Shoddy schooling

The DA leader's 'refugee' reference got the ANC's backs up - perhaps because the truth about the Eastern Cape hurt

There is something unforgivably crass and graceless about Helen Zille in full kamikaze flight. It's the shrillness of her voice, the razor-sharp edge to her tongue and the contemptuous defence that she employs when under attack.

But there is nothing more pitiful than watching ANC leaders resorting to personal attacks because it is the only refuge available to them.

This is what happened this week as Zille, in her defence of the violence in Grabouw, sought to explain the overcrowding in Western Cape schools as the result of the migration of education "refugees" from the Eastern Cape.

Zille, it seems, must always be right when she climbs on her campaigning horse, charging inelegantly and crudely through a minefield of sensitivities.

In this instance, it was less about Zille trampling on the ANC's sore spots, but much more about dismissing the vulnerability of ordinary black South Africans who expressed outrage and hurt at her terminology.

As they desperately search for black voters to radically transform the Democratic Alliance into a multiracial party with a convincingly large black membership, it would do well for Zille's advisers and backroom boys to rein her in on social media.

Whatever advances the DA has made with the black electorate will be undone by Zille, the party's hardest worker, because she is incapable of restraint when she responds with self-righteous anger.

But, and this is what the ANC cannot defend, Zille is absolutely correct in pointing out the shameful neglect and failure of the Eastern Cape government in providing quality education for the province's children.

The truth is that the Eastern Cape is a mess on most fronts, but education remains an unquestionably monumental failure by both provincial and national governments.

The notion of quality education is a joke in this province, illustrated and confirmed by education MEC Mandla Makupula's budget speech on Thursday.

It is a shameful list of failures contained in 29 pages - mud schools, inferior infrastructure, bad teachers, negative audits, maladministration, ghost teachers, inadequate teachers, under-served pupils, hungry children, wasteful expenditure.

It is testimony to the contempt in which the children of this province are being held. Is it so surprising, then, that Eastern Cape parents are looking to the Western Cape as a place to educate their children?

Nor is it surprising at all that the ANC has resorted to a barrage of insults and heckling - as has been the case since Zille's offensive "refugee" statement on Tuesday. They have no other recourse than to obfuscate the issue with personal attacks such as that by Marius Fransman, the ANC leader in the Western Cape, who said: "Zille, your underpants is hanging out en jou onderrok is vuil (and your petticoat is dirty)."

Truth be told, it is the ANC's dirty petticoat that is showing in the Eastern Cape, and it might do Fransman well to read Makupula's budget speech, rather than engage in cheap electioneering tactics.

It has been evident for many years now that the Eastern Cape is in desperate need of incisive leadership and that it should have been one of the priority provinces identified for national intervention.

But, as the time draws closer for President Jacob Zuma to face a re-election battle in Mangaung in December, it will not do to upset the ANC's second-biggest voting region by sending in a wholesale intervention team, as has been the case in Limpopo.

Zille's insensitive language this week was a huge public relations blunder because it so unambiguously portrayed a country with an incredibly fragile sense of identity, belonging and nationhood.

Worse still, it showed that the words Makupula quoted on Thursday in his speech are still a faraway reality.

Quoting from Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, he said: "Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation.

"It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another."

The way things are, the daughter will remain a peasant, the son a mine worker and the child a farmworker in the province of Madiba's birth. And it is failures such as these that reinforce how fragile we are as a nation.