By Enyichukwu Enemanna
President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa has reiterated that his Government of National Unity (GNU) will be durable despite a dispute with the largest party in the coalition government over a new education bill.
“We come from different histories … and are driven by different ideological outlooks but … the government of national unity is durable,” Ramaphosa said on Friday while addressing newsmen, dismissing concerns that the GNU could collapse over disagreements.
The disputed bill makes several changes to basic education laws in South Africa.
Part of the education bill gives the relevant department the power to approve school boards’ language policies, which aim to prevent racial discrimination.
“I have confidence in the durability of the GNU because anything else is just too ghastly to contemplate,” Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) has alleged that students are being excluded from some schools because of the language they speak, which it claimed has been used as a proxy for racial exclusion, referring to Afrikaans, the tongue of South Africa’s first white settlers, which was promoted by its white minority rulers under apartheid.
The DA says the bill violates what they say is South Africans’ right to teach and learn in their mother tongue. The party has struggled to shake off the image of a party that portrays white dominance, many of whom speak Afrikaans as their first language.
Earlier Ramaphosa said the bill would “resolve longstanding challenges in our education system,” but the DA promised to fight it in court.
Heritage Times HT recalls that earlier this week, DA said the bill went against the principle of consensus-building of the government of national unity and threatened the coalition.
“Primarily it’s about the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, which is seen as an attempt to exclude people that are not able to speak Afrikaans,” said Andre Duvenhage, a politics professor at North-West University.
“In a way the … legislation is an attempt at opening up these schools for all people,” he told Reuters.
The Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill also makes one year of pre-primary school mandatory, reinforces a ban on corporal punishment in schools and regulates home-schooling.
Ramaphosa said he would allow for three months of consultation on the most controversial sections of the bill and if a solution was not reached then implementation would go ahead.
