Ineptitude hinders youth prospects
SIR — Loane Sharp (SA’s trade unions the biggest obstacle to job creation, May 25) writes that there may be a conspiracy afoot to intentionally dumb down the black youth and that the South African Democratic Teachers Union is at the head of this conspiracy. This is without doubt one of the most serious accusations that has been made about the government since 1994 and Mr Sharp in not alone in his view.
After I addressed a business school recently a member of the audience asked me privately whether my institute believed that such a conspiracy could exist. Nor was this the first time I had faced such a question.
Our answer is along the following lines: It is true that the dream of an independent, educated, and prosperous black middle class is rapidly turning into a nightmare for the African National Congress (ANC). For example, black newspaper editors are not turning out to be the pliant deployees the party intended to foster when it first made an issue of racial transformation in the media. Quite the opposite has occurred.
In the Democratic Alliance it is precisely the crop of educated black professionals that the ANC sought to foster that now seem set to lead the opposition into the future.
The ANC, meanwhile, has to make do with Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu coming through their ranks! The ANC is shrewd enough to realise that the faster they create a truly well educated black middle class the faster that same middle class may find itself at odds with the party.
We saw this sentiment play out after Nedbank chairman Reuel Khoza criticised the government only for some senior party leaders to bewail the fact that he was a beneficiary of that government’s own polices of empowerment. The subtext was clear: they were dismayed that “their creation” of a black business executive had turned on them.
This is of course the ANC’s own fault as its attitude to economic and political freedom undermines the middle class. It does, however, mean that the government may now be faced with a perverse incentive in how it runs SA.
If it achieves its stated aims of creating ever-greater prosperity and employment it may be running itself out of power. If it keeps black people poor, uneducated, and dependent it may be better able to control them.
Can we conclude then that the ANC and the trade unions are intentionally stalling the educational advancement of black South Africans? We would argue no. The reason is that when we look around other parts of the state we come across problems of a similar ineptitude. The senior management of the police has, surely, now passed into the realm of the banana republic.
There are horror stories coming out of the Department of Public Works. Prominent hospitals have no equipment or drugs. There are “paved” roads in Free State that have become so dilapidated that people in the know now travel on a maze of old dirt roads to get from A to B.
What we see in our schools is probably just a reflection of that same ineptitude and not the result of a decision to stall black educational advancement.