BUDGETS AND BUREAUCRATS - WHOM DO THEY SERVE?
The problems facing South Africa at this phase of its history are many. The Educational Journal has striven to analyse the central problems that dominate the lives of people. And it has in recent years made no efforts to link problems in the policies and practises of education with the problems in the political economy of the country. So, for example, much of the continuing chaos in staffing, equipping and revamping the syllabuses and methodology has been traced to the woeful state of the economy. The Teacher�s League�s statement on The Funding of Education, issued in February 1996, sets out the more immediate causes and effects of the lack of funds and the misdirection of what is available. The article World Economy in this and the previous issue of the Journal presents a carefully researched analysis of both the global and the local economic realities that form the background of such problems.
But the government has also, in the meantime, produced its budget that is supposed to regulate the income and expenditure of funds used to run the business of the lives of forty million people. Education is part of that business, and the education budget provides an idea of what the government can and cannot do in this area. However, to understand why things can or cannot be done requires a far deeper grasp of a budget as an instrument of rule.
What is even more vital is the need to recognise what all the jargon and mumbo-jumbo of budget language add up to. This has been made all the more necessary because the Ministry of Education, like the Ministries of Health, Labour, and Social Services, has been using a barrage of half-truths and plain lies to cover up the reality of what is going on in the country and why.
The budget presented to the Government of National Unity (GNU) in the first quarter of this year, like the budgets served up by Keys, du Plessis, Horwood and others before him, tells a simple but grave story of a sick economy that cannot provide the basic needs of South Africa�s people. As Liebenberg himself confessed in his budget speech, the budget cannot on its own create employment. In fact the budget�s aftermath will continue a process of sacking, retrenching and swelling the ranks of the unemployed with some 100000 men and women from the State�s labour force. This in turn, will produce a ripple or chain effect in that part of the economy affected by the lives of unemployed people, and drag down further the life condition of another sector of the population.
The government of this country derives the income it works with from a few principal sources. These are the taxes on the wages and salaries of workers (income tax); taxes on consumer goods and services (VAT); taxes on non-essential goods (liquor, cigarettes). These account for some 70% of the government�s income. All these taxes, as a whole, have been increased in the recent budget, contrary to what has been claimed. Import duties are another source of State revenue. But the income from taxes on companies in mining, manufacture, finance and from farming accounts for less than half of what ordinary persons pay into the Treasury. Moreover, the taxes on companies, which keep back profits but do not reinvest them in development, have been decreased by 15% in the current year. It is because the State cannot squeeze more taxes out of the three major sources used in the past that plans have been introduced to tax the savings of people in insurance and retirement funds.
Along with these realities go an endless string of lies and half-truths concerning the �fairness� of recent budgets. But so woefully weak and ailing is the country�s economy that all the sources of income and all the fiction cannot produce nearly 45 billion rands of the State�s budget of about 157 billion rands to cover its expenditure. R45 billion has to be, or has already been, borrowed, and attracts huge interest payments - out of taxes that are paid mainly by ordinary people. In short, even in this sphere of our economy the country�s State business is like that of any third-world ex-colonial country. That is what the Journal�s survey of the world economy shows in unmistakable terms
The GNU has chosen to run this country on behalf of local and foreign investors who own and/or control the wealth producing factors, including labour, for their own benefit. It is mainly out of what is left over from the wealth-producing economic activity that all public services are funded by the State. One may safely say that an education budget of R38 billion and a social services budget of R7 billion are run on the basis of borrowings.
Much of the factual material is hidden by the double-talk dished out daily to the mass of the people via the media. But what is indeed deplorable is that in the field of education there are �educators� who are so ignorant of the most elementary economics and political factors determining education policies and practises that they have willingly acted as Little Sir Echoes repeating the trash that that the Ministry of Education has handed out over the years to justify or excuse the retrogressive and chaotic state of education in this country.
No account is taken of the fact that a system of special, additional, taxes has fallen upon parents of all economic classes. School fees have to be paid, books have to be replaced as �free� books disappear, and a range of school equipment has to be paid for from the proceeds of bazaars, dances, raffles, for example. These constitute some of the means by which the shortfalls in the total education budget are made good. But so great is the spread of poverty in this country that this unlegislated taxation leaves the education of those most needing it in dire straits.
This is further evidence that those teacher organisations and their individual spokespersons who argue that the Bengu rationalisation-retrenchment policy is an �economic necessity� are speaking for the ruling classes and the exploiters of this country�s wealth - and not for the victims of the Bengu policy. That is, not for the learners (the pupils and students) and the teachers who will be driven out of the schools.
To speak further of �budget restraints� is to cover up the truth of where the real trouble lies. The ministers who serve in government are servants of a political and economic system over which they have no control. The teachers who argue that �budget constraints� are a �reason� for sacking their colleagues and creating even worse conditions of overcrowding in the schools are, in effect, in the same position. All efforts on their part to claim that they do this in the name of �equity� (the new buss-word for the fraudulent �levelling of the playing fields�) amount to hypocrisy and dangerous cant - springing from their ignorance and their inability to wrench themselves from the clutches of being �obedient servants�. After all, they do not HAVE to agree to do the dirty of the principal perpetrators of this dark errand. On grounds of principle they had every need to refuse to do that. On grounds of lack of principle, lack of insight and lack of integrity they agreed to more than ten ways by which the new assault on education could be carried out. Such was the real meaning of no fewer than eleven resolutions which the Western Cape South African �Democratic� Teachers� Union (Sadtu), the Cape Teachers� �Professional� Association (CTPA) and the National �Professional� Teachers� Organisations of South Africa (Naptosa) shared with a Mrs. Martha Olckers - the Bengu agent in that province. And so the whole shameless saga will be repeated in every one of the other nine provinces.
But educators - as distinct from paid hirelings of a wretched, exploitative social system - who understand South African society as part of world society will know not only the basic causes of the decline of education and other necessary social services here. They will know on what scale the rulers rate the priorities of education, health, social services and other needs of the people. They will know that it is not their task to assist those who vandalise the school system, for whatever �reason� but that it is their duty to resist such schemes, to refuse to be party to them. Still less must those who know be drawn into patent manoeuvres to use the public standing of such as Nelson Mandela to sidestep the whole path from the sickness of the world economy, to the sickness of our own economy, to a budget that becomes a mechanism for dealing the masses short in every aspect of their lives; and onto that part of the path paved with the fabrications linked to education crises.
But what of today�s Bengu-Olckers agents? Yesterday they agreed that overcrowding was a major factor in the collapse of primary and secondary schools. Today they organise overcrowding. Yesterday they called for more, and better qualified, teachers. Today they are party to retrenching teachers, closing down training colleges and restricting the take-up of newly qualified educators in to the schools. Yesterday they went on strike, held protest marches and meetings, toyi-toyied, invaded State offices to indicate their protest. Today they not only act as sophists of their masters, they crowd into high office in the State and actively carry out what the Verwoerdians left behind for others to continue. Yesterday they called for more skilled persons to develop the economy, and promote educational progress. Today they conspire to ditch those needed to develop such skills in the youth, and thus strangle the growth of such skills at the very source.
The Teachers� League can find no redeeming features whatever in the newly planned staffing of schools. It can find no excuse for the manifestly racist ways in which public persons in high and low places claim they will be able to achieve �equity� - fairness? - within a school system racked by the errors of the past and the follies of the present.
There is no reason at all why South African educators should be able to claim that they �do not know�. 10000 kilometers away in Britain a writer responds to an argument for the abolition of model C schools that �If parents want privilege for their children let them pay the full price�. The writer says �The trouble is that is just what rich parents, black as well as white, will do if Model C schools are abolished. Fine for them, fine for the State budget, but what about children of poor parents?.....The trouble is that the educators have been so busy managing and amalgamating themselves that they have little time for the business of educating.� (The Economist, pp48, 53, 9 September 1995.)
