Remember you used to get your matric results in the same year you wrote that all-important examination? If the release of your results was postponed at all, you would still get them before the end of the year. Universities could happily process your results and offer you a firm place in your degree programme without skipping a beat. The system worked for matric students and university administrators alike. The good old days.
It was so exciting. You would rush at midnight to one or other newspaper headquarters in your province, wait with excitement to get the paper and frantically search for your name and some tick next to it that might signal exemption. You could enjoy the Christmas lunch and enter the new year with certainty as you planned your studies or career ahead of you. The very good old days.
These days? What a mess. The results are now routinely delivered in the year after you wrote, and horror of horrors, were even postponed to a later date in 2023. As a result, students remained anxious throughout the summer holidays wondering whether they passed (well enough) to start preparing for the next year. This year, for the first time in history, the new school year would have started while the outgoing matriculants still waited for their results. How about that?
Everything this government touches turns to dust. It cannot run a cheat-free examination; in fact, Umalusi just expressed concern about the levels of cheating in the last matric exam. Here’s what I don’t understand: how on earth were pupils allowed into the examination centre with cellphones? This exam was run the way the ANC branches run elections: a complete fiasco. Dubious professionalism, lax standards and a security system with more holes in it than my late mother’s colander bowls. If you cannot run a national exam with integrity after 30 years in power, you really should let others do the job.
The results are now routinely delivered in the year after you wrote, and horror of horrors, were even postponed to a later date in 2023.
In the meantime, students I talked to are stressed. They lived through their long-awaited holidays wondering all the time about the results. Universities can do little other than wait before making final placement offers; all they have is provisional placement based on school results from more than a year ago. Why is this happening?
As more than one person said on social media, the matric exam results were delivered much earlier when there was none of these fancy technologies available to make the marking and processing of large-scale data so much easier. It is not only technology, however, it is the people who run these systems from the start of the process. More than one examiner told me stories of administrative clumsiness of all kinds, like arriving to mark and spending a day waiting because the papers had not arrived, or the chief examiner was held up somewhere; that kind of amateurism.
To be fair, the matric fiasco merely mirrors the mess in every part of society; complete and utter incompetence none so obvious as the electricity crisis. Because of the negative impact on my research and development work, I plan to get off the grid. The academic business and health costs are too high, and there seems to be no end in sight. Every politician, from the president up, has lied about end-of-the-crisis dates (I see the minister of finance slipped on the same banana skin), and I just can’t go on with this poor quality of working life.
But wait, if you go off the grid, you are required to compensate your government for not using their services. Think that is a bad joke? How about an electricity increase at the very moment that you’re getting less of it. It gets worse: the very minister who helped land us in this muck, Gwede Mantashe, might very well be given Eskom to look after as well. If this was the apartheid government screwing with our lives, there would have been hell to pay. Somehow, we let these crooks off the hook time and again.
In short, the minister of basic education is not your problem. She is simply another cog in the wheel of a political establishment that does not care a damn about the lives and the futures of our children, or the efficient administration of our universities, or the peace of mind of parents when it comes to a solemn duty for officials: the timely release of the examination results of matriculants.
Meanwhile, there was a tiger loose on the streets of Johannesburg, and I can finally tell my American friends they were right after all.
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