AFTER her failed foray into politics with Agang SA, “an
experiment with a fresh start in party politics way ahead of its time”, Dr Mamphela Ramphele’s reputation went from political thinker to political
tinkerer. With her latest book, "Dreams, Betrayal and Hope" (Penguin, 2014) Ramphele however returns to her roots as
activist with a list of practical ways for South Arica to solve its education
crisis, renew its cities and – finally – achieve a just and reconciled country.
Always an idealist, but now one that has learned the hard
way that “the ANC would stop at nothing to remain in power”, Ramphele pulls no
punches in describing how the Independent Electoral Commission has become
discredited through the actions of the SA Democratic Teachers Union’s 240,000 members,
many of whom worked as presiding officers at voting stations and are often absent
from their classrooms to “spend time on union matters and campaign programmes for
the ANC”.
She says the ANC’s “biggest betrayal” to the people of South
Africa is the ruling party’s “monumental failure” to transform the bantu
education inherited from the National Party, but also offers hope to stop this
rot.
Her solutions start with a challenge to South Africans to dream and then
share these dreams through structured processes to add what she terms the “two
missing foundation stones from the 1994 dream: emotional settlement and fundamental
socio-economic restructuring”, and continues into detailed steps, like
abolishing the non-performing Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas)
that waste R15 billion a year.
Her shoot-first-talk-later political opponents will smirk at
Ramphele’s plans to use “storytelling” in “circles of healing” to reverse “our areas
of woundedness” caused by the “psycho-social engineering” that reach its zenith
during the apartheid era. These plans are, however, grounded in proven
practices that Mamphele say can reverse the cultural and “mental murder” of
indigenous Africans by imperial and colonial conquest.
While not an easy read thanks to lapses into academic jargon,
Ramphele’s dream offers a business woman’s strategic approach to fix the South
Africa from the ground up, and will be food for thought for every caring
citizen.
