We, in South Africa, are 23 years into our journey through true democracy. For 23 years the African National Congress (ANC) have been ruling South Africa (“ruling” is a more suitable word than “governing” for their actions), and according to them and their praise singers, they have been “building” and “improving” our country. But, in very important ways, the situation is much worse than it was at the height of Apartheid, in the 1980’s.
In November 2016, South Africa’s Statistician General, Pali Lehohla, presented the statistics of higher education institutions for 2015. According to Lehohla, in the 1980’s in South Africa, for every black graduate, there were 1.2 white graduates. In 2015, he said, for every black graduate, there were 6 white persons who graduated.
Unsurprisingly for a government employee under the current regime, Lehohla is eager to blame this statistic on poverty alone – a situation that the ANC has long blamed entirely on the past. Lehohla stated that partying, drug abuse and alcoholism, despite causing some students to drop out, are not the reason for the horrific worsening of inequality. With reference to partying, drugs and alcohol, the SA Statistician General said: “We all did that at the university. But this rate of failure is not because all of them do drugs and drink. It can’t be, there has to be a different explanation.”
Indeed, it seems unlikely that drugs, alcohol and partying have grown to such a problem as to be the sole cause of the change in graduations; I propose instead that there are multiple reasons, including that white people generally have access to better standards of basic education. The main reason, though, is that the ANC, the “liberator of the people”, has failed its country.
The Fees Must Fall protestors are fooling themselves into believing that if the costs of higher education were lower, there would instantly be a perfect pass rate. They are trying to build a house, by ignoring the foundation and starting with the roof! Our ANC government has failed to build a nation in which the standards of basic education can allow individuals to succeed on a higher education level. Basic education in South Africa is not only poorly run, corrupted, below standard and inaccessible, but it is overlooked.
So much focus is going towards the costs and accessibility of higher education, while we fail to ask: “Would the youth of this country be able to succeed, were higher education more accessible?” The simple and harsh answer is: “No.” When pass rates at primary and secondary schools look the way they do, how do we expect these youths to succeed at tertiary level?
If you want to know where all those black graduates go, when they never make it to graduation, don’t look at the privileged arsonists and terrorists of Fees Must Fall. Look to the forgotten children, who never even make it to matric. Of just over a million children of all colors who were in Grade 2 in 2006, only 44.8% passed matric in 2016. Over 597 thousand children fell through the cracks in that year alone – where is the outrage over that?
23 years, the ANC has had to improve our country. Instead, they have run it into the ground, with our ailing early education leading our charge into failure as a state. Tertiary education can do nothing but fall, with no legs to stand on.
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