Tragic panto of matric

The absurd drama of matric continues. And the release of the results every festive season is an exceptionally long-running government production that by now rivals an Andrew Lloyd Webber blockbuster.

For the next three years, the country as a whole — and thousands of pupils, teachers and parents in particular — will sweat through the matric endurance test. In 2008 something called the further education and training certificate (FETC) will replace the matric exam. We don’t know much about it as yet.

But “there is no secrecy and once government has information to communicate to the public it will provide it”, Minister of Education Naledi Pandor crisply told the Mail & Guardian this week.

So the Lloyd Webber matric extravaganza is what we’re stuck with. Leading lady Pandor glittered, though with severe gravitas, in her role last week Wednesday when she announced the results. Compared with previous productions, little was different.

Some cast members have changed. The tone of the show was more muted and the pace more measured (perhaps the cast is by now tired too). There was rather more nuance, subtlety and intelligence in the lead role; though the leading lady was reading from a script imposed on her (but that she intends to rewrite).

A striking difference, though, was that the final curtain never came down. About 10 minutes before applause and bows, the heroine ended the performance by congratulating the audience and wishing them “a happy and prosperous new year”.

This was because the results for Mpumalanga aren’t yet available — a backstage hitch involving some minor players apparently feeding their pupils their lines by writing them on the blackboard. The leading lady — who is also the producer and director of the extravaganza — is hunting down those miscreants.

So most of Mpumalanga — especially pupils and parents — has had a miserable festive season and a ghastly start to the new year. The heroine apparently forgot this when she congratulated “all matriculants”. All? Does she know what the Mpumalanga part of the audience thought of the show?

If so, she didn’t share that with the nation — no doubt the sort of “information” the government will “communicate to the public” when it has the information.

The problem here is that people pay a lot — financially and otherwise — to sweat through shows as prestigious (though pointless) as this. And treating the audience with this sort of contempt usually condemns cast members to very brief employment.

So, little difference from previous productions. Cast in last year’s leading role was Kader Asmal. After his bellowingly and shockingly poor performance when he released the 2003 results, he found himself ejected not just from the Ministry of Education after the April election but from the Cabinet too.

One familiar face last week Wednesday was long-time supporting actor Thami Mseleku. He was filling the part of Department of Education director general (DG) that day — but had only another two days in the role. He too was leaving the cast, and is now DG in the Department of Health — the health of which must be of even greater public concern now (consider who the leading lady there is).

Mseleku wasn’t leaving the cast very happily — and it showed. He preceded Pandor last week, displaying a bizarre and cynical jocularity as he flourished bar graphs or medians (or something) that senior professors and journalists couldn’t quite understand. Both his tone and his obscurity also flung contempt at the audience.

Asmal’s bombastic, self- aggrandising, smoke-and- mirrors act when he released the 2003 results — which showed the highest-ever and least credible ever pass rate (73%) — got him pelted with ripe tomatoes and rotten eggs.

So bad was his performance on the day that even he realised it (a rare epiphany of self-awareness). Or perhaps the unprecedentedly high public scepticism, outrage and misery prompted someone to tell Asmal his future was in jeopardy.

That got him moving. The following week he summoned the nation back, this time to his own changing room in Schoeman Street, Pretoria. The nation duly, and wearily, obeyed. But he was nowhere to be seen. A beaming Mseleku occupied Asmal’s changing room. He introduced some equally jovial, and some grave, members of Umalusi — the government’s quality watchdog body. They proceeded to try and reassure the audience that the marks were all okay and reliable and sound and respectable.

That performance failed dismally, and the audience was quite rightly unimpressed. Some even demanded their money back.

Mseleku made no mention of Asmal’s startling absence, so some of the audience began to suspect the cast members weren’t getting on too well with each other (domestic festive season stress?).

And some too started thinking Asmal might do well to consider how he’d be earning his crust of bread after the April election. Certainly, massive sections of the audience — pupils and parents — right then were worrying about their own crusts too, as they realised the piece of paper they’d sweated to receive was worthless.

Back now to last week’s production. Lloyd Webber isn’t actually in the same class. Nor is Shakespeare. The incredible mixture of genres puts the matric show in its own league.

There’s tragedy, comedy, pathos, surrealism and absurdity that include: