Understandably two sections in the contentious Basic Education Laws Amendment Act relating, respectively, to mother tongue education and schools’ rights to set admission policy have sucked most of the oxygen out of the debate on this controversial legislation.
There is a lot at stake here, including removing such decisions from the remit of school bodies to provincial politicians and calling into question the meaning and content of Section 29 of the Constitution, relating to the right to receive education in “the official languages of their choice in public education institutions…” It is worth reprising the wrangle over this and allied clauses which nearly torpedoed the passage of the Constitution itself back in 1996.
For many Afrikaans groups, then and now, diluting or negating language choice and instruction at school level is a dress rehearsal for the full-scale tragedy, in their view, of the effective disappearance of the language more or less completely from the national stage.
The legislation has become a veritable political football, and the national referee – who doubles as team captain (though for which side)? – President Cyril Ramaphosa dealt with this in customary form. He kicked it into touch, the ball only to be back in play in mid-December when he doubtlessly hopes that spectators will be in holiday mode and not concentrating on the state of play.
That is the scheduled date when progress, or lack thereof, on the “consultations” around this clause between the parties will be resolved. Or not, in which case, the fate and future of the government of national unity (GNU) could be in the balance.
On football matters, the premier of Gauteng, Andrek Lesufi, is universally known as “Panyaza”, a nickname acquired apparently due to his love of the game and for one of its storied players. He has also been skilled in the practice of scoring own goals.
There is a long list, especially during the Covid pandemic when he showed considerable form: endorsing Chinese capsules as a treatment for Covid-19 described by the US Food and Drug Administration as “fraudulent”; the whopping and misspent R431 million used to “decontaminate” schools in just two months; the murder of a whistleblower unravelling provincial corruption etc.
Spectacular vote-shedding skills
But while his administration might be problematic, his vote-shedding skills are spectacular (the ANC in his province bottomed out in May with its lowest vote share ever, just 34.76%, down 15.43% from 2019.)
However, in other respects, he has proven to be a man of zeal, and the BELA Act provides him with an opportunity to combine two of his pet hates: Afrikaans-language schools and the current GNU.
AfriForum and other interest groups have charted how the then-provincial MEC for education, now premier, Lesufi led the assault on converting Afrikaans-language schools into English-medium or dual-medium schools (a study in 2018 revealed that the education department under Lesufi had converted 119 Afrikaans or dual-language schools to English-medium). This means around 5% of schools offer Afrikaans in the province with the greatest number of Afrikaans residents in the country.
BELA with its expansive provisions to usurp the rights of schools to set language policy, could likely finish off the few remaining such schools in Gauteng. But since Lesufi is also the most prominent anti-GNU voice (in its current composition) in the ANC, he would get the double if pressing ahead with the contentious clauses results in the GNU unravelling.
If Lesufi is a GNU hawk, then Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana represents the opposite strain (GNU dove) in the highly fractured politics of the ANC. Godongwana has the difficult task of presenting – in exceptionally straitened circumstances – the government’s medium-term budget statement at month end. And while the politics of BELA (alongside the even more contentious NHI) has been centre stage, the dire fiscal peril in both bills is for Godongwana’s account.
Indeed, an engaged policy expert over the weekend reminded me of the financial bomb in BELA, which has received far less public attention than it merits. But it will detonate in next year’s budget.
Section 2 of the legislation, by a stroke of the presidential pen, mandates that each public school is obliged to house an entirely new (effectively a 13th school grade), namely Grade R (reception or introductory class). This, the expert estimates, will be at cost to fiscus over the life of this Parliament more than R18 billion.
Where is the money coming from? How is the retrenching of thousands of current teachers to meet current budget cuts reconciled with the funding of thousands of new teachers (if there are any) to fill posts for the yet to be established Grade R classes?
‘Unaffordable’
My interlocuter dismissed this as “simply unaffordable, an example of the magical thinking, so typical of the DBE (Department of Basic Education)”.
Panyaza Lesufi has been the strongest provincial cheerleader for BELA. The record, though, shows that he also presided over the Gauteng water crisis and the collapse of the major Gauteng metros, and he insisted on the installation of Kabelo Gwamanda as mayor of Johannesburg in May 2023, who was arrested on Friday on fraud charges relating to his funeral business (impossible to make this up).
But despite the fiscal perils and financial scandals mushrooming under his watch, on the weekend, Lesufi conjured up a whole new branch of the magical money tree, which informs his economic approach and supplements his political posturing.
Writing in the Sunday Times, he announced plans for a new high-speed rail network to connect Gauteng and Limpopo. In the spirt of smart cities, bullet trains and other baubles offered nationally by Ramaphosa, this wheeze on offer provincially does not provide a single sentence on how it will be funded. By whom? Will it be in place of which other spending priorities?
Doubtless asking such pesky questions will lead to the riposte offered by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi to his circling critics on the staggering budget-busting and institutionally destructive NHI as “mathematical hooligans”. Although he provided no answers, but simply spewed insults. Like Lesufi, he is a GNU hawk and uses the same playbook.
In Britain, Boris Johnson – a far more effective voter winner than either Lesufi and Motsoaledi – published his memoirs Unleashed which immediately climbed, on the back of 42 000 copies sold, to the top of the best seller list there.
Leaving public office in disgrace is no bar to the ex-prime minister’s popularity, at least among the book-buying class. While Johnson’s excesses during Covid, far less serious than Lesufi’s at the same time, led to his forced departure, there is one aspect of his political repertoire which finds a following echo here, in all matters from NHI to BELA and the uncosted impact of gargantuan social engineering projects of this sort.
Having cake and eating it
In 2019, Johnson offered a basic bargain to voters before he unravelled later, namely, “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”
So, on the one hand he offered the Tory faithful the red meat promises of low US-style tax rates; on the other, to entice Labour voters in the north of England to switch their support, he promised Scandinavian high levels of infrastructure spending and social benefits. He won a big majority on this basis. And unable to deliver on both, coupled with questions on his character, he unravelled within three years.
There is no shortage of “cakeists” in the South African body politic today either. Though most of them lack Johnson’s presentational skills or humour.
Lesufi is a prime example though. In his case he is, as the election results proved, an unpopular populist.
The question though of how much ruin he can yet cause to the financial and political health of his province and this country is still to be determined.
