Wednesday, 03 February 2010 14:57
WHEN President Jacob Zuma delivers his state of the nation address next week, he needs to switch his attention from how to maintain the unity of his faction-riven tripartite alliance, which has been preoccupying him for so long, to focus instead on the serious structural problems facing this nation.
It is, after all, a state of the nation address, not of the party. And this nation is poised at the start of a critical new decade, for it is in these next 10 years that we must either crack those key structural problems inhibiting our growth or we shall fail to break through to become a successful nation.
We need leadership if we are to achieve that. Strong, positive leadership that can focus the people of this country on what needs to be done to achieve our goals. A leader ready to acknowledge his missteps, as President Barack Obama did last week, but also one who can be bold and will not pander to populism or special interests.
Like Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who told her people the other day: “I did not become president to be popular. To work, to lead, to protect and preserve our country, our people — that is why I became president…. I want our republic to be ready for the first world in 20 years.
“To those who want to be president, this advice: if you really want something done, just do it. Do it hard, do it well. Don’t pussyfoot. Don’t pander.”
That’s what I would say to Zuma. You have changed the time of your address so that you can speak to the whole nation, and especially the youth, so when you step up to the podium next Thursday evening, just say it — and then just do it. Forget trying to pander to your alliance partners. The African National Congress (ANC) is strong enough to rule without them if necessary, but it won’t have to.
You have done what you promised: you have listened to all their views with great patience. Now it is time for you to decide what is in the national interest, and to spell it out clearly and decisively with no more pandering or pussyfooting.
Do that and the alliance partners will follow, have no fear. Because they have no alternatives, either in policies or in strategies, and they know that if they go it alone they will be eaten for breakfast at the next election.
We know what the key problems are. Top of the list is our dysfunctional education system, which is failing to produce the skills our economy needs, while at the same time swelling the ranks of a huge population of unemployed young people who constitute both a social tragedy and a future political time bomb.
Close behind that, and partly allied to it, is a management incapacity at every level of government, so that service delivery is failing across the board and our nine metro cities, the engines of the national economy, are all on the edge of bankruptcy.
The answer is not just to fiddle with the policy of “cadre deployment” but to ensure that only the most efficient people are deployed to the top jobs, regardless of political affiliations.
Then there is the plague of corruption, rapidly becoming endemic. This has done grievous damage to a number of other promising African countries and is in danger of corroding our future too. Everyone knows about it, everyone deplores it, but no one does anything to stamp it out . A few high-profile prosecutions would do so. Our law specifies a minimum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment for corruption, but when last did you hear of anyone going down for that? The only one I can recall came out somewhat prematurely to help establish a culture of impunity.
There are many other problems, certainly, of health and housing, of climate change and stubborn old racism, but emerging as we are from the deepest recession in nearly a century, we have to prioritise.
The issue that disturbs me most is education. We have betrayed a whole generation of young people and left more than a million of them with no prospects for the future.
That is failing in a sacred responsibility that the ANC had to the youth of this country, for it was the youth more than anyone else who fought the real war of liberation . They represent the future, and to fail them is to ensure the failure of the future SA.
There is no secret about what is wrong with the education system. It’s not lazy students, as some suggest. As Bill Clinton might have put it, “It’s the teachers, stupid!” Far too many, especially in the rural areas and former bantustans, are underqualified and unmotivated. Some are holdovers from the old bantu education system. They should be given early retirement and be replaced with better qualified, more motivated and better paid teachers. But of course that will require fighting the retrogressive South African Democratic Teachers Union, which will be backed by the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Don’t shrink from that, Mr President.
Nor is this the only flaw in the system. I often drive through long stretches of rural SA, where everywhere one sees schoolchildren, many only six or seven years old, walking huge distances to school, then back home in the afternoon. Three or four hours of wasted study time a day, to say nothing of the weariness inflicted. How many had breakfast before they left? What learning capacity can be left in them? Why can’t we have school bus services in these areas? Other countries do in corresponding zones, and we have one of the highest per capita education budgets in the world. Where is the money going?
And why can’t we have boarding schools in these rural areas? That would not only cut down on these exhausting walks, but the hostels could have libraries, computers and trained warders who could help the boarders with their homework.
The old mission schools had boarding hostels, and all the great early-generation ANC leaders went to them. I suggest that is why they were leaders of such calibre. But the apartheid government took over and closed the mission schools.
I stopped over the other day at the Tsomo Mission in the old Transkei, where there used to be a mission school.
A state school replaced it, but a sizeable girl’s hostel that used to serve the mission school is still there in pretty good shape — but empty. It has been empty for years, the local preacher told me. “Where do the students who come to this school live and how do they get here?” I asked him. “Down there,” he replied, pointing to the valley about 5km away. “They walk here every day.”
So the hostel stands empty while the children walk and sweat their way up the hill and down again, every day.
It’s that kind of thing that leaves me wondering what our education ministers and officials think about when they ponder the appalling matric results, attend another talk shop and draw up yet another report that fails to note the obvious.
Come on, Mr President, let’s have some action. Just do it!
