“We have to think about the kind of society we want; a society we need to struggle for and the framework of education which will drive us towards that society.” Steve Biko said these words half a century ago to highlight the central role education plays in building a better society.

He recognised then that the thinking about a new democratic South Africa went hand in hand with transforming the public education system at every level — from “cradle to career”.

Fifty years later and the South African public education system is in shambles. Of the 20.6 million young people between the ages of 15-34, nine million — almost half — are not in employment, education, or training. They are unemployed and unemployable.

Consider that in 2016 there were 863,307 students in grade 7, this class wrote their matric exams in 2021 and from that cohort only 30,000 students passed maths with a 60% grade or better. That’s 3.5%.

The main concern that keeps me up at night is whether the ANC is now pursuing miseducation as a deliberate strategy to stay in power. Reliable polls that I have looked at indicate that the ANC has its highest support base from communities that have high unemployment and that have high levels of welfare dependence. Trapping people in a cycle of unemployability and reliance on government is nothing short of evil. Therefore, we must ask the question: is the ANC sacrificing young people’s life prospects for short-term electoral gain?

It has been the fate of African liberation movements that as they stay in power longer and fail to deliver on the promises they made to citizens, they progressively lose the support of the elites, the middle class and then the working class. As the last liberation movement to get into power in Africa, ANC politicians would have been aware of this trend.

As the party continues losing its grip on power and slides below the 50% support mark, there is an incentive for the ANC to deliberately sabotage our education system or to let it remain a system which only serves two out of 10 students well enough for them to get quality results.

That incentive is to prevent the emergence of a new class of voters who are able to access gainful employment and form part of a new middle class. A growing middle class is a threat to the longevity of liberation movements and their hold on political power.

While Cyril Ramaphosa has paid lip service to the importance of education in every State of the Nation Address, little has been done to reshape the sector or to improve its performance. While they preach about the virtues of education, ANC politicians have always made it clear that for them the party comes first over everything.

Can we discard the possibility that if given a choice between the survival of the party and the improvement of education, they would not choose their self-interests of staying in power?

What makes this all the more sinister is that it’s a copy-and-paste of the apartheid government’s education system for a black child. And our history teaches us that the issue of education has always been linked to economic outcomes and opportunities in South Africa.

We often consider employment data separately from our education statistics, while these two are intertwined and affect both the growth of our economy and the inequality which plagues our nation. We need to realign our thinking about the quality of our education system with our thinking about our economic planning. We cannot build an inclusive economy with an unequal education system.

The South African economy was deliberately designed and maintained as a dual economy for centuries. The two South Africas are still evident across the nation both in the urban and rural areas. The world in Alexandra township is far removed from the luxury of Sandton. Visiting the rural parts of South Africa often feels like time travelling decades because of the underdevelopment that still persists.

The source of this dual economy structure comes from economic decisions taken over 140 years ago. The economy was designed to be an extractive economy for the benefit of a small racial elite. Between 1880 and 1913, the African farming economy was decimated to remove competition, and this culminated in the Land Act of 1913 which legalised the dispossession of land from African communities.

In addition to the seizure of land the African community was deliberately confined to cheap labour markets. While much has been discussed about the Land Act of 1913 and land reform remains one of the hottest topics in our political zeitgeist, this article seeks to underscore the harm caused by the colour bar in the labour market.

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As early as 1904, a system of job reservation for Europeans was introduced in the mining economy. Africans were banned from occupying any skilled labour work in the mining sector. A list of job restrictions was developed — for instance no African was allowed to be an amalgamator, an assayer, a banksman, a brass finisher, a bricklayer and so on. This system was known as the colour bar.

The colour bar was formalised under the Mines and Works Act of 1911 and its amendment in 1926. The state even before apartheid not only removed the possibility of Africans benefitting economically from an education but also refused to invest in black schools and discouraged black education. This was institutionalisation of the cheap black labour economy.

The exclusionary policy was entrenched further by the Bantu Education Act of 1953. Hendrik Verwoerd was very clear that there was no space in apartheid South Africa for a skilled black labour force. His own words on this ring loudly:

“What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.”

Black workers under both colonialism and apartheid were purposefully kept unskilled and were barred from high-skill occupations so that skilled white workers would not face direct competition and could enjoy higher wages. It was also to make sure that farms and mines could get access to cheap labour.

In light of this history, one of the priorities of the ANC government when it came into power in 1994 should have been reform of the education system, specifically with a view to making it equivalent in quality to the education that was being received by white South Africans. Education is the great equaliser, and it is one of the ways in which individuals can gain upward social mobility and be able to change the conditions of their lives.

In light of trends in the global markets, South Africa cannot afford to retain a cheap labour extractive economic model. To grow our economy, we need to grow the size of our manufacturing — currently manufacturing contributes only 13% to our GDP and only employs 9.7% of our workforce. The German industrial sector in contrast contributes 30% to the GDP and employs 27% of its population in the manufacturing sector.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is further shifting the nature of manufacturing and the nature of work. Developments in technology are rendering more of the old jobs obsolete. In order to stay competitive and to keep jobs in South Africa, our education system has to provide workers who are sufficiently equipped to handle equipment which is progressively becoming more sophisticated and to handle markets which are being more globalised and complicated.

In the 2019 World Economic Forum global competitiveness index, South Africa was ranked as follows out of 141 countries: on skills of the current workforce 101/141; on skills of the future workforce we ranked 107/141; and on quality of vocational training we ranked 119/141.

It is incredibly clear that we need to improve our national skills base in order to improve our economy, which requires us to have an education-centric government.

South Africa needed an education president in 1994 and South Africa needs an education president even more urgently in 2024. By education president, I mean a national leader who would put the reform of the education sector at the top of his priority list and direct the nation towards the rapid improvement of that sector as a matter of strategic urgency.

Nelson Mandela, while passionate about education and speaking strongly about its transformational impact, however, was failed by his administration and the administrations that followed. The ANC government failed to unravel the Bantu Education system. There are still two dual education systems in South Africa and that has put a brake on the development of the country and our journey towards unification.

How do we address the challenges in our education system to produce the outcomes that we need as a country? We drop the 30% pass mark for subjects, introduce an independent education ombudsman and raise salaries for educators. We reduce class sizes, limit unions’ power and replace Life Orientation with Critical Thinking.

We introduce cash incentives for students, improve our primary phase of education and implement tighter security at all schools. We extend programmes for underperforming learners, bring in digital learning centres in every township and conduct a nationwide teacher skills audit.

Our townships and rural areas cannot remain dormitories of unemployment, they need to be economically viable, and they need to become high-skills communities.

In the words of Nelson Mandela, the power of education extends beyond the development of skills we need for economic success. It can contribute to nation-building and reconciliation. DM