Although I’m not a big reader of The Sunday Times, Fred Khumalo got me thinking. He was having a go at the most recent faux pas by one of the country’s emerging, supposed leaders. This time it was poor, young Julius Malema.
Khumalo quoted one such de-contextualised phrase: “I got excited after joining Cosas and failed grade 8. In 1997, I was expelled for political activities and pleaded to be taken back, and I repeated grade 9 in 1998.”
Three things can be construed from this. One, Jules (as I like to call my man) didn’t crack the nod into higher education or matric for that matter. Two, he’s excitable, by his own admission. Three, he knows how to grovel. Two and three seem to be entirely consistent with the state of the state these days. Err via an outburst of emotion one day; retract the next. Screw up in one tirade blame the media in the next hyperventilation.
But, like a song that entrenches itself in one’s consciousness, it was the first point to which I’m repeatedly drawn. Higher education is clearly dangerous in today’s political climate. Zuma has no formal education, but that hasn’t deterred him. In fact, education and its pernicious offspring, higher education, appears as a deterrent to political ambition. And quite frankly I think the new unintellegentsia could be right.
There’s no denying that George W Bush is not the brightest briquette on the braai and that Barack Obama might well lose the upcoming election simply because he appears to be too clever. In fact, it’s the United States that has got me thinking along these lines. There’s a website — isn’t there always? — in the US that proudly tracks the behavioural patterns of graduates. It’s also a pretty good guess that most, if not all, of these odd behaviours would be replicated in other countries, including good old South Africa.
Did you know that higher education graduates are given to the most remarkable of behaviours? Did you know, for example, that they are less likely to smoke or go to jail than your average high-school leaver? And that’s not the worst of it. Graduates tend to earn substantially more (60% over the course of a working lifetime), pay much more in taxes and are hardly any burden on the public medical infrastructure.
The real stunner though is the less obvious proclivities of these graduates. They are statistically more likely to vote, to volunteer, to give blood, to donate to charities and generally to feel healthier than their less educated peers.
Now, if one were to gather these graduate types around a table and synthesise them into an aggregated individual, what would we get? The ideal citizen, that’s what. Compliant, healthy and working for the public good for free.
If that’s the case, one question continues to niggle away. No, it’s not “why are our leaders not better educated”. The question is deeper. If you are plotting to create an eager and largely compliant citizenry, would not higher education be the perfect vehicle to achieve this ambition? Docile Cuba, for example, immediately springs to mind with its huge graduate population per thousand citizens. Surely this kind of assistance is crucial for the building of a young democracy, surely the public return on investment of one graduate — largely irrespective of discipline — is equal to hundreds of the unemployed who largely drain resources?
A clever government would be bending over backwards to create an educated majority at both further education and training colleges and higher education levels simply because they produce, in the process, a passive citizenry.
So, there must be something else at work here. Maybe Jules offers an insight into what that might be. Let’s say we take Jules seriously in his talk of laying down his life for Zuma and the revolution. If a revolution is actually in progress and our current democracy is a veneer, then it is the obligation of the citizenry to be disobedient. If this is so, then crime, violence and xenophobia swim starkly into focus. What if the government has, inadvertently or on purpose, kept the old revolutionary discourse in play and in so doing has inculcated a real belief among disenfranchised South Africans that we are still in the grips of a revolution?
It then follows that the atrocities that blight our country on a daily basis are not atrocities at all, but rather the logical and banal casualties of our fight for a democracy not yet achieved.