Professor Sibusiso Bengu’s education legacy
- William Gumede
Reforms were poorly thought-out and executed, and their ramifications continue to undermine the quality of education and economic growth.
The ineffectiveness of outcomes-based education, part of the most consequential package of education reforms introduced by the newly elected ANC government in 1994 to undo the neglect of apartheid-education on black South Africans, will be forever associated with Professor Sibusiso Bengu, the first post-apartheid education minister.
Bengu was the Minister of Education between May 1994 and June 1999. The intention of outcomes-based education was to improve pupils' problem-solving, critical thinking and mathematics skills.
In the most recent international school mathematics ranking, South Africa ranked among the five lowest performing countries, along with most African countries. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan ranked the highest in mathematics proficiency. South Africa’s school science and technology education ranking are also at the bottom of global rankings, even behind many African countries.
In another global survey, SA's grade 5 learners came last among 58 nations in mathematics and science. In the study, SA's grade 5 learners were mostly assessed against grade 4 learners from other countries. Furthermore, a recent global survey showed 8 out of 10 SA learners struggle to read by the age of 10.
It was not the policy of outcomes-based education per se that was disastrous, but the out-of-context, uncoordinated, and ultimately shambolic way it was implemented. It was a clash between vision and reality. The reform was implemented at the same time as the whole public administration of the education department was restructured, the different ethnic segregated education departments amalgamated into one, and the leadership structure of the administration changed.
Almost immediately after the new government was established the whole leadership of the Education Department was replaced from minister to senior administrative heads. New provincial education departments were introduced. The former homelands, Bantustans and ‘independent’ territories were reincorporated into one administrative system.
At the same time all the administrative processes, systems and reporting lines were overhauled. A new budget allocating system was introduced, and budgets were reprioritised and rechannelled.
ANC deployees, many who came from exile, and some with little recent experience of the education system were appointed at the head of the education system at critical levels. A new administrative culture had to be inculcated from disparate administrative cultures inherited. The reforms were often introduced with ideological zeal, rather than pragmatism. Many of those who urged caution were regularly sidelined, forced out or accused of being apologists for apartheid or the Bantustan system. It was system overload.
The ANC government also introduced reforms to close teacher training colleges, as part of its reform to close technical colleges, and incorporate Technikons into universities or turned them into technology universities. The government also closed the successful artisan or apprentice programs – key to the industrialisation emerging economies, with many seeing this as producing “labourers”.
Many of South Africa’s technical schools were abolished and turned into mainstream schools. Many of the remaining black mainstream church-based schools were either incorporated into the state school system or closed by churches because of lack of funds – as churchgoers and funding, to mainstream churches dwindled.
During Bengu’s ministerial term, essentially, three massive education reforms were introduced simultaneously: in 1997, at the school level he introduced outcomes-based education, called Curriculum 2005 and a new school language policy.
The department also introduced a policy to “redeploy” teachers, ostensibly as a redistributive policy whereby experienced teachers, would be redeployed to poor schools. Teachers had the option not to be redeployed by taking a voluntary retrenchment package. Not unsurprisingly, vast numbers of experienced teachers took the severance package. By January 1997, more than 18000 teachers did so.
Bhengu at the time conceded that many of the country’s best equipped teachers had the severance package and had left to the private sector or abroad. It costs the government millions of rands – and its best teachers. The black education system has yet to recover from this – as government also closed down teacher colleges as part of the reform, meaning a loss of experienced teachers, and fewer new teachers coming into the system. At the higher education level, he introduced a structural shift from technical colleges and artisan programs to universities.
Some teacher colleges were incorporated into universities. Some Technikons were either merged or incorporated into universities.
Many rural teachers and technical colleges were closed, not only disrupting supply of new teachers for the system but collapsing local economies in one sweep.
Black school sports, culture and music were downgraded or terminated. Necessary parts of an education system, such as the system of inspectors to play an oversight role over teachers, were abolished, as it was seen as relic of the apartheid-era, when predominantly white inspectors played an oversight over black teachers.
The South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), an affiliate of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a member of the ANC-tripartite alliance with the SA Communist Party, started to dominate school education. In the years after Bhengu, the basic education Cabinet portfolio would virtually be reserved for a SADTU leader.
Over time, SADTU’s often partisan, patronage and ideological interests became to override the interests of SA’s pupils. SADTU often would control the appointment of teachers, prevent its members to be held accountable for wrongdoing and many of its members have been implicated in corruption in school infrastructure procurement.
The reforms were poorly thought-out, and poorly executed and their ramifications continue to undermine development outcomes, quality of education and economic growth.
Bengu on the face of it was eminently suited to be the first post-apartheid national education minister. He was born in Kranskop, Natal in 1934. His father was a Lutheran Minister. His paternal uncle was the Evangelist Reverend Nicholas Bhengu, known as “uMkhulu”, by his congregants, he was the Founder of the Africa Back to God Crusade (Assemblies of God) in the 1950s.
Bengu was educated at the University of South Africa where he completed an honours degree in history in 1966. In 1974, he completed a PhD at the University of Geneva.
Bengu started his career as a teacher. He established Dlangezwa High School in 1969, near Empangeni, of which he was the principal. Creating new institutions are critical in the development of countries. One of the key reasons why many African countries have failed is because they have not created too few new institutions and destroy too many inherited institutions, under the adage of ‘transformation’ or ‘decolonisation’ or for patronage reasons.
Pupils of Dlangezwa included Glen Mashinini, the former Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, Musa Zondi, the former IFP Secretary General and the children of Ntatho Motlana, the former Chairperson of the Soweto Committee of Ten, and Percy Qoboza, the former Editor of The World newspaper.
In 1977, Bengu left teaching and joined the University of Zululand as Director of Student Affairs.
Bengu met Mangosuthu Buthelezi through the “Ubhoko” group, which was established Bishop Alphaeus Zulu, the Diocesan Bishop of Zululand, the first black bishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa. Since the ANC and the PAC was banned Bishop Zulu proposed a “Brain Trust” be established in Zululand to keep liberation ideas alive.
Bengu was the first secretary-general of the Inkatha Freedom Party in 1975. However, he fell out badly with IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi and went into self-imposed exile in Europe. Between 1978 and 1991, he worked for the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva.
On his return to South Africa in 1991, Bengu was appointed principal of the University of Fort Hare until 1994, when he was appointed Education Minister by President Nelson Mandela. He joined the ANC, and between 1994 and 2002 he was a member of the ANC’s national executive committee.
Bengu’s initial career as an outstanding teacher and principal, his previous stint as secretary general of the IFP, and with that his first-hand knowledge of the homelands’ education system, his conversion to the ANC, and his career as a seasoned academic administrator at the Universities of Zululand and Fort Hare, made him an obvious choice for Mandela to appoint him as Education Minister.
Bengu was a person of inscrutable honesty. He was old-school polite. Coming back from Europe, and first-hand witnessing in Switzerland, how competently schools were run, the quality of education there, he was bursting with energy and with big dreams to replicate these successes in South Africa also.
As education minister, Bengu had to run a tightrope: pushed on the one hand by SADTU teachers determined to protect their members even if they do wrong; and other hand by senior ANC cadres appointed to senior administrative positions in the education department, who were often ideologically driven, rather than pragmatic.
South Africa’s black schools were also politicised – after the turbulent 1980s, with the Congress of South African Students dominating many high schools, demanding to have a say in how schools were run. Few ANC leaders had any experience in complex institutional change management, understood the scale of the institutional complexity of the state and the extent of the divergency of the organisational cultures of the different education departments that had to melt into one.
Soon after his appointment he suffered a stroke, which affected him for years, at least until 1996. His prolonged absence from office left a leadership vacuum that he was unable to claw-back.
Retrenching experienced teachers – with the best leaving; closing teacher colleges, technical colleges and artisan schools; turning technical schools into traditional schools; allowing church-based schools to close; allowing black schools to phase out sports, culture and music; and jettisoning teacher oversight structures, such as the system of school inspections, because they were established during apartheid, plunged South Africa’s education system into chaos, which is still continuing.
Many of South Africa’s iconic educational institutions, such as teaching training colleges, started during the colonial and apartheid-eras were destroyed – lost for current and future generations, during the zeal of the outcomes-based education reforms. The outcome-based education was introduced too rapidly, should have been phased in slower, over a longer period.
William Gumede is Associate Professor, School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand and author of Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg).