INLSA
Senzo Mchunu has been elected as the ANC’s provincial leader in KwaZulu-Natal and is also the MEC for education in the province. File picture: Terry Haywood
This month marks 19 years since the dawn of freedom in our country. It seems like it was just yesterday when we saw images of long queues of people with expectant faces meandering towards the ballot boxes in the villages and cities of our beautiful country.
These images branded our country as a miracle nation – a rainbow population that captured the world’s imagination.
Fast forward to this year and there are many achievements and breakthroughs South Africans can be proud of.
One of the most significant achievements, but one that is hardly recognised, is that of bringing dignity back to our people.
Today, when you find yourself in a restaurant with people of different races, as an African person in particular, you do not feel like you less deserve to share that space.
Instead, you feel like you too deserve the best that this country has to offer.
We have achieved many things since 1994 and to pretend that this country has regressed, as some cynics tirelessly try to persuade us, is disingenuous at best and delusional at worst.
In the education sector, we have covered a lot of ground since that euphoric day in 1994.
One of our main achievements is that of ensuring access.
As we speak today, no one is denied access to education on the basis of race, physical condition or economic status.
This we have achieved through, among other things, programmes like the National School Nutrition Programme, the no fee schools programme and an inclusive education policy.
Though these programmes have had teething challenges, they have gone a long way to alleviating the plight of especially indigent communities in our society.
South Africa can boast near-universal access to primary education and gender parity in education – a milestone that has put the country on track to achieve two of the eight millennium development goals by 2015.
Access to early childhood development services has also improved over the past decade and enrolment in Grade R has increased from 15 percent in 1999 to 77 percent in 2010.
All our achievements notwithstanding, our education sector has some undesirable traces.
There are ugly stains that do not represent the freedom our Struggle stalwarts had in mind when they fought and died for the liberation of this country.
In KwaZulu-Natal, we have realised that, although our education system has changed for the better, we still need to work on it.
Towards the end of last year, we introduced a programme called Transformation of the Schooling System in KwaZulu-Natal, which aims to enhance service delivery and provide high quality education for everyone in the province.
Among the many facets of this programme, is the consolidation of small and non-viable schools in KwaZulu-Natal.
These schools (which form 22 percent of public schools in the province), do not represent the freedom we celebrated during April.
Small and non-viable schools are characterised by limited curriculum offerings, a low post provision norm – or not enough state teachers per school which leads to multi-grade teaching, a low allocation in terms of norms and standards and insecurity of tenure on privately owned land.
Most of these schools unfortunately are found in farm areas.
The conditions and the conditions of pupils in these schools as well as the condition of the parents of these pupils does not tally with the freedom we celebrated this month.
The families of the pupils who go to these schools do not own anything – they do not own land, they do not “own” their spouses, they do not own these schools and they do not even own cemeteries.
The conditions of farm dwellers in the main, remains the darkest secret of our much celebrated freedom.
Their plight and that of their children, is the antithesis of what our founding fathers and mothers imagined as they sacrificed their lives fighting for freedom.
Early last month, we visited a few small and non-viable schools in the Underberg.
There is a school in that area called Elton Primary School. That school now has only three pupils, taught by one teacher, in one classroom doing different grades.
When we talk about transforming the schooling system in KwaZulu-Natal, we are talking about such schools and many others like it in our province.
As a department, we are not going to close any schools. We want to give pupils in these schools the kind of education we’d wish for our own biological children.
As we implement this programme, we are starting by meeting farmers in the Underberg and uMshwathi, where there is already a task team, with the aim of finding lasting solutions to ensure that our children in rural areas enjoy freedom.
As mentioned earlier, our transformation programme seeks to eliminate a number of challenges in our schooling system.
The one mentioned above is only one of them.
Unless we face challenges like these and many that our people are still facing head on, we can’t claim total freedom.
None of us is free, when only one of us is still chained.
This means we can only claim total freedom when all of us, including the children and farmworkers of the Underberg, are free.
l Mchunu is the the MEC for Education in KwaZulu-Natal and is the provincial chairman of the ANC.
The Mercury
