Typically of a South African politician, the Gauteng premier has sought to gaslight and scapegoat thousands of anxious parents after continued failures in the province’s online school admissions system left up to 3,000 grade 1 and grade 8 pupils without placement. This week, Panyaza Lesufi suggested that parents were to blame for preferring certain schools over others.
What he fails to acknowledge is that it is his government’s own failures that lead parents — whose only crime is wanting a decent education for their children — to make these choices. Lesufi’s department had months to implement the very solutions he is now punting at the drop of a hat.
What mattered more to him appears to have been defending a system first introduced under his watch as education MEC — a system that has had problems year after year.
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