OPINION: We cannot allow the state near our kids

NEELS BLOM | 16 May, 2016 11:04

Blade Nzimande. File photo.
Image by: FREDDY MAVUNDA / Business Day

Education Minister Blade Nzimande’s Higher Education Amendment Bill is to fight the thing tooth and nail, although at this stage of the nation’s intellectual decay, such action may be moot.

The case is clear because Nzimande’s purpose is nothing but a power grab that would further erode academic freedom, as Business Day pointed out in an editorial last week. Nzimande is seeking even greater control than he has already wheedled out of the universities because he doesn’t know what else to do about the unfolding catastrophe in higher education.

Absolutism and centrism, oppression, force, deceit and the inability to accept responsibility for failed policies are the only devices available to him. It is what the African National Congress (ANC) has done in each case it has failed and, arguably, failure applies to every instance of the party’s rule. Instead of scrapping its failed policies, it recommits itself to the same principles with greater fervour.

If Nzimande wanted to do the right thing, he might want to consider stepping across the hall for a chat with Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to engineer the removal from our schools of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which has done more than any other agency to addle children’s minds. That won’t happen, of course. The party needs the unions to maintain its grip on power, and for the ANC, power is a goal in itself. This alone is reason enough to throw the Constitution at the minister and enumerate his violations in court. To do the right thing, the vice-principals might want to grow themselves a spine and litigate. But that, too, is unlikely to happen, which does not leave us with much of tooth and nail.