Swazis desperate to get their children into SA varsities
When a rural high school in central Swaziland recorded a whopping 73.25% failure rate for the 2016 junior certificate external exams, the resultant national uproar elicited an equally shocking response from the affected learners — they claimed their schooling was made difficult by the revealing clothes the women teachers wore in class.
Although this produced a spate of memes on social media, the sad truth is that these results, and equally poor performances in many other schools, highlight a deep problem in Swaziland’s education system that could soon develop into a crisis.
Once the poster child of Southern African education after the country’s independence in 1968 and well into the late-1980s, Swaziland’s education system is now on the brink of failure.
Ever since the government dropped the O-level qualification for finishing high school more than a decade ago and replaced it with the international general certificate of secondary education (IGCSE), many parents prefer their children to write the South African matric exams because, they believe, they stand a better chance of being accepted at tertiary institutions there.
At the start of the academic year for South African universities last month, the South African High Commission in Mbabane was inundated with an unprecedented number of applications by young people seeking study permits to enter universities and other institutions.
In the 23 years since South Africa’s transition to democracy, the number of Swazis seeking entry into the country’s universities has risen, mainly because of an equally growing neglect of the University of Swaziland (Uniswa) by the government, which has forced parents to look elsewhere for their children’s higher education.
Over the years, Uniswa has had to deal with a growing number of school-leavers seeking placement there although funding has dropped. Today, it barely survives.
Part of the reason for the poor funding is that the government has diverted much of the country’s education budget to the Limkokwing University of Technology, a Malaysian institution that set up shop in Swaziland after King Mswati struck up a close relationship with its founder. It is seen as the monarch’s personal project.
Mswati intends to establish the Southern African Development Community (SADC) University of Transformation for all countries in the region in collaboration with the Limkokwing university, which will be sponsored by the Swazi government. He announced this in August last year when he took over the chairmanship of SADC.
Uniswa counts among its alumni from the 1980s former public protector Thuli Madonsela and mining magnate Patrice Motsepe (who did his BA law degree there before proceeding to the University of the Witwatersrand for his LLB).
The university is also still an internationally accredited institution of higher learning and offers qualifications that sit comfortably alongside those of many universities in South Africa and the world.
But some schools in Swaziland have dropped the IGCSE schoolleaving qualification and are offering South Africa’s matriculation certificate in the curriculum so that Swazis can enter universities there.
But that arrangement hit a roadblock at the end of last year when Swaziland’s ministry of education announced that, from 2018, the South African government will no longer recognise matric results from Swazi schools because the arrangement is illegal.
The announcement has caused panic among parents in Swaziland.
According to Swaziland’s director of education, Sibongile Mtshali, some schools in the kingdom received matric accreditation through a private arrangement they made with the KwaZulu-Natal education department. This had the backing of Swaziland’s education authorities and the department received examination papers from the South African officials and submitted them for marking in South Africa.
But, after several meetings between Swaziland’s minister of education, Phineas Magagula, and South Africa’s minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga, it was announced that the arrangement is to be terminated. Motshekga is reported to have told her counterpart the arrangement is illegal.
Even though Mtshali has warned schools and parents to drop the matric option, Magagula has given parents hope that the arrangement might be continued. Swaziland is arguing that a SADC protocol on education allows for countries in the region to co-operate on educational matters, which gives legal effect to the arrangement.
The minister promised to continue discussions with his South African counterpart to persuade the basic education department to withdraw the letter that gave notice of the termination of the arrangement.
Although the education minister has promised to try to smooth things over with South Africa’s educators, he has done little to deal with the kingdom’s growing education crisis.
A former leader of Swaziland’s teachers’ union and a retired principal of the oldest teacher training college in the country, Magagula was among those who strongly opposed the government’s changing of the education system from O-level to IGCSE. That he is not doing anything now to fix the problem and would rather rely on South Africa’s education system beggars belief.
Severely under-resourced, Uniswa needs a huge financial injection to keep its doors open. It also needs to expand to accommodate the growing number of school-leavers, many of whom cannot be accepted at the institution because of limited space.
The minister has yet to pronounce on the huge failure rate at many schools, which would worry any other government.
By addressing that, he could make at start at solving the country’s educational problems and addressing its needs.
Uniswa needs a huge financial injection to keep its doors open