Govt out of touch
David Macarlane (June 22) highlights the education department’s flawed policy of requiring qualifying schools to exempt poor parents from fees, while failing to compensate them for lost revenue.
In fact, it is the fee-paying parents, many of whom make considerable sacrifices to meet their obligations, who are subsidising exempted parents.
Education Director General Duncan Hindle insists that fee exemptions do not have a detrimental effect on schools’ financial wellbeing because ”we would not have drafted policy that had such an effect”. That is absolute nonsense!
I am treasurer of a Gauteng primary school that last year granted exemptions totalling about R400 000. We are also trying to collect overdue accounts amounting to R100 000 and many have been handed over for collection. At end-December last year, 30% of our debtors’ book had not been collected.
Many of our children come from very poor backgrounds.
State schools receive an annual allocation from the Gauteng education department based on a formula that ranks each school in five poverty-related categories. Our school is a quintile 4 school — incorrectly in our view — and we received the sum of R83 000 last year. That is 4,6% of our income base and barely sufficient to pay our lights and water.
Since March 2005 we have tried to set up a meeting with decision-makers in the department of education to dispute our ranking.
The law states that the department must set up transparent and fair procedures to deal with such queries. But our views, after many meetings at the district office and letters to the Gauteng education department, and even to Education Minister Naledi Pandor, have been ignored.
The funding problems faced by many state schools are systemic and driven by the following:
- Communities may have reached the ceiling of what they can pay in school fees. With rising operating costs, school budgets are under increasing pressure.
- The government allocation has not materially increased for some years and makes a smaller contribution each year to school operating costs.
- Bureaucratic incompetence has prevented schools from disputing their poverty rankings and annual allocations.
- Schools find it difficult to collect outstanding school fees from uncooperative parents who fail to respond to communications. This makes it difficult to follow the law, which requires schools to determine whether the parents qualify for exemption before taking legal action.
- The number of applications for fee exemptions increases every year.
- Gauteng does not recognise that schools need staff to maintain financial records, manage a debtor’s book running up to 1 500 accounts, collect monthly cash payments and attend to daily banking of cash and cheques, and manage the many exemption applications.
I believe a number of schools will soon experience serious financial trauma, with many being unable to cover their operating costs. It will become increasingly difficult for them to maintain standards.
Last week, after the court case against a Durban school, Hindle said his department was working out how to compensate schools for fee exemptions. But the department has a long history of failing to act promptly.
It seems out of touch with what is happening, and to lack the competent staff needed to give schools support and encouragement in these difficult times. — Neil Garden, governing body member
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Patients are bottom line
Although pharmacists support certain aspects of Discovery Health’s Vitality plan, such as its coverage of annual cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose and body mass tests at community pharmacies, the move towards closed networks is a worrying trend for patients and health professionals.
Closed networks work against members’ interests. For instance, the Designated Service Provider (DSP) system penalises members on chronic medication for not using pharmacies approved by their schemes. Members who choose to stick with the pharmacy of their choice are forced to make cash co-payments.
For those who cannot afford to pay cash for their medicine, this is quite a hardship.
DSPs mean that schemes contract to closed systems based on price only, but at the expense of choice and community accessibility.
Perhaps it’s time for our schemes to realise that the provision of healthcare should be guided by patients’ best interests, and not only by the bottom line. — Julian Solomon, chairperson, United South African Pharmacies
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Spin doctoring?
Close to two years ago, President Thabo Mbeki incurred widespread anger over his leadership on Zimbabwe, HIV/Aids and kicking Jacob Zuma out of the Cabinet. Most people believed he had lost support.
Yet Markinor researchers found he scored higher marks than previously, with more than 70% support for his leadership. Many disputed the findings.
In May this year, Markinor found that North West is the second-best performing province in the country. Yet most community protests between 2005 and 2007 took place in North West!
Is Markinor paid by government to be spin doctors? — Mothusi Motlhabi, North West University
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Blank cheque to rule
The United States of Africa is a good idea advocated by great pan-Africanists such as Kwame Nkrumah, Zeph Mothopeng, Robert Sobukwe and Cheikh Anta Diop. The problem is that there is a lack of exemplary national leadership. Political selfishness is killing Africa.
Almost all African states are not sufficiently democratic; even Botswana and South Africa cannot claim to be wholly democratic. Some members of the ruling parties of these two countries are corrupt to the core.
There can be no democracy where, for example, attainment of education is based on extraneous factors such as the ability to pay, rather than a student’s intelligence.
Examples of corruption here are the arms deal and Oilgate. The Botswanan Vice-President, Ian Khama, has used a government helicopter with impunity to attend political party campaigns.
All African ruling parties latch on to power against the continent’s best interests. The skewed distribution of wealth and income and class divisions militate against the establishment of a federated African state.
Africans would be stupid to give the current crop of megalomaniac leaders a blank cheque to rule. — Sam Ditshego
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Roberts’s disservice to Mbeki
When I first met Ronald Suresh Roberts early in our new democracy, at Kader Asmal’s house, I instinctively knew he was a phony. His naked ambition was so transparent that I wanted to flee the minute I met him.
South African politicos, especially ANC members, welcomed him because he seemed so erudite and willing to use his glib tongue in defence of those from whom he could gain patronage. They failed to see that it was his self-serving vanity and desire to promote himself that drove him to ingratiate himself with the powerful.
In a party like the ANC, where true intellectuals are in short supply, he seemed impressive. He can read and write (not that well) and more importantly, ply his trade as a quid pro quo for status in a foreign country that he clearly wanted to make his home.
He will defend political thugs like former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Robert Mugabe if that will gain him access to President Thabo Mbeki. On whom will he leech when Mbeki goes?
Finding against him in the Cape High Court, Judge Leslie Weinkove agreed with the Sunday Times’s counsel that Roberts was ”unbalanced, paranoid and obsessed”, and that he ”spent more time trying to score points off the cross-examiner than in answering the questions truthfully”.
The irony is that, as Max du Preez noted last week, his new book will do Mbeki a great disservice at a time when the president needs all the help he can get, in a party that is deeply divided and with sectors openly mobilising against him. — Rhoda Kadalie
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Roberts’s book brings out irrefutable evidence that Mbeki and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang are being vilified and lampooned for being pedagogues of the oppressed, poor and besieged.
Like Gagool in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, they want Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang caricatured and cast in a horrible mould because of their stance against imperialism. — Bright Banda, Mofolo Central, Soweto
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How refreshing that Roberts defines all actual and potential critics of Mbeki as ”representatives of the colonial mother”.
One would hope that natives, local and imported, are soon liberated from this debilitating intellectual impediment. — Leon Groenveld, Florida Glen
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Make Tel Aviv Israeli capital
Israel’s recent celebration of the 40th anniversary of Jerusalem was not an event that received universal plaudits.
I believe the solution is to make Jerusalem the religious capital of Israel. Then let Tel Aviv become Israel’s political capital.
This would solve the present political impasse in which only a limited number of governments have their embassies situated in that city. This has probably been done to avoid giving recognition to Israel as a state belonging only to the Jews.
One advantage of making Tel Aviv the political capital would be that it would make it incumbent on the Palestinians to follow suit. In finally accepting and developing their own sovereign state, they would have to establish a separate political capital, rather than espousing the belief that Jerusalem must serve this function.
When Judah, in the south of Israel, and Israel in the north, were created years after the flight of the Jews from Egypt, each had their own tribes and their own capital cities. Isn’t the current political situation between the Palestinians and Israelis similar?
After all, the Arabs are half-brothers of the Jews, their respective ancestors being Ismael and Isaac, whose father was Abraham.
And South Africa has survived
having three capital cities, each serving a specific purpose. It may serve as an example of multiple capitals in one country. — AM Levin, Bryanston
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Idealistic talk
The Human Rights Commission’s Jody Kollapen criticises the practice of ”zero tolerance” because it fills jails (”Approach to crime fails democracy”, June 22). The real problem with zero tolerance is that it is verbally endorsed by politicians who have neither the will nor the influence to ensure it is implemented. Criminals know this and thrive on the idealism of people like Kollapen.
Perhaps Kollapen should read ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography and the success he had with real zero tolerance. New Yorkers felt very much safer as a result.
That is what South Africans want — not idealistic talk. — RL Legg, Hillcrest
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In brief
The South African Rugby Union has a naked disregard for consistent action on transformation, and is toying with the government and the nation. Nine black players have been chosen for the Tri-Nations tour of New Zealand and Australia, whereas in Durban, in a losing cause against the All Blacks, two black players were in the national squad. Saru is ignoring Parliament’s sports committee and the masses of South Africans who are trying to normalise sport in this country. — Clement du Plessis, Athlone
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The baying at the ANC policy conference for a ”developmental state”, in which government involvement will supposedly kick-start our sluggish economy, has prompted fears of a nosedive into socialism. This is unlikely. The public sector strike in fact proved Cosatu’s weakness in the tripartite alliance. Despite bringing service delivery to a halt, it was forced to accept a mere 7,5% increase. Cosatu just doesn’t have the power to radically change government policy. — Alex Matthews
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Uri Avney’s article (”Behind the implosion in Gaza”, June 22) provided a sane analysis of the plight of the Palestinians so different from the knee-jerk reaction of many South African Jews. The evil perpetrated by the Israeli military, largely to pander to fundamentalists in the occupied territories, imitates some of the worst behaviour of occupying forces throughout history. — Larry Jenkins, Cape Town