Evidence of the state’s decrepitude is everywhere, from the potholed roads and stinking beaches to decaying small towns. But nowhere is the state’s inability to get the basics right more insidious than in its failure to teach children how to read.
If there is one thing South Africans agree on, it’s that radically improving the education system is the key to faster growth and employment. So why isn’t there a national outcry over the fact that 78% of grade 4 pupils cannot read for meaning in any language?
Though President Cyril Ramaphosa has committed the government to ensuring that all children can read by 2030, at current rates of progress it will take 80 years before all 10-year-olds can read for meaning, and that was before Covid.
In short, SA faces a huge system failure in which the bulk of the future population will be unlikely to meet the needs of a growing economy unless there is a significant, urgent intervention in education.
Years ago I was sent to interview then finance minister Trevor Manuel for a Financial Mail cover story. Armed with questions about exchange controls and the rand, I was dismayed when he refused to talk about anything other than the importance of fixing the education system.
We had no choice but to run a cover bearing Manuel’s face followed by a story entirely about education. (The education minister at the time was not amused.) But, of course, Manuel’s emphasis was entirely appropriate because an education is the surest way out of poverty, and without adequate skills the economy’s growth will forever remain capped.
Years later, Manuel and Ramaphosa co-chaired the formulation of the National Development Plan (NDP). It stipulated just three priorities for SA: creating jobs, improving education and building the capacity of the state. They are as pertinent now as they were in 2012 when the plan was adopted.
Crucially, more than half the plan was dedicated not to specific policy changes but to the institutional reform required to improve service delivery. The commission was prescient in warning that SA’s developmental agenda could fail because the state was incapable of implementing it.
“In some instances policy change may be necessary, but in most areas it is about getting the basics right, implementing government programmes, holding people accountable for their actions and finding innovative solutions to complex challenges,” the NDP concluded.
What SA needed wasn’t to throw more money at a problem like education, said Manuel at the time, but formal systems that held leaders accountable for their conduct, from school principals to cabinet ministers.
The NDP proposed that principals be appointed purely on merit, be given greater powers over school management and be held accountable for school performance. With these reforms it believed up to 60% of problems in schools could be solved. It is a travesty that a decade later none of these reforms has been universally implemented — and we wonder why SA’s grade 6s perform worse in reading tests than their peers in Eswatini.
Society has had enough. Last week, a high-level panel of education experts and civil society leaders headed by former SA deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka launched the 2030 Reading Panel. It will meet every year for a decade, leveraging its clout to ensure every child can read by 2030.
It attributes SA’s dismal performance in reading to ineffective teacher training, teaching and support; an absence of classroom reading resources; and a state that fails to back lofty promises with scaled-up budgeted programmes.
The danger is that the panel will be able to secure only minor reforms, when what is really required is a sustained overhaul of the education system. More broadly, what SA needs is bold political leadership that confronts the country’s many challenges with real conviction.
Its continued failure to reform education is damning future generations to joblessness while starving the economy of critical skills. The real tragedy is that it was all foreseen more than a decade ago, and was completely avoidable.
• Bisseker is a Financial Mail assistant editor.
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