ING.

Tembisa parents and volunteers like Phale Seroka, above, turned their communitys schools around, says the writer. Picture: Mujahid Safodien

Gwede Mantashe hit the nail on the head this week when he said that the education mess in the Eastern Cape would only be fixed when parents in that province woke up to the fact that the education of their kids was their responsibility.

The Eastern Cape Department of Education was taken over by the national Department of Basic Education last year in terms of section 100 (1) B of the constitution. The takeover came after the Eastern Cape had overspent its education budget for salaries, failed to provide textbooks and stationery, and suspended its transport programme for pupils.

The national government has since taken over Limpopo’s Education Department and four other departments in that province because of financial mismanagement.

The ANC secretary-general told a media briefing this week that the fixing of the province’s education “will take the people of the Eastern Cape appreciating that the education of their children is their responsibility”. Mantashe was briefing journalists at the weekend meeting of the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC).

He cited Tembisa, where parents took it upon themselves to sort out schools in the Ekurhuleni township, where teachers were arriving at 10am and leaving at 12pm.

“That community went there and beat them up and said: ‘If you don’t want to work, disappear.’ Since then Tembisa has actually become a serious point of teaching and learning,” Mantashe said.

When Tembisa schools were in trouble, its citizens took charge. This is the example we need to follow, believes Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary-general

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“The matric results reflect that.

“In the Eastern Cape, parents cannot be passive and wait for a disaster to happen. They must wake up and ensure that their kids learn,” he added.

“That is how serious the situation is, but if parents don’t see themselves as having a responsibility for the learning and teaching of their own kids, there is a big problem.”

Perhaps the beating up part should be ignored, but Mantashe’s core message is spot on, not only about education but a whole range of public services.

Democracy is not only about putting one’s mark on the ballot box once every five years to elect national, provincial or local government, but it calls for the day-to-day active participation of the citizenry.

Francis Fukuyama makes the same point in State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century.

He defines state-building as the creation of new government institutions and the strengthening of existing ones.

The development or strengthening of institutions, Fukuyama says, cannot take place in the absence of the demand by domestic constituencies.

“The majority of cases of successful state-building and institutional reform have occurred when a society has generated strong domestic demand for institutions and then created them out of whole cloth, imported them from the outside, or adapted foreign models to local conditions.”

He concludes that insufficient domestic demand for institutions or institutional reform is the single most important obstacle to institutional development in poor countries.

“Such demand when it emerges is usually the product of crisis or extraordinary circumstances that create no more than a brief window for reform,” writes Fukuyama.

The National Planning Commission (NPC) echoes Fukuyama.

In the National Development Plan published in November last year, which has since been endorsed by the ANC’s NEC as the framework for national planning, the commission says the transformation of SA does not depend on highly technical processes, but rather on the participation of citizens.

Such participation, the NPC says, is provided for in legislation, especially in education (school governing bodies) and in local government.

Informal arrangements already exist in other areas, including community police forums and health committees.

The importance of school governing bodies (SGBs), for example, was underscored last month by Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga when she launched the SGB election season.

“Research has shown that learner achievement is dependent also on the level of support and active involvement of parents and members of the community,” Motshekga said.

“It is uncontested that SGBs play a crucial role in the success of schools. Schools with effective and efficient SGB members are most likely to secure greater success than those with limited parental and community involvement.”

The focus therefore by Cosatu shop stewards this week on SGB elections is an encouraging sign that trade unions are taking the education of their children as seriously as they do their working conditions.

The same seriousness of purpose needs to be extended to participation by citizens in the provision of a whole range of other public services, especially those that President Jacob Zuma’s administration chose in 2009 as priorities for its five-year term of office. These are education, healthcare, reduction of crime, rural development and agrarian reform, and the creation of decent jobs.

“Active citizenry requires showing inspirational leadership at all levels of society. Leadership here does not refer to one person, or even a tight collective of people,” the NPC said.

“Leadership should mobilise communities, or parts of communities, to take charge of their future, raise grievances and assume responsibility for outcomes.”

One certainly hopes that the governing party will do its bit by removing any obstacle, including itself, to citizens taking charge of their future.