ARTICLE: BACK TO SCHOOL, MR DEPUTY-PRESIDENT?
2015-10-19
In his address on 15 October 2015 to the Higher Education Transformation Summit in Durban, Deputy President Ramaphosa made the following statement:
“Though we have made a decisive shift from the fragmented, inefficient and inequitable higher education system of the apartheid era, we still feel its effects. Had the apartheid rulers not been so thorough, so methodical, so malevolent in the denial of education to the black majority, then South Africa would today be on a completely different developmental trajectory. We would be a more equitable nation, a more prosperous nation. We would have an advanced, diversified, more inclusive economy.”
Almost all South Africans agree that our country is in a crisis. Most government departments are paralysed by incompetence, corruption and a culture of entitlement.
The ANC must be congratulated for the care with which it prepares its members for important policy discussions of the kind that will soon be taking place at its 2015 National General Council. The NGC is the most important ANC meeting between National Conferences. It gives the organisation an opportunity to consider progress made with the implementation of policy since the preceding National Conference and to develop proposals for new policies at the next National Conference – which will take place at the end of 2017.
Luister, the video that was recently produced by the Open Stellenbosch (OS) movement, should be viewed by everyone who is interested in the future of our universities and the future of South Africa as a multicultural society. It presents 32 interviews – primarily with black students – regarding their sense of racial exclusion at Stellenbosch University. They complain of subtle – and not so subtle – racism in their interactions with white Afrikaans-speaking students – including accusations of out-and-out racial abuse in student bars and on the internet.
We welcome reassurances by South African Communist Party (SACP) deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin of his devotion to the Constitution (A distortion to stir the demagogues, Letters, Business Day, August 11.
The Department of Trade and Industry has just published the latest version of the Promotion and Protection of Investment Bill. The Bill has its origins in the government’s wish to reassure foreign investors who were alarmed by South Africa’s decision three years ago to terminate its Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) with a number of European countries. Its purpose is supposedly to provide for “the legislative protection of investors” and the “promotion of investment”.
The FW de Klerk Foundation shares the concerns of participants in a recent private round-table discussion – mentioned in Business Day – on the functioning of Parliament, which was hosted by the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC).