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WHY IS OUR GOVT NOT PROACTIVE?

02/03/2017 03:10:00 By Vusi Kunene

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IT seems our prime minister is busy with declarations this year and coincidentally these declarations all deal with schools. What is surprising though is that it seems the stakeholders are not contacted before the declarations are made.

It seems even parliamentarians are not contacted. My assumption is informed by the reactions from the different stakeholders. Head teachers and parents seem unaware of the declarations and only learn about them from the media.

What triggered my thinking though is not the issue of the declarations but by what the prime minister, supported by the minister of Education, said when justifying why children should be taught in vernacular at least up to the fourth grade. He cited UNESCO as the source of such a directive. I am not disputing that and I am not sure why it was decided that way.

My concern is why now? I am sure that it is not a recent thing that UNESCO had suggested such a move. It is something that was communicated to government a long time ago. What bothers me is why they were silent about this until now that it is thrown at people like it is an emergency. This is what makes people react this way. If the concept was introduced timeously and people told on time that this was coming, they would not be such a reaction as they would be ready and have been taught and understood the concept.

This is the same situation we are in with the banning of corporal punishment and introduction of positive discipline. I happened to meet with different people and sat in workshops where the issue of positive discipline was discussed. I have also sat in school meetings where positive discipline was discussed. In generally most of the school meetings where parents discussed this, they seemed to lean more on the support of corporal punishment.

The reason is that the parents have not been taught on positive discipline. This also goes to the teachers themselves. Teachers are saying government should give them alternatives to corporal punishment. It is only now that moves are being made to educate parents and teachers on the pros and cons of banning corporal punishment and introducing positive discipline. If government was proactive it would have first educated the stakeholders on positive discipline.

We are heading for elections next year and guess what, the EBC had been silent all this time and now that elections are getting closer they began to engage people on elections. They are ‘kind of’ doing civic education on elections. The question is how many people will they get to in such a short period of time? Even those people whom the EBC will be in a position to reach, they will not have enough time to educate them. Maybe the EBC is not equipped enough with the knowledge to disseminate to the people on elections.

Telling people not to vote for someone who gives them bread the previous day is not enough to educate the people to be in a position to elect someone who will contribute to the development of the country. It seems the EBC is just reacting to the fact that elections are now close and they are just ticking boxes that they did conduct civic education.

I will not entertain the excuse of lack of money because it holds no water. There are a lot of organisations that would have assisted the EBC in doing this, not only with money but by even going to communities to conduct this education. But the EBC was not there until now that they cry lack of resources.

In the budget presented by the minister of Finance, it is a good move that there is an increase to money reserved for disasters. It is a step in the right direction but I honestly believe that the increase is not a proactive move but a reaction to what we experienced last year. This I say because we cannot be saying we are being proactive to the disaster while at the same time reducing the allocation to agriculture, which is for me the worse disaster we can have. Food for me is the most important thing and we need a lot of it.

Is government telling us that the yields that we will get this year are enough to sustain us for some- time? Will it be able to take us through next year if we could have what we experienced last year? If any answer is negative then we want to react when disaster strikes. If we are still not producing enough to sustain the country then we need to increase the budget for agriculture. Do we need so much money for the army or we are waiting to react when we have food shortages. Why is government not being proactive in doing things? It always waits for problems to manifest before it reacts.