculation about who would be minister of education, Asmal was named because he was a man who was not afraid to make unpopular decisions — someone who could lead from the front with those behind him screaming and shouting.
“Given what he had to work with, he has done more than anyone else could. Sure, he is a showman and downplays failures. But that is how he has got things moving here.
“We are living in a country that can be very depressing, but if you make people believe that things are working, people start to believe they are working,” said the official.
The official said Asmal’s other virtue was that he had turned what is in other departments a routine meeting between a minister and his provincial counterparts into a statutory body —the Council of Education Ministers (CEM).
“He has made the CEM an important consultative body. Everyone who participates in it looks forward to the discussions that take place there and to being kept informed about what happens in the education sector.
“Some people say he uses it to centralise the control of education, but with the way that some provinces run the departments, maybe that is not such a bad idea.”
Professor Sipho Seepe, acting vice-chancellor of Vista University, called Asmal’s style, including his fondness for “centralising”, an example of “the undemocratic streak that characterises” him.
Seepe said Asmal’s style, one unable to accept failure, was managerial as opposed to consultative; so the minister regularly had to be taken to court “to have sense knocked into his head”.
Seepe pointed to Asmal’s riding roughshod over the University of Transkei’s desire, along with its merger partners Border Technikon and Eastern Cape Technikon, to be known as the Walter Sisulu University for Science and Technology, as an example of this managerial centralism. He also cited Asmal’s very public lashing of Unisa for daring to go ahead and appoint a new vice-chancellor (Barney Pityana) in 2002 in defiance of his explicit request that all institutions heading for mergers refrain from making senior appointments.
“His handling of the [then University of Durban-Westville vice-chancellor Dr Saths] Cooper issue is another example of his hurrying for headlines without providing reflective assessment before he goes headlong with issues.
“He instituted an inquiry [into governance and management problems at the University of Durban-Westville] and when Dr Bongani Khumalo [the chair of Transnet who conducted the inquiry] came with a report that was damning [of Cooper] he said there was no time to remove Cooper. He should have thought about that before starting the inquiry.
“On a scale of one to 10, I would give him four, which in terms of matric means he would have done very well,” said Seepe.
Although Seepe believes that “we are a people who take the issue of miracles too far — we want to achieve excellent results without putting in the necessary rigour that such excellence demands”, Asmal’s former aide Bheki Khumalo feels the increase in pass rates is no mystery.
“I know from experience because I was a teacher myself in Thembisa. In the early 1990s teachers would come to school at nine and leave at one. At that stage education had all but collapsed in black areas.
“[After being appointed Asmal’s spokesperson] we used to read the papers and we would tell him [Asmal] about a problem in an area. He would say ‘let’s go there’. That is why there were so many surprise visits at schools.
“It is a credit to Kader that all that [teachers bunking classes] has stopped,” said Khumalo, who is now the presidency spokesperson.
Thulas Nxesi, South African Democratic Teachers Union general secretary, said Asmal had “done well overall because he had learned to consult with stakeholders midway through his term”.
He said the union’s differences with Asmal related to issues such as the minister wanting private sector-like performance evaluation systems without regard for the factors such as available resources at schools.
Nxesi said Asmal had also failed to ensure coordination among provincial education departments.
“Gauteng is always doing its own thing and there is still no solution to the management system crisis in the Eastern Cape,” he said.
Despite the division of opinions, Asmal’s stature within the African National Congress remains secure. He returned to the country in 1990, after many years as dean of law at Trinity College, Dublin, to an academic post at the University of the Western Cape, and was soon playing a central role in the thickets of constitutional talks then gathering momentum.
Legend has it that the first draft of the Bill of Rights was drafted on his kitchen table in Dublin.
An ANC insider and educationist said Asmal was respected in the ANC because of his record of getting things done and his independent thinking.
“He has remarkably high standing within the ANC. That does not mean he is close to the leadership or he is an insider.
“He is chairperson of the Conventional Arms Committee and the ANC disciplinary committee, and in 1999 was asked to help arrange for the inauguration [of Mbeki’s presidency]. This shows they respect him and trust him.
“Even though he is an independent thinker, he says what he thinks has got to be said and is known to have a view on all things. That is why he is so highly regarded.” Asmal is fourth on the list of ANC members returning to Parliament and was elected the eighth most popular ANC leader at the party’s national conference in December 2002.
Independent political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi said Asmal’s standing within the party was unlikely to be affected by his performance as minister.
“The ANC does not pay attention to education as I think it should. Individual education ministers and MECs [provincial ministers] have been developing education policy away from the ANC. We have not seen the ANC actively inform education policy.
“The ANC has become more alienated from what goes on in government as far as education is concerned. It is therefore difficult to say what Asmal’s standing is as a minister.”
Matshiqi repeated what other analysts say about disproportional attention given to matric results instead of the schooling system as a whole.
And he highlighted Asmal’s playing of the media. “He appears more like a spin doctor than a minister. Maybe that can be explained by referring to his time at water and forestry, where quantity was the only indicator of significance. He presents you with a house painted in bright colours on the outside, without looking sufficiently at what is inside the house,” concluded Matshiqi.
With the imminent retirement of the sickly Dullar Omar as minister of transport, will the party call on its respected Mr Fixit to sort out what appears to be, like matric, a perennial December/January ritual about what statistics mean? One thing is for certain, nobody would accuse him as transport minister of inflating figures.