Lesufi signals exit from politics, rules out ANC top seven bid ahead of 2027 conference
Panyaza Lesufi, Gauteng premier and co-convenor of the ANC in the province. Photo: X
The premier and provincial co-convenor said the party would resurrect itself in Gauteng because there was no better alternative
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Mail & Guardian
an hour ago
- Mail & Guardian
Calls grow to address marginalisation of boys in education system
With youth month around the corner, education support networks have raised the alarm on the persistent underperformance and marginalisation of boys in the education system. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G) With youth month around the corner, education support networks have raised the alarm on the persistent underperformance and marginalisation of boys in the education system. 'Girls are now outperforming boys in National Senior Certificate results and bachelor's degree graduations, which is a positive achievement, but why are boys not matching up to that percentage?' asked former Gauteng education minister, Mary Metcalfe. Malose Langa, the author of Becoming Men, said: 'Boys are underperforming and there is no light shed on this issue — we need an equal society in the workplace and out in the community.' Recent Moreover, the 2023 National Senior Certificate results indicate that although boys and girls had similar pass rates (82.92% and 82.88% respectively), boys are more prone to dropping out before completing grade 12. Kathryn Kure of Data Myna, an analytics platform, describes the issue as 'complex', emphasising that boys are particularly at risk of falling behind during their early schooling years. 'Gendered norms play a significant role. Boys are often expected to be dominant, self-reliant and emotionless. These expectations clash with the demands of modern learning environments,' she said. A report by the Zero-Dropout Campaign highlights that boys are dropping out of school at higher rates than girls, largely because of entrenched gender norms and social expectations. The report, titled, The research suggests that from an early age, boys are socialised into rigid and often violent forms of masculinity, making them more susceptible to bullying and less likely to feel a sense of belonging at school. According to the report, this emotional detachment contributes to a gradual withdrawal from learning. 'Dropout comes at the end of a long process of disengagement in which learners are pushed or pulled away from school because of factors at home, at school and in their communities,' said the campaign's communications director, Colin Wardle. 'When educators, school leaders and decision-makers are aware of the factors driving disengagement and drop-out, they will be in a better position to implement drop-out prevention strategies.' The study also links dropout to socio-economic pressures, particularly for boys in single-parent households who may be expected to take on provider roles. Other contributing factors include gang involvement, substance abuse and experiences of corporal punishment, all of which compound the problems boys face in staying in school. 'Boys can become easily pressured into harmful acts which will jeopardise their future all because they did not have school-based initiatives that encouraged boys to express emotions and challenge harmful gender norms,' said Langa. During the department of basic education's commemoration of International Day of the Boy Child, TT Mbha, the founder of the men's wellness network Amatyma Brotherhood Circle, emphasised the need for community-based support networks to address the feeling of isolation among boys. 'Young boys often do not have strong father figures in their lives, and that is where community members should step in and guide them to make good choices to raise confident and capable young men,' Mbha said. A According to the report, in 2022, the out-of-school rate for South African children and adolescents of primary and secondary school age was 10.54% for boys, compared to 8.17% for girls. In response to these issues, the department of basic education said it has committed to improving foundational learning for all children. 'Through our global efforts to uplift women, and the girl child in particular, there is the unintended consequence of leaving the boy child behind in our classrooms and our communities,' said Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube during the commemoration of International Day of the Boy Child. 'Boys are either disengaging in schools or they are repeating grades. This has a societal impact, and we need to make sure that we are supporting boys and giving them space to be vulnerable to become positive male models, and to grow up to be responsible men, citizens and leaders, not engaging in violence.' The department said it has launched initiatives which include the implementation of programmes aimed at enhancing reading, writing, and maths skills among primary pupils. These efforts are part of a broader strategy to ensure that no child is left behind in the pursuit of quality education. But advocacy groups such as Equal Education argue that more comprehensive measures are necessary. 'We need to establish the importance of addressing systemic issues such as unequal resource allocation and the need for inclusive policies that cater to the diverse needs of all learners,' said Equal Education's Noncedo Madubedube.
The Citizen
2 hours ago
- The Citizen
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Daily Maverick
3 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Same same — how State Capture has become SA's greatest export
As Trump wipes away American history and redoubles down on thought crimes, he'd be horrified to know that the ANC has done it better, which is to say worse. Of all the ANC's masterstrokes — and believe it or not, there have been a few — the capture (and subsequent erasure) of history is perhaps its most successful. Without a past, there is no future — just an eternal now, a limbo that represents political stasis. And as dynamic as South Africa may seem if you have your nose jammed in the news, this is indeed a country of stasis, a country where new ideas and genuine transformation die before they are born. Because the ANC has captured history — it is, after all, the 'liberation party', and that's all there is to know — there is no point in revising history, because it's meant to be forgotten. Take the Zondo Commission. Remember that billion-rand boondoggle? Four volumes stuffed with the nightmare legacy of Zuma era corruption, and the results? Not much. The complaints are simple: all of that taxpayer money blown, and not a single meaningful prosecution. But that is to miss the point. As the political commentator and playwright Richard Calland has noted, 'State Capture was something that was really significant. And yet there was a real danger that we moved on too fast from it, and the lessons were not learned, were not digested. And then all the work that was done to defend democracy was kind of wasted. And it was a huge effort to protect the institutions and the rule of law. And I think, although full accountability hasn't happened yet, that it was a significant effort to defend public democracy from private State Capture.' And yet, the Zondo Commission Report should be required reading — the first thing placed in the hands of a kid hitting Grade Zero, in picture-book form. This, after all, is the story of how the world is hijacked. It's an epic, a fairytale, a parable. It's also universally applicable, at least as far as democracies are concerned. The Zondo Commission tells a linear story: how a state is captured, and corruption formalised, by a norm-breaking executive and its private sector enablers. President Jacob Zuma, who was manifestly and obviously a thief, became a viable candidate to replace the establishment figure Thabo Mbeki because he wasn't Thabo Mbeki. His shortcomings were overlooked because it was time for change. The change he offered — a populist spin on African nationalism — was the only thing that would keep the ANC, and therefore the country, from imploding. Or so we were told. In educational and intellectual terms, Zuma was not a Harvard University business school graduate. But he was at least as unethical and rapacious as one. A spy by (forced) vocation, he employed his louche paranoia as a tool against his enemies. He effortlessly subverted the State Security Agency, using it as a money funnel and a battering ram to enrich his cronies and undermine his enemies. His benefactors were brought into the fold to act as middlemen in the flow of funds from the state to state-owned enterprises and their private sector contractees. Then, Zuma went for the National Prosecuting Authority, and followed that up with attacks on other law enforcement agencies — a very simple procedure, given that the executive has the final say over who runs these institutions. He made foolish choices to head the Public Protector's office and the Constitutional Court, but they were his choices to make. By doing this, he signalled that it was open season for corruption, and that shame no longer had a role to play in moderating political behaviour in South Africa. There are other forebears of the 21st-century style of kleptocratic state vandalism. They include Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and, of course, the OG, Vladimir Putin in Russia. But no other country has 4,000 pages of testimony breaking down exactly how the system works. In this, the Zondo Commission Report is perhaps the most important piece of political literature written in the past 25 years. And outside of Ferial Haffajee, how many South Africans, let alone foreign political observers or analysts, have read the whole thing? From a certain perspective, Zondo is a blueprint for how an empowered and unembarrassable executive performs a coup on his or her own country. There are clues in Zondo for how the 21st century has gone so horribly wrong, and hints at how to fix it. *** If liberal Americans knew what they were doing — and they don't — they'd see South Africa as a bellwether, as a warning. This isn't a Zuma equals Trump comparative thing — this goes far beyond individual personalities. Instead, they'd understand how corruption becomes entrenched — how it underpins, and then entirely supplants, ideology. As in South Africa, in the United States, special interests long ago hijacked anything resembling a functioning democracy. Here, the Guptas were avatars for private parasites latching on to the state and leeching it dry. In the US, corruption was driven through the Supreme Court, which has proved almost gleefully amenable. The biggest moment was the Citizens United ruling in 2008, which effectively allowed unlimited corporate spending in election campaigns. From there, it's been relatively smooth sailing. In recent years, while much of the focus was on the repeal of Roe v Wade and the end of female bodily autonomy, Trump's Supreme Court has done two things. First, it's allowed the executive almost monarchical power. And second, it's made bribery — or, rather, 'gratuities' — legal. You don't have to be a genius to see how this leads to a culture of extreme corruption, and it has. The end of Joe Biden's disastrous term led to a slew of pre-pardons of family members, which slithered into Trump 2 and the Zuma-like strip-down of the state. Congress, ostensibly a lawmaking body, stares on gape-mouthed as Trump rewrites the American order in the Oval Office. The lower courts have held up what might be considered the rule of law, but at this point it's largely vestigial. Trump is so empowered that he's now very literally rewarding corruption. Take the case of Paul Walczak, a medical executive and tax cheat who made an application for a full pardon, which Trump ignored. Until Walczak's mother showed up at a million-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner, where she hobnobbed with the Republican glitterati and scored her son a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's pay to play, and there's no longer anything ambiguous about it. *** Zuma's genius, as with Trump and his minions, is to make graft ideological. The infamous Bell Pottinger misinformation campaign, which reintroduced White Monopoly Capital into the South African parlance, situated corruption and anti-constitutionalism as a transformation project — as a means to empower the previously unempowered. In essence, this was a 'screw the elite' project, which conveniently ignored the facts of power distribution in South Africa, while exploiting the very real economic disparities. Likewise, the Trump ideology comes down to little more than Fuck The Libs. This is a deplorable uprising, the upending of snooty Harvard/Yale/Columbia shitlibs (which again ignores the specifics of who is currently in power in the US). This is emotion as ideology, a vacuous project of rage-baiting driven by the neo-Bell Pottingers on the likes of Elon Musk's X. 'So loud and quiet at once, ideology becomes a substitute for mood,' wrote the novelist Joshua Cohen. And the mood in the US is dark and rebarbative. The capture of the state by special interests — by the billionaire class and the corporations who will exclusively benefit from the revolution under way — is misinterpreted as fascism. But this is silly. The performance of authoritarianism is secondary to the flood-the-zone-with-sewage approach to governance, which hides the formalisation of corruption. No one bothered to call Zuma a fascist — it simply didn't matter. He worked for his family and his friends and benefactors, and no one else. It was a simpler time. It should hopefully be obvious that rebuilding a functioning state in the wake of State Capture is nearly impossible. The centralisation of corruption under Big Men like Zuma (and Trump) inevitably gives way to a violent contestation when they leave office. This fragmentation is lethal and destabilising, and it breeds nostalgia for the good old days of the God King. Which is where South Africa finds itself now. As Trump wipes away American history and redoubles down on thought crimes, he'd be horrified to know that the ANC has done it better, which is to say worse. The rest of the world should take note: it's not fun digging out from under ideology-as-mood. Very little is left to build with. But it always pays to remember that State Capture is an elite project, prosecuted from the top, that benefits the wealthy and powerful. The rest of us are just suckers and cannon fodder. DM
