Post 1994 Education System in South Africa

Prior to the realization of what many term as freedom, the majority of black people in South Africa were exposed to what was termed as Bantu Education, a system that was designed to disenfranchise black people, and limit their employment options. Previously, it was rare to find qualified black Civil, Mechanical or Electrical Engineers, in most cases, black people were apprentices or draughtsmen, or workshop assistants. Yes, there were a few exceptions, but as I said, these were rare. There was a proliferation of black clerks, teachers, nurses, yet very few blacks possessed scarce skills and qualifications that would open good work opportunities for them. This did not only disenfranchise black people in South Africa during the apartheid era, but further disenfranchised us, after the apartheid era, during the transition, which has unfortunately taken longer than many care to admit.

We are currently having a dire shortage of South African born, black, M&E, QA/QI and Program/Project Officers/Managers/Specialists in both public and private sector, and this is highly evident in the NGO sector, where most of these positions are occupied by people of foreign descent, mostly from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, Lesotho and most West African countries. Also, when it comes to Statisticians, we are also having a challenge. The challenges that we are faced with, are not only surface challenges, but they are systemic, and were designed into the education system, through its evolution from Bantu education to what we have now, which many argue is worse than what Bantu education offered.

Currently, the education system that is in place is not conducive for the development of our country. We have a system that continuously breeds employees, instead of breeding industrialists, innovators and developmental practitioners. This is more so within the black community, as evidenced by the number of black graduates who are sitting at home, not knowing what to do with the education they acquired. This is due to a number of factors, one of them being the stream they followed, where there is an over-supply of graduates in the specific field. For example, in the past, the entry requirements for a person who wanted to do Engineering were a bit high, and "good universities" that produced highly respected engineers, architects, Chartered Accountants, Actuaries, Scientists and so on, had very stringent entry requirements that excluded the majority of black people. A black student had to work double as much to gain entry, and when these were getting "saturated" with blacks, the entry requirements were seemingly relaxed a bit, and there was a systematic shift to raise the entry standards and requirements to other careers that were in critical shortage, like Chemical Engineers, Doctors, Remote Sensing Scientists and so on.

Today, you find it difficult for a black student to be admitted at WSU for Medicine, because the university has to maintain a certain standard of entry to their MBChB. What then happens, is that many black children end up flocking to degrees that are already in over supply, and we have even more graduates sitting at home with no employment. Our education system is, by design, not meant to develop us. Imagine, our graduates are unable to utilize their education as a stepping stone to start their own businesses. You find a person with Masters, struggling to get employment, or struggling to convert their own thesis into a viable business opportunity. It becomes even worse to have someone with an MBA/MBL stuck in a position they are not happy in, and not utilising what they have learnt to start something for themselves. We even have PhD graduates who are unemployable, not because they don't have the requisite experience, but due to their fields of study not being aligned with what industry requires.

Why are we not changing our system then, to suite the majority of South Africans? It is simply because we have been indoctrinated to not see anything wrong with the system as it is. Even our academics act as if they are content with the system, yet many of them, in their small corners, lament the value and impact of education in our generation. It is rather disheartening to note that in this day and age, our academics have not found ways of transforming education to take care of the needs of the black populace. What we are busy with, is to try and change what is there already. For example, we are busy fighting for the transformation of Stellenbosch University to an English Medium university, instead of us learning from how the Afrikaners established and ran such an institution that allows them not only to educate their children in their mother tongue, but also helps in the preservation of the Afrikaner culture and language.

In essence, as black people we are cowards and apologists. We are scared to innovate. Some argue that our vernacular languages will not have names or descriptions for some of the complex words that are used in English, not appreciating the fact that languages are, in their composition, not stagnant, but evolve as times pass. Some are not even aware that some, if not many, of the words we use in English today, come from languages like Greek, Latin and other languages that were spoken mostly in the pre-medieval times. We are so apologetic that we don't even know or realise that we have the power to change the system to suit us. We go around giving ourselves pats on the our backs for being slaves, and we even promote this slavery by not getting to a point where as black people, we have our own institutions that not only instill our values and systems, but addresses our aspirations and develops the black populace in a manner that doesn't oppress us, but develops us to be better.