“Free Education for All” remains a pipedream under the policies of the ‘New ANC’
Percy Ngonyama | 16.06.2007 02:46 | Education | History | Cambridge | World
This article argues that by adopting neo-liberal policies, like Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ Party the ‘New ANC’ has also sold out. And because of anti poor policies, on the 31st anniversary of the June 1976 ‘Soweto Uprising’, for poor working class kids, “The Doors of Learning” remain as shut as during apartheid.
On April 27 2007, amid a big media fanfare, public and elitist celebrations, post apartheid South Africa turned thirteen. Our first democratic election hailed, the world-over, as a ‘great miracle’ came as a result of a long drawn liberation struggle which cost the lives of many people, South Africans and non-South Africans. Primarily because, in modern society, education is critical, and had been recognised as such by the 1955 Freedom Charter which, during the days of the struggle, was the African National Congress’s undisputed blueprint for socio-economic development, with the provision “The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened!”, the demand for decent “free education” became one of the key demands of the liberation movement.
Furthermore, putting education at the centre of the struggle was also the reality that the National Party in 1949, hardly a year since taking power, with the appointment of the Eiselen Commission, had embarked on a campaign whose intentions were to limit and ‘inferiorise’ the education of blacks.
Speaking in parliament in September 1953 during a parliamentary debate on the Bantu Education Bill, drafted in accordance with recommendations of the Eiselen Commission, the then Minister of Native Affairs, Dr. H. F. Verwoerd, one of the greatest architects of the neo-Nazi apartheid doctrine, declared a “crime against humanity” by the United Nations in 1973, insolently stated “There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim, absorption in the European community.”
About a month following this statement, what became one of the most loathed legislations of the apartheid era, the infamous Bantu Education Act, Act No 47 of 1953, was passed. The Act meant that the so-called ‘Bantu’ would be subjected to an education systerm that would only prepare them for what the apartheid patriarchs saw as their future occupations: domestic servants, gardeners and blue-collar factory workers.
Thirteen years on, guided by the neo-liberal doctrine, just as “criminal” as apartheid, the ANC government, in what signals a deviation from the declaration that “Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit!” seems destined to deny poor, mainly black, students the constitutionally guaranteed right to decent education, from primary all the way up to tertiary level. While, unlike Verwoerd, it is inconceivable that President Thabo Mbeki or the Minister of Education Naledi Pandor will also stand in parliament; or announce publicly their true intentions, the anti poor, hence anti black, education policies of their government speak volumes.
Salim Vally, Senior Researcher with the Educational Policy Unit at Wits has argued that “Despite the concerns of the earlier National Commission on Higher Education, higher education is increasingly placed beyond the reach of students from poor backgrounds… Current trends in higher education entail a disincentive for universities to enroll students from poor backgrounds and the continuing reproduction of a highly elitist system.” Vally’s paper entitled Higher Education in South Africa: Market Mill or Public Good? which appears in the latest edition of Journal on Higher Education in Africa, also adds that the much touted financial aid loan scheme provided by the National Students Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) in insufficient. Corroborating this is the recent shutting of the “doors of learning” on the face of more than 400 poor working class students, just in the first semester of 2007, when they were financially excluded by the now ‘corporatised’ University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
Mass financial exclusions are just one devastating impact the corporatisation of the university, following the dictates of austerity measures stipulated in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) macro-economic programme, has had on poor students at the institution which advertises itself as “The Premier University of African Scholarship”. Departments deemed ‘irrelevant’, only in the sense that they do not meet the ‘necessary skills’ criteria of big business and the government’s ambitious plan of 6% annual growth rate by 2010, have been forced to shut down, or operate on very meager funding. Resources are also shrinking rapidly. Students are forced to stand in long queues waiting their turn on computers to type assignments and dissertations in computer rooms. Classes have dramatically increased in size, and the workload, and not salaries, for lecturers has almost doubled making lecturing extremely difficult and unpleasant.
In the era where the principle “Money talks everything else walks” reigns supreme, working class students without money for accommodation, food, photocopies, printing credits, stationery, books, etc. are finding it extremely difficult to cope. Some, particularly female students, have resorted to desperate measures, such as risky, in the backdrop of the devastating HIV/Aids epidemic, ‘transactional’ sexual relationships with older, mostly married, men who drive the latest models of German vehicles to make ends meet. This dire situation at UKZN reflects the reality in most institutions of higher learning. Those fortunate enough to make it through, in spite of the circumstances, are now facing yet another neo-liberalism induced crisis: finding secure employment.
And on the 31st anniversary of the ‘Soweto Uprising’ which, contrary to widespread perceptions was not triggered solely by the use of Afrikaans - widely seen by most black people as the language of the oppressor - as a medium of instruction, but also by an inadequate supply of resources at black schools; many schools, due to policies which promotes cuts in social expenditure, face a serious shortage of properly trained teachers, have no libraries, let alone science and computer labs. For many learners from indigent communities, learning under trees is still an everyday reality, and grossly underpaid and overworked, the teachers are not motivated. Recently, the Minister for Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, a prominent member of the South African Communist Party (Sacp), insisted that the insulting 6% wage increase offer for government employees, including teachers, was a ‘generous’ offer. [At the time of writing this offer had been rejected by public sector unions]
Valid comments that, like Tony Blair’s British ‘New Labour Party’ the ‘New ANC’, in spite of its membership remaining largely working class, has also “sold out” by adopting pro-rich economic policies which are, ironically, depriving the very people it purports to represent of the most basic of rights, including rights to education, guaranteed by our internationally acclaimed Constitution; are always passionately denied by Luthuli House and government officials. It has also become necessary to remind ‘lying’ critics of the government’s disastrous economic policy that, by the way, “The ANC was never Socialist”. While this remains a subject of much debate, conversely, however, the biggest ‘lie’ would be to claim that the ANC has always been neo-liberal. The ANC which the South African masses fell ‘madly in love’ with during the crying days of apartheid was never neo-liberal, but the ‘New ANC’ is.
Encouragingly, mostly due to mobilization and popular education by revolutionary social movements and progressive non governmental organisations, often with scarce resources, the number of destitute people realizing that their suffering emanates from the anti-poor economic policies of the ‘growth obsessed’ government is increasing. However, the big question is when is the left within the ‘New ANC’-led Tripartite Alliance ever going to realise that our former comrades in arms, including self-styled communists, in the interests of fattening their pockets, have been ‘converted’ and no amount of lobbying will cause them to diverge from the neo-liberal route they have taken, but will have to be forced by the power of the masses; and seriously consider cooperating with social movements and left aligned forces seeking to start a socialist revolution and overthrow capitalism in this country?
Indeed, the only solution to South Africa’s widespread man-made socio-economic woes is a well-coordinated encouragement of the “prisoners of starvation” in every corner of our society, to “arise” and demand a genuine “Better life for all.” While there are some differences between the left in the alliance and the left outside the Alliance, without a doubt, they are minor compared to the SACP and Cosatu’s serious misgivings with self confessed Thatcherite Mbeki’s government and the bourgeoisified leadership of the ‘New ANC’. As the Sacp’s beautifully worded melody Thibela mabourgeois! - Beware of the bourgeoisie! - suggests, it is the bourgeoisie, the main enemy of the masses that we should be wary of, and not like-minded pro-working class anti-capitalist forces.
We need to revitilise our struggles for decent “Free education for all.” Our experience, past and present, tells us that the only language that bureaucrats and the capitalists, old and new, understand is mass protest. The concluding remarks of the Freedom Charter “These freedoms we will fight for side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty” should act as a constant reminder that political rights, and other rights, now being eroded under neo-liberalism, did not come on a silver platter, and to re-claim them we must, like in the past, reject all sectarian thinking, realize the changing nature of the enemy of the working class in South Africa, and unite in waging another mass based struggle against neo-liberalism and its proponents.
“If the ANC does not deliver the goods”, advised Nelson Mandela, “the people must do to it what they have done to the apartheid regime.” When the policies being robustly implemented by the ‘New ANC’ in government are not only failing to deliver, amongst other “goods”, a decent and “free education for all”, but are exacerbating the already worse situation, is it not about time?
******Ngonyama is a full time postgraduate student with the Department of Historical and Internet Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a Durban based activist.
An edited version of this article appears in the July Issue of Amandla!, a new popular left publication: www.amandla.org.za
Furthermore, putting education at the centre of the struggle was also the reality that the National Party in 1949, hardly a year since taking power, with the appointment of the Eiselen Commission, had embarked on a campaign whose intentions were to limit and ‘inferiorise’ the education of blacks.
Speaking in parliament in September 1953 during a parliamentary debate on the Bantu Education Bill, drafted in accordance with recommendations of the Eiselen Commission, the then Minister of Native Affairs, Dr. H. F. Verwoerd, one of the greatest architects of the neo-Nazi apartheid doctrine, declared a “crime against humanity” by the United Nations in 1973, insolently stated “There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim, absorption in the European community.”
About a month following this statement, what became one of the most loathed legislations of the apartheid era, the infamous Bantu Education Act, Act No 47 of 1953, was passed. The Act meant that the so-called ‘Bantu’ would be subjected to an education systerm that would only prepare them for what the apartheid patriarchs saw as their future occupations: domestic servants, gardeners and blue-collar factory workers.
Thirteen years on, guided by the neo-liberal doctrine, just as “criminal” as apartheid, the ANC government, in what signals a deviation from the declaration that “Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit!” seems destined to deny poor, mainly black, students the constitutionally guaranteed right to decent education, from primary all the way up to tertiary level. While, unlike Verwoerd, it is inconceivable that President Thabo Mbeki or the Minister of Education Naledi Pandor will also stand in parliament; or announce publicly their true intentions, the anti poor, hence anti black, education policies of their government speak volumes.
Salim Vally, Senior Researcher with the Educational Policy Unit at Wits has argued that “Despite the concerns of the earlier National Commission on Higher Education, higher education is increasingly placed beyond the reach of students from poor backgrounds… Current trends in higher education entail a disincentive for universities to enroll students from poor backgrounds and the continuing reproduction of a highly elitist system.” Vally’s paper entitled Higher Education in South Africa: Market Mill or Public Good? which appears in the latest edition of Journal on Higher Education in Africa, also adds that the much touted financial aid loan scheme provided by the National Students Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) in insufficient. Corroborating this is the recent shutting of the “doors of learning” on the face of more than 400 poor working class students, just in the first semester of 2007, when they were financially excluded by the now ‘corporatised’ University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
Mass financial exclusions are just one devastating impact the corporatisation of the university, following the dictates of austerity measures stipulated in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) macro-economic programme, has had on poor students at the institution which advertises itself as “The Premier University of African Scholarship”. Departments deemed ‘irrelevant’, only in the sense that they do not meet the ‘necessary skills’ criteria of big business and the government’s ambitious plan of 6% annual growth rate by 2010, have been forced to shut down, or operate on very meager funding. Resources are also shrinking rapidly. Students are forced to stand in long queues waiting their turn on computers to type assignments and dissertations in computer rooms. Classes have dramatically increased in size, and the workload, and not salaries, for lecturers has almost doubled making lecturing extremely difficult and unpleasant.
In the era where the principle “Money talks everything else walks” reigns supreme, working class students without money for accommodation, food, photocopies, printing credits, stationery, books, etc. are finding it extremely difficult to cope. Some, particularly female students, have resorted to desperate measures, such as risky, in the backdrop of the devastating HIV/Aids epidemic, ‘transactional’ sexual relationships with older, mostly married, men who drive the latest models of German vehicles to make ends meet. This dire situation at UKZN reflects the reality in most institutions of higher learning. Those fortunate enough to make it through, in spite of the circumstances, are now facing yet another neo-liberalism induced crisis: finding secure employment.
And on the 31st anniversary of the ‘Soweto Uprising’ which, contrary to widespread perceptions was not triggered solely by the use of Afrikaans - widely seen by most black people as the language of the oppressor - as a medium of instruction, but also by an inadequate supply of resources at black schools; many schools, due to policies which promotes cuts in social expenditure, face a serious shortage of properly trained teachers, have no libraries, let alone science and computer labs. For many learners from indigent communities, learning under trees is still an everyday reality, and grossly underpaid and overworked, the teachers are not motivated. Recently, the Minister for Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, a prominent member of the South African Communist Party (Sacp), insisted that the insulting 6% wage increase offer for government employees, including teachers, was a ‘generous’ offer. [At the time of writing this offer had been rejected by public sector unions]
Valid comments that, like Tony Blair’s British ‘New Labour Party’ the ‘New ANC’, in spite of its membership remaining largely working class, has also “sold out” by adopting pro-rich economic policies which are, ironically, depriving the very people it purports to represent of the most basic of rights, including rights to education, guaranteed by our internationally acclaimed Constitution; are always passionately denied by Luthuli House and government officials. It has also become necessary to remind ‘lying’ critics of the government’s disastrous economic policy that, by the way, “The ANC was never Socialist”. While this remains a subject of much debate, conversely, however, the biggest ‘lie’ would be to claim that the ANC has always been neo-liberal. The ANC which the South African masses fell ‘madly in love’ with during the crying days of apartheid was never neo-liberal, but the ‘New ANC’ is.
Encouragingly, mostly due to mobilization and popular education by revolutionary social movements and progressive non governmental organisations, often with scarce resources, the number of destitute people realizing that their suffering emanates from the anti-poor economic policies of the ‘growth obsessed’ government is increasing. However, the big question is when is the left within the ‘New ANC’-led Tripartite Alliance ever going to realise that our former comrades in arms, including self-styled communists, in the interests of fattening their pockets, have been ‘converted’ and no amount of lobbying will cause them to diverge from the neo-liberal route they have taken, but will have to be forced by the power of the masses; and seriously consider cooperating with social movements and left aligned forces seeking to start a socialist revolution and overthrow capitalism in this country?
Indeed, the only solution to South Africa’s widespread man-made socio-economic woes is a well-coordinated encouragement of the “prisoners of starvation” in every corner of our society, to “arise” and demand a genuine “Better life for all.” While there are some differences between the left in the alliance and the left outside the Alliance, without a doubt, they are minor compared to the SACP and Cosatu’s serious misgivings with self confessed Thatcherite Mbeki’s government and the bourgeoisified leadership of the ‘New ANC’. As the Sacp’s beautifully worded melody Thibela mabourgeois! - Beware of the bourgeoisie! - suggests, it is the bourgeoisie, the main enemy of the masses that we should be wary of, and not like-minded pro-working class anti-capitalist forces.
We need to revitilise our struggles for decent “Free education for all.” Our experience, past and present, tells us that the only language that bureaucrats and the capitalists, old and new, understand is mass protest. The concluding remarks of the Freedom Charter “These freedoms we will fight for side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty” should act as a constant reminder that political rights, and other rights, now being eroded under neo-liberalism, did not come on a silver platter, and to re-claim them we must, like in the past, reject all sectarian thinking, realize the changing nature of the enemy of the working class in South Africa, and unite in waging another mass based struggle against neo-liberalism and its proponents.
“If the ANC does not deliver the goods”, advised Nelson Mandela, “the people must do to it what they have done to the apartheid regime.” When the policies being robustly implemented by the ‘New ANC’ in government are not only failing to deliver, amongst other “goods”, a decent and “free education for all”, but are exacerbating the already worse situation, is it not about time?
******Ngonyama is a full time postgraduate student with the Department of Historical and Internet Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a Durban based activist.
An edited version of this article appears in the July Issue of Amandla!, a new popular left publication: www.amandla.org.za
Percy Ngonyama