Only 24% of learners who enrolled for grade 1 in 1998 managed to complete their matric in the minimum of 12 years, while the rest were left with “no qualification, no hope and no future,” Cosatu secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi told the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) congress this week.
“The fault-line remain stubbornly in place, the poor’s children remain trapped in inferior education with wholly inadequate infrastructure,” Vavi said in a speech that expressed clear disillusionment with an ANC leadership whose appointments Cosatu had backed. A major concern was also that 70% of matric passes were produced by only 11% of schools.
This is Sadtu’s 7th congress and the union celebrates its 20th birthday this week. Since its founding in 1990, it has grown to become the largest union in trade union federation Cosatu, with about 245 000 members.
Earlier, Sadtu president Thobile Ntola had deplored the fact that only 3% of learners who enter the schooling system eventually complete higher-grade mathematics.
He challenged delegates not to rob learners of the weapon of education and to transform all schools into institutions of excellence, saying the next five years should be used for effective teaching: teachers should not only fight for salaries but to also balance their responsibility to teach, he said.
Ntola told delegates to be impatient and not allow pupils to learn under trees. “No member of Satdu should teach in a school without necessary facilities, we must not allow that,” he said.
He lashed government’s education management, saying “it had mastered all evils of bureaucracy in the last 16 years”. This bureaucracy was irresponsible, “too entrenched in routine to meet new challenges”, and “deceitful and talentless”, he said.
Even so, Ntola chastised the delegates who booed at the mention of Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s name on Wednesday, the first day of the congress. He told provincial Sadtu leaders to look at their delegates and that “discipline was critical and fundamental.”