/ 8 January 2010

Grasp the nettle, please

Right, class. The education minister told you on Thursday that it is “pleasing to note” our exam system is “maturing” and “stabilising” and “we have seen some positive gains in the results of the class of 2009”: “There is an increase in the number of passes over 40% and an increased number of bachelors passes from 18% to 32%,” she said.

Did you get that, class? Well, no. With more than half a million pupils, and untold numbers of their relatives, sweating to hear the results of the most stressful exams they will ever write, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s first statistical salvo on Thursday morning was gobbledygook you’d have to be a professor of education to have understood. Maybe.

If nothing else was clear about Motshekga’s dizzy foray into pedagogical instruction, one thing was: don’t think, just feel. But who did she think she was fooling?

By early Thursday morning, about 60 000 pupils remained uncertain about whether they would even hear their results because of yet another round of security cock-ups in Mpumalanga. Clearly under massive political pressure, the national headmistress announced beneficently that they shouldn’t worry because, after a “rigorous” process, quality body Umalusi has found, amazingly, that there is no “systemic problem” in that unhappy province, so the kids can have their results. And feel good.

But Mpumalanga’s children had scarcely wiped the sweat from their brows before Motshekga announced that her department would take over the province’s exams process next year (too bad for the Mpumalanga class of 2009’s confidence in the reliability of their results, then); its exam “structures will be immediately reconstituted” (meaning?); and the Hawks are being called in “to get to the root cause of the problem”. All this, but there is no “systemic problem”? No problem in the system?

But there was no time to worry about that: Motshekga was quickly asking us to feel good again because “more learners have registered for mathematics (296 659) than for mathematical literacy (284 309)”. Why is this good? It wasn’t explained. And the bland recitation of these allegedly feel-good (but, as presented, meaningless) figures muffled the fact that a derisory, indeed nationally catastrophic, 50% of all candidates even wrote mathematics. And how many of that minuscule 50% passed? She didn’t divulge this before trying to make us feel good because “the results for mathematics also show greater differentiation at the upper levels”. Huh?

Eventually, the weight of truth forced Motshekga to note that the overall pass rate had declined again, now to 60,6% — but it’s a “slight decline”, so feel good, or goodish. Truth also compelled her to note (without doing the maths — we had to) that seven provinces (there are only nine) recorded declines, with Mpumalanga (yes) at the bottom of the barrel.

So, who is she fooling? Not universities, which already have to apply their own Band Aids (in the form of “benchmark tests”) to the entire matric and schooling disaster; and not the majority of the youth, whose anger justifiably grows the longer they are denied the liberation promises of equitable and high-quality post-apartheid education.

Motshekga shows no signs of being able to grasp the nettle. So what is she doing in this most urgently important of portfolios?

Get ready to party
It’s finally 2010, when South Africa gets to host one of the greatest sporting spectacles on Earth: the Fifa World Cup.

We remain critical of some of the poor choices made in the billions of rands spent towards developing World Cup-associated infrastructure. The sight of Durban’s new Moses Mabhida stadium — initially projected to cost taxpayers R1,6-billion but eventually climbing to more than R3-billion — sitting right next to the perfectly upgradeable Kings Park, is merely one sign of our hubris.

We could have played harder ball, too, with Fifa, to ensure that its strictures were loosened enough to create a truly developmental World Cup that integrated emerging entrepreneurs and the large informal sector into the tournament. Or, at the very least, allowed them to earn a living inside its periphery.

And we will continue to delve into the murky world where business, political and sporting interests converge.

But we are also ready for the mother of all parties.

The world really is coming to South Africa. The World Cup is much bigger than any international tournament we have previously hosted. And, as we party alongside Argentinians, Nigerians, Koreans and Spaniards, hopefully our insularity and parochialism — which in their benign form manifests as ignorance and at their most rabid has spawned xenophobic violence — will be alleviated.

The potential for South Africans to realise that we are truly part of a greater connected humanity is an exhilarating one.

South Africans of all shapes, sizes, classes and colours are embracing both Bafana Bafana and the World Cup. Football is putting us in a good mood and this is equally exhilarating.

We are in the throes of restating our common destiny, which will reach its crescendo in June and July this year. But this good will is ephemeral and needs to be managed carefully so that the kickoff for a new decade doesn’t end up in an own goal.