SA REQUIRES AN IMPROVED EDUCATION SYSTEM TO REDUCE UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY AND INEQUALITY

Glad to hear that Serena Williams has called it quits. She has done incredibly well for her country, the United States, and she is still a shining star in tennis.

Let me come to the Marikana Massacre, which was quite unfortunate in a democratic society given the past we are coming from.

Some people want to apportion blame to President Ramaphosa as a result of an email sent by him to the authorities. I think that this is not new, where management of any company [take this kind of action], especially where the property, assets and the lives of its people are at stake as a result of an illegal strike that is so violent.

This is understandable in any society and now it was up to the senior police officers and political heads to assist Lonmin management to deal with the uncontrollable circumstances. The methods of defusing should have come to the senior police officers and political heads of state, including the President, and naturally the [Sibanye-Stillwater] management and Cyril Ramaphosa wanted the state to solve this unprotected and very violent strike because to them that was unproductive to the company.

I was looking at the strikes led by SAAWU in companies like Wilson Rowntree, Hoover, Dunlop Johnson & Johnson, Daimler-Benz, which was known as CDA. All these strikes had an element of violence, including the one Ramaphosa led in 1987 that took more than three weeks. People were arrested and yes, beaten with sjamboks.

And that is why I am saying Ramaphosa surely wanted the strike to end in Lonmin so that there [could be] productivity, profitability and job growth. But one of the challenges that South Africa has is the question of the education system in our country, where we produce kids without skills.

All over the world radical extremist views are more popular and flourishing as public frustrations mount and the centre cannot hold.

Yes, our trade unions are protected by the law under Section 23 of the Constitution and all of us agree that we are coming from a terrible past, but [the problem is when] a company arrives in South Africa (foreign direct investment) and within three to six months people want to establish a trade union and workers organise themselves to form a trade union because the Constitution allows them to do so, and the same trade unions are not part of the solution to the unemployment in South Africa.

For example, I’m told that 42% of South African citizens do not have matric and 17% have tertiary education. Of course, you can retrain those with tertiary education if they have a simple diploma or degree and training skills. Yes, Zimbabweans didn’t taste the Bantu education system from the British government, so they were quite lucky.

Yes, there is no profit in race discrimination, but at least now SA has produced a number of black middle-class people and it is bigger than the white middle class. But the problem SA is sitting with is that it has a number of untrained, unionised people in both the private and public sector.

The government needs to engage white skilled people to train the current crop of our kids by opening training centres. I’m quite aware that most people are doing great in areas of bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing and electrical engineering, and were given training by white people. Some fragile individuals from all our communities require a project which was started by Nelson Mandela. We should ask ourselves why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and I think that the reason was that Europe, like Africa, was never a unified single state. There was continuous competition. The French were worried about the English and the English were worried about the Spanish and the Spanish were concerned about the Turks and the Turks were more worried about Germans, and that produced wonderful competition. And the infrastructure of these is currently magnificent so in order to have significant progress you need a system that is competitive and that is not dominated by a single power but requires inclusive ideas from all communities and backgrounds.

My belief is that if you put your ideas on the table, you need discussion and to be prepared to compromise. South Africa desperately requires an improved education system from Sub A or Grade 1 in order to reduce unemployment, poverty and inequality, and become productive and start growing the economy.

I hope that if there is a coalition government, there will be competition for success in all the departments.