The bell has tolled for resistance to Bela

THE Basic Education Amendment Act (Bela) is currently a focal point within the ANC. However, the reality is that only party president Cyril Ramaphosa's temporary reservations over the law are preventing its final implementation.

Given the insistence of teaching unions such as Sadtu (the South African Democratic Teachers Union) as well as the ANC executive committee on no further amendments to the law signed by Ramaphosa on 13 September, it is surprising that the presidency, Solidarity and the minister of basic education, Siviwe Gwarube, have reached a new agreement at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) this week.

In a media release, Solidarity and the minister claim that the “dispute has been resolved”. However, if you read the minister's statement, it seems anything but. What is correct is that the controversial sections will no longer be implemented on December 13. In its statement, Solidarity also makes it clear, “This settlement does not, however, affect the process of the government of national unity or any other processes regarding Bela,” and “The Solidarity Movement will indeed present the outcome of the settlement to the government of national unity.”

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Gwarube's statement is more cautious: “The minister of basic education and Solidarity have entered into a bilateral settlement agreement, dated 25 November 2024, in terms of which the parties have reached an understanding of how concerns relating to sections 4 and 5 of the Bela Act may be addressed.” It is therefore a settlement for a further process, the setting of “norms and standards”, but the details and the likely outcome are not inevitable or certain.

All this agreement means is that Ramaphosa will have to convince the ANC and teaching unions that the amendments he signed in September should be amended again. This includes Sadtu, the ANC's caucus in the national assembly, the national working committee and the national executive committee.

For months now, the DA has created the impression that this law will be a kind of litmus test for the preservation of the government of national unity (GNU), but it is not. Adriaan Basson from News24 recently stated that the Bela Act does not necessarily pose any danger to the survival of the GNU, and he is probably right.

I have it on good authority that three months ago Ramaphosa was completely prepared for concessions to the DA and Afrikaners and a referral of the law back to parliament as a political compromise. But several events since September 13 have made him realise that he could not and no longer needed to make any concessions as far as Bela was concerned.

Ramaphosa under enormous pressure

The biggest problem is that there is not sufficient consensus within the ANC – or the tripartite alliance – on the justification for the “Faustian pact" coalition government between the liberation movement and the DA. In fact, Ramaphosa's opponents within the ANC, especially those positioning themselves to take over from him eventually, are using the room for manoeuvre within the tripartite alliance created by the disagreement over Bela and the National Health Insurance Act, to cast even more suspicion on the GNU.

The DA realises that Ramaphosa is under enormous pressure within his own party not to make concessions to Helen Zille and John Steenhuisen that can be seen as ideological betrayal. The president will run an enormous political risk if he refers the law back to the national legislature, because the chances are very slim that the ANC's caucus will favour the DA and Afriforum and amend the law in a way that will bulwark white Afrikaans schools against poor management of public education.

The final nail in the coffin is that Ramaphosa, like Zille and Steenhuisen, knows that the DA is involved in a battle for South Africa's political survival and will be unable to easily withdraw from the agreement. The “doomsday scenario" of a political agreement between the ANC, MK Party and the EFF is significantly greater than the manageable problems of Bela.

Maybe some background first. Bela sparked great debate over clauses 4 and 5 which deal with the power over schools' language and admissions policies. Clause 4 gives provincial heads of departments (HODs) the power to influence the final decisions on language and admission. The purpose of the law in its current form is to promote “inclusiveness" and prevent discriminatory practices resulting from the exclusive use of Afrikaans at some schools.

Critics argue that this undermines the autonomy of school governing bodies and could jeopardise the right to mother tongue education. We also know that while the law may be the initiative of the former minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga, its details were born out of the legal standoffs between Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi and white, Afrikaans schools. Similar to clause 4, clause 5 gives provincial HODs the final say on schools' admissions policy.

Backlog in building new schools

Although the goal is to ensure equitable access to education, opponents believe that it centralises control and reduces the decision-making role of local school communities. The massive backlog in building new schools in Gauteng creates the impression that politicians want to solve the problem by simply making space in white schools available to black learners.

As a result of the controversy surrounding these clauses, Ramaphosa kicked the can down the street and delayed implementation for three months to allow for further consultation among stakeholders. He followed the same clumsy strategy with the NHI law, an upside down way of doing things that creates more problems than solutions. From there, the process only moved further south when Steenhuisen, in an attempt to influence Ramaphosa's thinking about Bela, persuaded the president to first enter into discussion with Solidarity frontmen Kallie Kriel and Dirk Hermann.

Steenhuisen realised that the DA's political leverage was limited and dragged Bela from the technocratic space into the domain of power politics with his decision to involve Kriel and Hermann. It would have been entirely possible for the DA to refer Ramaphosa to research which suggests that mother tongue teaching is important for scholastic performance and that the proposed amendments to the law undermine this important principle. He could have pointed out to the president of the ANC that public schools will not always be managed in the general interest, precisely because the interests of communities are so often ignored by cadres and civil servants. Or he could have argued that parental involvement is promoted by empowering governing boards rather than by bureaucrats and provincial administrations. The DA certainly made all these arguments in defence of the amendments, but these should have been the primary motivations.

By referring the president to Kriel and Hermann, Steenhuisen took a technocratic justification for Afrikaans education into the sphere of cultural and linguistic nationalism. If Ramaphosa did intend to extend a hand to the DA as a political partner in the GNU, he clouded his options by listening to Steenhuisen. I will always wonder if it would not have been easier for him to market a technocratic decision to the ANC's management structures, rather than the nationalisms in which the draft law is now immersed. The soft diplomacy of technocratic motivations might just have taken the sting out of the conversation in the ANC's NEC and its caucus in the legislature.

Afrikaner pressure groups do not exactly strengthen Ramaphosa's hand or their own cause by openly appealing to the power politics of popular nationalism. The cause for Afrikaans will probably be better served by conversations in the silence of an inner room than the Sturm und Drang of a procession from the Voortrekker Monument. AfriForum and Solidarity have already made it clear that for them it is about the preservation of Afrikaner culture and that the law cannot and must not separate language and culture from each other. Afrikaans schools in their eyes are therefore cultural or political entities, as much as they are a resource for teaching.

In his conversation with Ramaphosa, Kriel invited the ANC leader to visit Afrikaans schools with him. Kriel argues that there are no exclusively white Afrikaans schools. But to black South Africans, hosting 20 or 30 or 40 black children in the midst of 800 white pupils is an attempt to legitimise white dominance. This is in no way indicative of equal and fair access.

Public display of power

For many ANC members, such as Lesufi, but also the party's national working committee and the NEC, as well as the ANC caucus in the national assembly, the phenomenon of white schools as political islands of cultural nationalism is a stumbling block. There is little doubt in their minds that these schools aim to exclude black children or at least endure them as permanent minorities, rather than innocently striving for quality education.

The event at the Voortrekker Monument, with right-wing hothead singer Steve Hofmeyr present, was intended as a public display of power by Afrikaners in support of Afrikaans education, but left the optics that Afrikaner nationalism and language are still inextricably linked. An alleged 10 000 people took part in the largest gathering of Afrikaners since 1994.

The images of thousands of Afrikaners at an Afrikaner “volksmonument" left black South Africans with the impression that resistance to the law had to do with “volksnasionalisme" rather than an honest attempt to promote Afrikaans mother tongue education. This puts Ramaphosa in an impossible political position to make any concessions to his partners in the GNU and gives his opponents within the ANC all the ammunition they need to mobilise resistance against further amendments to the law he has signed.

I am not convinced that it makes sense to periodically suspend the liberal values ​​of the DA for the sake of sectarian nationalisms. In this case, a cause that has merit was undermined rather than advanced.

I am amazed at how adaptable children from good Afrikaans schools are by the time they start studying at tertiary institutions. Within months of being enrolled, they are almost completely bilingual and the demand for lectures in Afrikaans decreases drastically. The high-quality education at Afrikaans schools makes learners adaptable beings who can migrate between diverse worldviews.

But there can be no doubt that schools that reflect the demographics of South Africa are the death knell for Afrikaans public education. The concept will eventually have to survive in private education. To that one must add that the insistence on Afrikaans teaching comes more often from parents than children. I have often wondered if this is not a case of an older generation trying to keep a younger generation captive in the ideology of their fears. 

As far as I'm concerned, whatever the amendments to the education act might ultimately entail, they should reassure black children that language will not serve to exclude them from a public school. Afriforum and Steve Hofmeyr's presence do not fill me with confidence.

♦ VWB ♦

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