Folly of lofty ideals with no action plan

One of my favourite classes in post-graduate studies had the simple title "The Politics of Planning".

The professors were people from across the world who were not only renowned academics, but also experts in planning who had worked as advisers to government in many developing countries. The goal of the course was simple: to convince us as presumed future education planners that planning was not simply a technical task but inherently a political undertaking. So, to develop wonderful national plans with clear goals and sufficient resources were important, but not enough. There was something that could destroy the best laid plans of any government - it was called politics.

Now politics can be good and bad. Mobilising people behind government plans for literacy, for example, is a kind of politics that can energise local communities to become actively engaged in their own learning. Governments like Nicaragua gained world respect for such mobilisation in their national literacy campaigns.

But there is another kind of politics, and that is the nasty, destructive kind that's all too familiar to South Africa. This is the politics that pits black and white, foreigner and national, radicals and liberals, against each other. It is the kind of politics that demeans ordinary people by getting them to vote, and then ignoring them for five years. This politics ensures that the powerful, the few at the top of the pile, get filthy rich while the rest remain stuck in poverty.

I was thinking of my classes in "the politics of planning" when I listened to Trevor Manuel deliver his very sophisticated vision and national plan for South Africa to achieve in 2030. The national development plan follows on the diagnostic report of June, which told us with smart statistics the state that we are in. You cannot fault the National Planning Commission for the elegance of its analysis or the sharpness of its recommendations. In fact, these reports offer the best kind of official thinking and writing to come out of government for a very long time. The glaring vacuum in the report is this little inconvenience called politics.

Take, for example, the agreeable observation of the commission that union and political interference in schools must stop. And how exactly is this going to happen? We have a heavily politicised school system in which, to take a very live situation, teachers in the Eastern Cape are preparing to go on strike at the very point that the most disadvantaged children in the province are about to write (or are writing) exams. And so in a province with one of the worst annual senior certificate exam results, the unions find this to be an ideal time to disrupt the life chances of millions of children.

The mistake of the commission, as with so many post-colonial governments in Africa, is to assume that by pronouncing a policy ideal or a set of goals, you actually achieve it. What the planning report lacks, to draw on my class notes, is a theory of action. That is to say, how exactly will we get there, or at least plan to get there?

This is where cynicism tends to take its hold on those of us who have observed African politics and development for decades. You see a date like 2030, and you know our minister and his crop of commissioners will be dead or dying; we would all have forgotten this elegant report and there would be a new breed of politicians to blame for the country's woes. The cemeteries of post-colonial African governments are littered with national development plans.

Still, we should not be too cynical. The goal that 80% of children should complete 12 years of schooling or that higher education participation should increase from 950000 (17%) to 1620000 (30%) of the age cohort, are certainly worth striving for. The further goal that 80% of schools and pupils should achieve 50% and above in literacy, maths and science in grades 3, 6 and 9 is low enough to make it sound achievable.

For this to happen we will need a new kind of politics - not simply a new kind of economics. We will require a government between now and 2030 that places a firm grip on its public schools; that recovers authority over schools from the unions; that places the children of politicians and officials in public schools only; that tests teachers for subject knowledge; and that demands that every teacher teaches every day, or face the consequences. It will take much more than jamming sessions with youth to get this kind of politics in our country.