logo
Leaders place education at the heart of efforts to transform Africa's children

Leaders place education at the heart of efforts to transform Africa's children

Eyewitness News25-05-2025

JOHANNESBURG - Government leaders have placed education at the heart of efforts to transform the continent's children - and drive long-term economic growth.
At the Africa Day celebration at Freedom Park in Pretoria, officials highlighted the role of education in building the Africa envisioned under this year's theme: 'building the Africa we want through solidarity, equality and sustainability.'
Freedom Park came alive with music, cultural performances and formal addresses, as South Africans joined the rest of the continent in marking Africa Day.
This year also marks the 11th edition of Africa Month, focusing on unity, heritage, and sustainable development.
Gauteng Health MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko stressed the importance of seeing education beyond just the classroom.
"Education does not only happen in the classrooms. It happens in the theatres, in our libraries, and in our sports fields, through the preservation of our indigenous languages and cultures."
Nkomo-Ralehoko added that the government must continue investing in education to empower future African leaders.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Jacinta Zinhle MaNgobese Zuma's campaign against illegal immigration gains support
Jacinta Zinhle MaNgobese Zuma's campaign against illegal immigration gains support

IOL News

timean hour ago

  • IOL News

Jacinta Zinhle MaNgobese Zuma's campaign against illegal immigration gains support

March and March campaign supporters Scelo Mlaba, Gcina Dube, Mxolisi Nxumalo and Msizi Ngidi after their picket outside the Pietermaritzburg Magitrate's Court on Thursday. Image: Bongani Hans FORMER radio personality Jacinta Zinhle MaNgobese Zuma's newly established March and March Until We Win campaign against illegal immigrants is gaining traction around the country while being allegedly shunned by the government. On social media, ordinary South Africans have expressed their support for MaNgobese Zuma's campaign. However, she expressed concern about the government departments' lack of support. MaNgobese Zuma, who also enjoys support from ActionSA, said the national police and KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thami Ntuli, were the only ones not hostile and who were willing to hear her concerns. 'Otherwise, all the other departments are very, very hostile when we try to work with them. 'We write letters without getting responses, we try to facilitate engagements, we don't get feedback from them, and we tried reaching out to the president,' she said. She spoke to this reporter telephonically on Thursday after a group of her supporters picketed outside the Pietermaritzburg Magistrate Court where a suspect, who was believed to be from Malawi, had appeared for allegedly raping a 10-year-old girl from Copesville. Although she welcomed Ntuli's campaign against illegal immigrants, she stated that this was not sufficient. 'My point is that you cannot do something once off and keep quiet for three months because the situation is dire and requires serious intervention,' she said. She wanted President Cyril Ramaphosa to declare a state of emergency against illegal foreigners and deploy the army to assist the police in flushing them out of the country. 'The police cannot do this by themselves, as they are already overwhelmed. 'Our courts and the national defence force need to play their parts,' she said. She called on the South African citizens to assist by stopping to rent out spaces in their homes to the illegal immigrants to open spaza shops. MaNgobese Zuma described the issue of illegal immigrants as the country's crisis that has depleted already scarce resources earmarked for the local citizens. She said there was no way that the government could misinterpret the March and March campaign as xenophobic because it was supported by legal foreigners who understood the situation. She said the crisis was clear because people were losing their jobs as companies were opting to employ illegal foreigners. 'We state all those things in our communication with the departments, and if they keep ignoring us, things are going to get worse. 'Look at the health department, people complain about overcrowded clinics and hospitals, leading to the lack of access to healthcare, and that leads to more tension on the ground. 'We recently saw a report from ActionSA stating that 70% of the files at the Department of Health in Johannesburg belonged to foreigners, and that speaks to the situation that is not healthy,' she said. Responding to ActionSA MP Dr Kgosietsile Letlape's parliamentary questions last year, Public Service and Administration Minister Inkosi Mzamo Buthelezi said out of 12 million employees of government departments nationally and various provinces, more than 6,000 were foreign nationals. MaNgobese Zuma said she started the March and March campaign on March 24 this year after realising the future of young South Africans was bleak. 'I was inspired by looking at the future of this country and seeing the pain from thinking of my poor children of South Africa, where they can no longer be able to go outside and play because there is kidnapping, human trafficking, and drugs. 'The youth of South Africa don't have jobs,' said MaNgobese Zuma. She alleged that illegal immigrants were contributing to the high crime rate. 'They are armed to the teeth with all kinds of ammunition and guns, and there is even a spaza shop mafia run by Pakistanis and Somalians, and when South Africans try to open a shop, it becomes a crisis. 'How is that even possible that a country cannot allow its citizens to open spaza shops?' she said. According to the Home Affairs website, the department deported close to 47,000 illegal immigrants in the 2024/2025 financial year alone. In a statement issued on April 2, Home Affairs Minister Dr Leon Schreiber described the country's deportation rate, which he linked to improved working relationships between his department, the Border Management Authority and police, as having improved than the previous years. 'The fact that Home Affairs now performs more than double the number of deportations conducted in a country like France, which has the highest rate of deportations in the European Union, sends a clear message to offenders that the days of impunity are over. This improved performance, coupled with our digital transformation reforms that will automate entry and exit to prevent people from entering the country illegally through our ports of entry, is contributing to enhanced national security and trade facilitation,' said Schreiber. [email protected]

Phumlani Mfeka emerges as front-runner for MKP Secretary-General position
Phumlani Mfeka emerges as front-runner for MKP Secretary-General position

IOL News

timean hour ago

  • IOL News

Phumlani Mfeka emerges as front-runner for MKP Secretary-General position

Phumlani Mfeka is tipped to replace Floyd Shivambu as a new MKP Secretary-General. Image: Supplied As speculations gather momentum on who the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) supreme commander Jacob Zuma was considering to appoint as the new party Secretary-General following the axing of Floyd Shivambu, Phumlani Mfeka has emerged as the front runner for the position. The position became vacant after the party axed Shivambu on Tuesday following his unsanctioned trip to Malawi, where he attended a church service of a fugitive pastor, Shepherd Bushiri, who skipped bail in South Africa in 2020. Mfeka, the leader of socio-economic group Injeje yaBenguni, which advocates for African nationalism, was expected to hold a meeting with Zuma in Durban on Thursday. Sources within the party said the discussion will be followed by Mfeka's announcement as the new Secretary-General. Mfeka commands a lot of support from traditional leaders, something that Zuma regards as an important constituency for his party. Mfeka confirmed earlier on Thursday that he would meet Zuma in Durban but refused to be drawn on what they would discuss in their meeting, saying it was a private meeting between himself and the party leader. Mfeka's name had always been mentioned as a possible successor to Shivambu after rumours of his (Shivambu's) future in the position started circulating. The rumours were fueled by Shivambu's fallout with Zuma's daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, who publicly insulted him and questioned his leadership, as well as Mfeka himself, who, when resigning as both a party member and a member in the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature, cited issues with Shivambu as one of the reasons. Other names that emerged on Tuesday after Shivambu's fall were former ActionSA member and founder of Xiluba Party, Bongani Baloyi, who joined the MKP in September last year, and Advocate Busisiwe Mkhwebane. However, sources in the party said Zuma will opt for Mfeka because of his support among traditional leaders and traditionalists, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, which is the party's stronghold. It is believed that Zuma convinced Mfeka to return to the MK Party because he (Zuma) felt he needed Mfeka and his constituency in the party. Mfeka has been Zuma's strong backer before the founding of the MK Party and immediately joined after it was launched in 2023. He was on the national list to parliament during last year's general elections, however, he was deployed to serve in the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature and sat in various portfolio committees. He was among the dissenting voices within the party who were unhappy that senior positions were given to the newcomers while overlooking the founding members. If Mfeka gets appointed, he will be the fourth person to hold the secretary-general position in the party after Arthur Zwane, Sihle Ngubane, and Shivambu. [email protected].

AfriForum and the Criminalisation of Black Memory
AfriForum and the Criminalisation of Black Memory

IOL News

time3 hours ago

  • IOL News

AfriForum and the Criminalisation of Black Memory

After losing its hatespeech bid to silence the liberation song Dubul' iBhunu, AfriForum has recast itself as a victim on a Washington roadshow—proof that South Africa's culture wars now trade on transAtlantic markets. Image: IOL The legal campaign by AfriForum against Julius Malema for singing Dubul' iBhunu exposes a deeper problem in post-apartheid South Africa: the refusal to recognise Black historical expression as legitimate political speech. The case becomes a proxy for a wider battle—over how trauma is voiced, who owns remembrance, and whose narrative the law protects. Even though the Constitutional Court ruled in March 2025 that the chant does not constitute hate speech and refused AfriForum's final appeal, the group continues to push a cultural logic that seeks to erase African memory and symbolic resistance. In the wake of that defeat the organisation's leadership flew to Washington, DC, courting White-House-aligned conservatives and evangelical pressure groups. There they resurrected the discredited 'white genocide' myth, recasting their legal loss as a global human-rights emergency and lobbying for US intervention. Through laundering a local culture war into trans-Atlantic respectability AfriForum weaponises the language of victimhood to criminalise Black grief on an international stage. The chant in question gained prominence through the ANC Youth League in the 1980s, where it boosted morale, unified activists, and encoded a shared narrative of resistance. It resurfaced during Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall, accompanying toppled statues, confrontations with institutional power, and the mobilisation of a generation unafraid to connect past to present. Framing it as a Malema issue ignores the collective histories it carries. Struggle songs such as Dubul' iBhunu emerge from moments of crisis, mourning, and confrontation. They are ritual expressions forged in the crucible of generational trauma. The word dubula is not a literal instruction. It channels defiance, spiritual rage, and unresolved loss. Bhunu became a cipher for the apartheid state's armed wing—those who brutalised, detained, and executed under racial law. AfriForum chooses a narrow, decontextualised reading. Its interpretation deletes the cultural logic of African expression and dismisses the long tradition of symbolic resistance found across pre-colonial societies. Among the Xhosa and other Nguni peoples—including Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele—war dance was political dramaturgy, signalling readiness without declaring bloodshed. Choreographed movement, chanting, and regalia combined into displays of spiritual authority and communal strength. These traditions preserved dignity, summoned ancestral guidance, and often prevented violence through symbolic confrontation. The Khoekhoe and ǀXam (San) held equally intricate cosmologies of performance and protest. For the ǀXam, trance dance was healing. It was also social memory and boundary. Khoekhoe resistance rituals used song and oral invocation tied to land custodianship and lineage, later suppressed by missionaries and colonial administrators who labelled them chaotic or threatening. Under settler rule, performance was criminalised; suspicion replaced meaning. Similar traditions surface worldwide. The Māori haka projects strength, summons ancestors, and faces power, often in peacetime assertion rather than wartime aggression. Indigenous nations across the Americas and Australia use ritual chant and dance as spiritual-political speech—warning, remembering, dignifying in the face of settler encroachment. Colonial authorities never grasped this. Ritual was 'primitive'. Song was 'subversive'. Expression itself became a crime. That legacy lingers in how courts treat African performance today. While Dubul' iBhunu is condemned and policed, Die Stem remains sacrosanct—its lyrics celebrating settler conquest and Christian dominion. Its presence in the national anthem shows how power still accommodates the spoils of conquest while rejecting the memory of the conquered. Settler symbols are validated by law; Black resistance is sanitised or prosecuted. The demand is reconciliation without responsibility, visibility without history. The aftermath tells its own tale. On Human Rights Day (21 March 2025) EFF supporters sang Dubul' iBhunu in Sharpeville; AfriForum threatened contempt but had no legal foothold. Two months later the lobby group turned to new litigation, filing papers in the Gauteng High Court to strike down the 2025 Expropriation Act as 'part of a genocidal land-grab'. Simultaneously, Washington rewarded AfriForum's alarmism: a special refugee track has begun admitting small Afrikaner cohorts, and an executive order now withholds USAID funds until Pretoria tackles so-called 'farm murders'. President Ramaphosa has condemned the campaign as 'disinformation diplomacy' and lodged a protest note with the US State Department—but the propaganda has already taken flight. The unresolved question is whether the National Prosecuting Authority has the mettle to deem AfriForum's trans-Atlantic lobbying an act of treason against the republic.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store