ON Thursday, President Zuma presented his fourth State of the Nation Address, which could have been his second last in his five-year term. Now that the spectre of the ANC Youth League is finally laid to rest, South Africans should perhaps brace themselves for yet another seven years of Zuma’s haranguing.

But this year’s address is perhaps important for one reason other than that it coincides with the centenary of the ANC.

It is two years before 2014, the year in which the ANC government promised to “halve poverty and unemployment”. Only clairvoyants can tell us how South Africa will, by 2014, halve poverty and unemployment without a concerted effort to improve the quality of education.

Regrettably, the lack of focus on improving the quality of education is the major weakness of Zuma’s State of the Nation Address. This is despite the fact that when he presented his first State of the Nation Address in 2009, Zuma declared that “education will be a key priority for the next five years”.

He promised that Early Childhood Development programmes will be stepped up, with the aim of ensuring universal access to Grade R and doubling the number of 0-4 year-old children with access by 2014. He also decreed that “teachers should be in school, in class, on time, teaching, with no neglect of duty and no abuse of pupils”.

Zuma undertook to “improve access to higher education of children from poor families and ensure a sustainable funding structure for universities”.

Again in 2010, Zuma said his government would “increase the number of matric students who are eligible for university admission to 175 000 a year by 2014”.

Three years later, Zuma’s State of the Nation Address doesn’t inspire confidence in the ability of the state to deliver on its promises.

If anything, the address projects a president who either lies or is misled.

That the matric pass rate is on an upward trend is true, however the credibility of results and quality of the pass remains suspicious in the eyes of many enlightened South Africans.

There is an obsession with the quantity rather than the quality of the passes and this does not address the deep-seated challenges of our education system. The failure to strike a balance between a pass rate and quality of the pass is injurious to the future of the country and the learners involved.

This obsession places our education at risk of no longer serving as an antidote to disempowerment, but as a catalyst that perpetuates inequality.

The 2014 target to increase the number of matric students who are eligible for university admission to 175 000 a year will not be met. According to the Ministry of Basic Education, the number of candidates who sat for 2011 matric exams was only “496 090 compared to 537 543 in 2010, a decrease by 41 453”. Only 348 117 passed and only 116 085 (24.3 percent of 496 090) passed with university entrance.

To achieve the 2014 target, we will need to reverse the downward trend in the number of students who actually write the exams before we increase by over 58 000 the number of students who pass with university exemption a year.

This is the truth that Zuma did not want to tell the nation on Thursday.

Any president with a vision and an aspiration to leave a lasting legacy would not allow himself to be misled by ministers who set unrealistic targets. He who accepts a shocking 7.2 percent pass rate without an inquiry into the quality of the pass may not be considered rational. That our public school system suffers from the dangerous effects of irresponsible unionism – the major source of teacher absenteeism and teacher ill-discipline in schools – is another reality Zuma’s government is too scared to confront. It has become normal for teachers to spend weeks engaging in union activities, reducing further the time spent on teaching.

This year already, teachers in the Eastern Cape were on a go-slow, despite President Zuma’s decree that teachers must be in class, on time and teaching.

Yet he used this year’s State of the Nation Address to thank teacher unions when in fact their actions go against the spirit of his official call. Why?

In a period that President Zuma rightfully declared that education would be a priority, the dirty politics of patronage and corruption have collapsed education in the Eastern Cape.

That the national government had to implement section 100 in the province to restore the delivery of education in that province undermines Zuma’s noble intention to make education a priority.

It is worrying that no action has been taken against those who are ruining the future of the children in that province. And, if national was working so well with the province in the intervention, why is it that CAPS text books have not been delivered in schools? Why was there a go-slow? Why was Gwede Mantashe and lately Zwelinzima Vavi meeting with the provincial government in that province?

When Zuma indicated that “we appear poised to meet the target of 100 percent coverage for Grade R by 2014” many welcomed this announcement with excitement. If Statistics South Africa’s Household Survey released in August 2011 is anything to go by, it is not clear how the target of 100 percent enrolment in Early Childhood would be achieved. According to Stats SA, only 526 000 children were attending pre-school including day care, crèche and pre-primary compared to the 705 000 that president Zuma hailed as a major achievement.

Furthermore, Stats SA estimates show that about 32.3 percent of South Africans aged 0-4 and 35.9 percent of children aged 5 attended Early Childhood Development in 2010.

It will be interesting to see how President Zuma arrived at the figure of 705 000 enrolment in Grade R.

There are only two logical conclusions: the president lied to the nation or someone lied to him.

The trumpeting of the small successes in higher education cannot obscure important truths about its state.

Walter Sisulu University, Tshwane University of Technology, and the University of Zululand are under national administration, similar to the interventions in provincial governments. How, for instance, will the soon-to-be-built universities in Mpumalanga and North Cape be immunised against the problems that beset struggling universities is not known.

The impasse on the intervention in the Eastern Cape, the sabotage in Limpopo and the interventions in other provinces and in the universities provide enough ground for a national legislation to guide the national interventions.

In the light of all these, the president could have at least said something about the much-awaited Monitoring, Support and Intervention Bill.

But President Zuma cannot be blamed for the conceptual confusion on the issue of access versus that of exit. He is a victim of his minister and his advisors. After correctly diagnosing the challenge of access, President Zuma prescribed the wrong antidote.

In his 2009 address, Zuma promised to expand access to higher education to children from poor families. He was again in 2011 made to announce the conversion of loans into bursaries for qualifying final-year students. Again this year, Zuma has been misled to report that 200 million used to assist 25 000 students was used to expand access.

This is not access, but exit.

The decision to convert bursaries for final-year students does not address the challenge of access. It merely deals with issues of exit. It is a complete deviation from the Polokwane resolution that aimed to make “education free up to undergraduate level”.

By focusing on the small population of students completing their studies, the ministry has chosen to deal with a simple issue of exit and successfully avoided addressing the bigger question of access. It is for this reason that The South African Students’ Congress (Sasco) should learn an important lesson: the alleged ideological stance of a minister is not an indicator of progress towards the goal of free education.

There are many ways in which the issue of exit can better be addressed, for example, linking students to employment opportunities that would enable them to service their debt could serve this purpose. A youth service programme could be another option.

As all the misleading and lies continue, South Africans are fast becoming used to promises that are never fulfilled.

When a perception of state as a bearer of falsehood is deeply engraved in the collective mind of a society, citizens will lose confidence in the state.

They will begin to see the state in the eyes of Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), wrote: “The State is the name for the coldest of cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth.”

n Malada is a Senior Researcher at the Forum for Public Dialogue (www.fpd.org.za). He is also a member of the Midrand Group.