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| These toilets at Ncincinikwe Senior Primary School in South Africa shows what the ANC's education looks achieved. |
OPINION: THESE are exciting times, more exciting even
than 1994, when all South Africans stood in long queues in an attempt to cast
their first democratic votes in our miracle election.
Attempt? Yes, for as an IEC observer back then, working in dusty
hamlets in North West, I saw two instances of the many questionable votes IFP
leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi refers to when he states our Independent Electoral
Commission has been less independent and more commissioned since the start of
our democracy.
It did not matter then and in the elections that followed. As long
as the vote was free and the campaigning reasonably fair for the democratically
desired result to be proclaimed, none of us minded all those discarded boxes
full of ballot papers could safely being discounted.
But it matters now, as the vote has become increasingly automatic
and the campaigning definitely state captured, as Mamphela Ramphele points out
in her bookDreams, Betrayal and Hope.
After her failed AgangSA party, Ramphele learnt the hard way that
the ANC will stop at nothing to remain in power and saw firsthand how the
Independent Electoral Commission continues to discredit itself through the
actions of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union’s 240 000 members. She calls these
members the foot soldiers of the ANC, and says they spend more time on union
matters and campaign programmes for the ANC than teaching, to which our pupils’
results bear testimony.
Ramphele says the ANC’s biggest betrayal to the people of South
Africa is its monumental failure to transform the “architect of apartheid”
Hendrik Verwoerd’s system of inferior bantu
education. As minister of Native Affairs, Verwoerd defended his closing
down of missionary schools and tribalising of universities by asking: “What is
the use of teaching the bantu child
mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?”
The ANC and its minions in the SA Democratic Teachers Union have
not only kept in place Verwoerd’s philosophy on education, but added to its
oppression through ill-discipline and a constant refusal to have teachers graded
on their results. Stories abound of principals in rural and not so rural schools
getting death threats for just trying to get their Sadtu-member teachers into
the classroom on time, never mind teaching.
Fact is, the rot in education and hence the future of our country,
goes deep, but Ramphele, and lately Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and now
even our former Finance minister Pravin Gordhan, all offer hope that we can cut
out this putrid gangrene and start afresh.
Ramphele’s solution starts 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 socioeconomic restructuring”.
She wants to start the big fix by abolishing the non-performing
Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas) that waste R15 billion a
year.
Her murderous political opponents in KZN and the Free State will no
doubt smirk at the motherly Ramphele’s plans to use “storytelling” in “circles
of healing” to reverse “our areas of woundedness” caused by the “psycho-social
engineering” that reached its zenith during the apartheid era. These plans are,
however, grounded in proven practices that Ramphele says can reverse the
cultural and “mental murder” of indigenous Africans by imperial and colonial
conquest.
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| Suits and ties in Africa show a colonial mindset. |
I want to add to these intellectual exercises a much more practical
requirement to loosen the shackles of racist colonialism — let’s adopt a uniform
to show we are Africans who are serious about fixing South Africa with solutions
that work for us, not for a rich mining corporate or faceless group of
shareholders. This requirement is simply to drop the ties, guys.
As an African whose Huguenot tribe escaped the oppression of the
Catholic Church to settle in the Cape in 1676, more than a century before Chief
Zwide started the holocaust that saw the birth of the amalgamated Zulu tribe
from various Nguni tribes, I had high hopes that Madiba’s cool collarless shirts
would inspire a new sartorial culture suited for our climate. Instead, we still
ape the Savile-suited clones from colder climes up north. Now, I get that some
women like a man in a smart suit, so wear that hot jacket if you so desire. But
why add that useless little European neck scarf?
As a first small step on the journey to start the real rebuild of
our country, I say we lose that noose. Then let’s roll up the sleeves and start
measuring each other on how well we do what we do, not in the European fashions
we wear.
This attitude is why Japanese businesspeople introduce themselves
by their company first, their names second. Such a shirtsleeve approach is also
what made Korea’s economy boom after it suffered its own Difaqane under the
Japanese. And it will certainly help us Africans to loosen the shackles on our
minds that are imposed by capitalists who will tell us, against all evidence,
that the International Monetary Fund will secure our financial stability,
facilitate international trade, promote employment and sustainable economic
growth, and reduce poverty.
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| Food tunnels in the marginal land on the Gaza strip. |
With our minds freed of this lie, the next step is to start making
tunnels above ground to grow food for in tribal areas, instead of sending the
men to tunnel deep underground for The Man, who will sell our rocks cheap for us
to buy back as shiny baubles. For both Paul Kruger and Julius Malema had a point
when they observed, 200 years apart, that no long-term good can come from a
mine.
Our real anti-colonial struggle has only just started, and it is
not me versus you, but mines versus ours.
