JUSTICE MALALA | Scholar transport tragedy was not an accident, it was poor leadership

Scholar transport tragedy was not an accident but poor leadership

We owe the 14 schoolchildren who were killed in the crash between a minibus taxi and a truck last Monday the truth.

What happened to them was not “an accident”. It was a tragedy we have manufactured over 31 years. It is a tragedy that stalks every child who has to travel long distances in dangerous “scholar transport” from their neighbourhood to a school in a formerly whites-only area.

What happened was political cowardice and leadership failure trickling down to the public and causing death and untold pain.

The January 19 deaths are a tragedy that illustrates the lack of leadership on education by every single administration from President Nelson Mandela’s in 1994 straight through to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s today. The chickens have come home to roost, and the people are the ones who suffer.

The crash that occurred on a narrow strip of road in Vanderbijlpark was not caused by poor driving, an overloaded taxi, an expired licence disc or a dodgy public transport permit. It was caused by this: Why are hundreds of thousands of black children packed into unsafe minibus taxis every weekday morning to learn at formerly white schools far from their homes?

Why, 31 years after a free South Africa was ushered in, aren’t there excellent schools in Sebokeng or Zola or Soshanguve? Why are “white schools” still regarded by black parents as better?

It is because those schools are indeed better.

The ANC can argue until it is blue in the face, but there is perhaps no sphere in which it has failed more spectacularly than in the education of black children. Instead of energetically putting in measures to improve existing schools and build new schools that would continue the legacy of great black schools such as Ohlange High, Healdtown and others, which were destroyed by the Bantu Education Act of 1952, it has instead shut down schools in places such as Soweto.

It breaks my heart that when Nelson Mandela was set to vote in 1994, he chose to do so at Ohlange High School in KwaZulu-Natal. The symbolism was huge. The school was founded in 1901 by John Langalibalele Dube (the first president of the ANC at its founding in 1912) and Nokutela Dube. That act alone sent a message across the country: This ANC government would fix the mess of apartheid education.

Utter failure has followed that great act of symbolism. Today, the country transports its children in rickety minibus taxis from black townships to formerly white suburbs. With the help of the state, trade unions aligned to the ruling party block action against their members who sell teaching positions for money and sexual favours in township schools.

We should hang our heads in shame. The ANC — together with other formations — freed black people from apartheid. Yet, many of the party’s actions over the past 31 years have told black people that they are inferior to whites.

What exactly is this government saying to our children when every day they are transported from black townships (subliminally saying: “this is a place of failure and low standards”) to white suburbs (“this is a place of excellence”)?

The job of a leader is to learn from the past but to not be imprisoned by it; to govern wisely today, and to work to ensure that the future is better than the present. It is not the job of a leader to play to the gallery.

Yet, with this scandal as with so many others, we have seen our leaders running around impounding taxis that are unroadworthy and mounting useless, bribe-collecting, roadblocks.

Impounding taxis for show will not solve the problem. Build excellent schools in Soweto and you will solve the problem. Build solid roads in Johannesburg — instead of handing out tenders to your friends and relatives — and you will build a city. 

Again, all this is mere show rather than a sincere effort to deal with the real problem: parents do not think their kid at school in an Orlando West school can compete fairly for a place at the University of Cape Town with a kid from Afrikaanse Hoer Meisieskool Pretoria. Why isn’t there such a school? There is no political will to establish such a school. That’s the simple, painful, answer.

All the speeches we’ve heard since Monday remind me of what we saw last November in Johannesburg before the arrival of the delegates to the G20 summit. Potholes were (cosmetically) fixed, rubbish removed, the homeless chased away and water ran for a while. The minute the international guests left, Johannesburg’s problems returned — and the city’s leaders are as hard to find today as evidence of a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa.

Cosmetic solutions to the problems we face will lead to tragedies similar to what we saw last Monday with the deaths of the 14 scholars. Impounding taxis for show will not solve the problem. Build excellent schools in Soweto and you will solve the problem. Build solid roads in Johannesburg — instead of handing out tenders to your friends and relatives — and you will build a city.

What happened last week was not an accident. It was poor leadership. It is not the snotty-nosed taxi driver alone who should be charged with murder. The real culprits are our leaders.