Why do our leaders despise competence and laud loyalty?

Whatever else the disastrous appointment of David "Des" van Rooyen as minister of finance might have signalled, perhaps the most troubling message from the leaders of our country was the complete disregard for competence.

It is a simple word, "competence", meaning a skill or capacity to do a job well, a qualification to carry out a task. Yet the most shared memory of this nondescript member of the cabinet is that he was a parliamentary backbencher who, as the failed mayor of a small town, had his Merafong home burnt down by protesters.

The markets reacted sharply to his appointment, and an already fragile economy appeared to be in free fall until, as with the crowning of Miss Colombia in a recent world beauty pageant, the announcer had to return to the stage and concede that a horrible mistake had been made. The old finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, would replace the newly crowned one only days later.

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The complete disregard for competence has become a standard mark of our government. Think of the number of senior government appointments in some of the most crucial public positions in which people have lied about their qualifications while others scrambled to find nonexistent matric certificates, with the media in pursuit.

While public facilities were run into the ground, requiring government bail-outs of billions - not millions - and where costly mistakes in procurements were being made, none of these incompetent appointments were fired on the spot. Instead, they stood their ground until, in a few cases, public pressure led to the demise of the incompetent.

Our leaders poked fun at "clever blacks", making the lack of skills look decidedly attractive.

Truth be told, our leaders despise competence and prize loyalty.

What on earth does the Van Rooyen appointment have to do with the 2015 national senior certificate results? Everything.

For nothing demonstrates more visibly our national disregard for competence than the way government policies have systematically dumbed down our school system since the '90s.

We created a watered-down mathematics stream for those who, we were told, could not do maths; under apartheid, everybody in the various departments did the same mathematics paper.

We gave legitimacy (and a university-entrance point) to life orientation when, in the past, guidance (or the lack thereof) had no consequences.

We pegged passing levels in school subjects at 30% and 40%. We created an exit level at Grade 9 because more than half the children who start Grade 1 do not make it through 12 years of schooling to achieve what should be the minimum standard of competence - a school-leaving certificate in Grade 12. We used to add marks to the grades of non-native speakers writing in English. More than one study has pointed to the inflation of grades, no doubt to make the national pass percentage look good.

block_quotes_start Which raises the question: why is there no #IncompetenceMustFall movement in South Africa? block_quotes_end

Schools became part of this impression-management scheme and would hold back pupils whose progress to Grade 12 would make the school pass rate (a recruitment tool for middle-class schools) look less than stellar. Still the demise of competence was not complete.

On September 18, Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga - aided and abetted by the provincial MECs - announced that failed pupils in Grade 11 would be allowed to "progress" to Grade 12, and that those who felt that the customary sixsubjects were too burdensome could "modulate" (a nonsense application of the term in curriculum theory) their programme of study and write three subjects this year and the rest next year.

If only there were also "markets" in education that would respond to this official dumbing down of the nation's poorest children.

There is no educational justification for passing failed pupils in the South African context.

The failure of tens of thousands of FET (further education and training) students to pass on merit reflects a systemic breakdown in the quality and provisioning of education. Put differently, we are compensating for the failure to deliver quality education to the bottom two-thirds (at least) of our schools by a basket of compromises that not only sets the bar low for passing, but now has effectively removed any barriers to progression for failed pupils.

Very important - do not let this government tell you that some other countries pass failed pupils.

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Where this happens, their problem is not systemic dysfunction for millions of children in the 12-year school cycle, but individual remediation for small numbers of pupils who may or may not benefit from automatic promotion in the lower grades.

And so what can we expect from the 2015 national senior certificate results? Many more pupils would have written this year and more will fail than last year.

Ministers of education over the years receive an early tip-off from their officials about whether to act upbeat about the unprocessed results. Already in October Motshekga conveyed the sombre news that the 2015 national senior certificate results might not improve on the 2014 performance.

The 801688 candidates enrolled for the exams included 674232 full-time pupils - an increase of 122644 over the 2014 numbers. What this means is that 43460 more pupils were expected to write mathematics and 28301 more were expected in physical science than in the previous examining year.

There is no question that a large part of the explanation for this record number of Grade 12 candidates is the pushing over of failed Grade 11 pupils, the cynically named "progress learners".

Fundamental to any education and training system is the concept of mastery. That is, you must achieve a certain level of competence to progress to the next stage of learning, whether it is a junior doctor wanting to become a specialist in cardiology or a Grade 7 pupil wanting to enter high school.

In both cases, the failure to achieve the required level of competence can have disastrous results, more visible perhaps on the heart doctor's operating table than in the Grade 8 performance of a child. But the consequences are no less serious in a school system without an effective and comprehensive system of remediation.

Which raises the question: why is there no #IncompetenceMustFall movement in South Africa?

Because those in leadership actually do not care whether pupils in schools or public officials in government are competent or not.

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Worse, in a system where incompetent leaders make critical appointments, the dilemma is that they would not even know what competence looks like if they bumped into it in the dark.

That, sadly, is the legacy of our government - it has trashed competence in school and society, but, as the Van Rooyen example showed, those who rule us are more than willing to change their minds, quickly, if citizens stand up and say enough is enough.

Here's the rub: you cannot fix in Grade 12 what was broken since Grade 1. The solution remains deceptively simple: make sure every child has a competent teacher with access to basic resources (like textbooks in every subject) inside a decent infrastructure for learning.

Even if we cannot afford anything else, the single most important determinant of quality education is a competent teacher.

• Jansen is vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State