By: SACP GS Blade Nzimande 11th June 2002
Hosted by: National Department of Education
Minister Asmal, MEC Ignatius Jacobs, Your Excellency, Mr Jean Cadet, Dr Antheaume, I feel honoured to have been invited to address an international conference of this calibre, and on a topic of such importance to us in South Africa, the African continent as a whole and globally. This is also a topic in which I have a great interest. When I was director of the Education Policy Unit in Durban in the first part of the 1990s, the unit was actively engaged in research on issues around governance and decentralisation of education in South Africa. After my departure from the unit, the EPU published a book, which incorporates all its work on the democratic governance of public schooling in South Africa.
Decentralisation and democratic participation Decentralisation results in a wider distribution of power, with power being shifted from a central authority to lower levels. Various reasons are given for decentralisation, amongst them increasing democracy by "shifting power closer to the people"; increasing efficiency by cutting bureaucracy; increasing available resources through the greater use of local resources, and so on.
Yet whatever reasons are given by those promoting decentralisation, they need to be looked at critically and analytically. For example, while decentralisation can genuinely promote democracy, it does not necessarily do this. In the past, the establishment of bantustans - homelands - was a form of decentralisation. While the central apartheid government maintained essential power, some elements of power were distributed to collaborators who benefited from the fruits of this system. However, the entire system of decentralisation to the bantustans, as we know, was not meant to promote democracy but to prevent it - to give the appearance of self-government while maintaining and strengthening minority power.
During our negotiations for a transition to a democratic government, as well as during the constitutional negotiations, we had two competing and conflicting models of decentralisation. The one model was based on a notion of decentralisation for people's power and non-racial democracy, and the one on defending racial and/or ethnic privileges. The latter argued for maximum devolution of power to school governing bodies (SGBs), so that the then white schools could decide on admissions and language policies for the schools. This in effect meant decentralising power, democratic as it sounded, to white and ethnically controlled SGBs to keep these schools white or ethnically separate. Even the idea of language-based (Afrikaans in the main) schools was advanced in order to keep some of these schools lily-white.
At another level, in the early 1990s, one of the last moves of the apartheid regime in the area of education was to decentralise power to those state schools which traditionally catered for whites. Partly, this was because popular demands for government resources, a faltering economy and rampant corruption increasingly deprived government of the resources needed to support the white schools in the manner to which they had become accustomed. The result was that the state had to mobilise the resources of local white communities. In addition to this, and in the knowledge that state power was about to pass to a democratic government, the regime wanted to put the schools into the hands of local white communities in order to try to keep them out of the control of the incoming democratic state. So, once again, we see decentralisation taking place for gains opposite to those of democracy.
In addition, the apartheid regime sought to exacerbate and exploit the ethnic and language differences in our country. In this respect, decentralisation was used to exacerbate ethnic and tribal differences. It is for this reason that even in a democratic South Africa we need to be careful that cultural, ethnic and political entrepreneurs do not exploit these differences to maintain their narrow class, gender and ethnic interests in the name of decentralisation.
National imperatives and decentralisation: new experiences in the democratic South Africa In the new political dispensation which we established in South Africa from 1994, decentralisation has taken place for other reasons - although this, too, has not been problem-free. In the apartheid period, the democratic movement had demanded - and attempted to construct - another form of school decentralisation in the form of the Parent-Teacher-Student Associations (PTSAs). This tradition was drawn on in designing the South African Schools Act of 1996. This Act established mandatory School Governing Bodies (SGBs) made up of all the major stakeholders in a school and having considerable democratic powers. There is evidence now that many governing bodies have an important impact on the schools, helping to ensure that they function smoothly, assisting school managers and teachers to do their jobs, encouraging parents to support the education of their children, managing the schools properly and mobilising resources to improve the education offered. These things obviously do not happen at all schools, but they are becoming more common and are closing the gap between schools and communities.
The recent establishment of the National Association of School Governing Bodies is evidence of the growing stature and effectiveness of our SGBs. Nonetheless, it is true that many of our governing bodies do not have the capacity to fulfill all their functions properly. There is a need for more and more effective capacity building programmes to empower SGB members and ensure that they can carry out their functions properly.
Building capacity of school governing bodies, and therefore effective democratic decentralisation, also underlines the need for strong co-operation between government, communities, unions and local municipalities. In particular, we need to build capacity of local education district officials so that they can play a role in building the capacity of school governing bodies. We need a new type of education civil servant, one who is not only good behind the desk, but also is able to relate to, and contribute towards, community organisation to strengthen school governing bodies and local education communities. For example, we need officials who regularly meet with municipal ward committees, where schools are located, and ensure two-way communication between communities and officials. This might involve rethinking the relationship between municipalities and educational institutions like schools.
At the moment, there is hardly any interaction at this level, since schooling is a provincial and national competence. As a result, municipal communities, outside of school governing bodies, see no role for themselves in supporting and sustaining democratic decentralisation. This is in many ways an erosion of the gains made during the anti-apartheid struggles for people's power. Our conception of people's education for people's power then was much more advanced, since it integrated the role of civics, local education communities, street committees and school governing bodies far more effectively than is the case now. We need to return to and interrogate these experiences so that we can rebuild a community movement for democratic control of schools as part of effective decentralisation.
We should also be aware of another model of decentralisation - the pervasive neo-liberal model. Neo-liberalism is new ideological totalitarianism, a "single idea" which fits all circumstances, irrespective of regional and national conditions. It has sought to transform developing nations from being states populated by people with yawning social needs into "emerging markets". They are no longer people but markets. This has had a profound impact on education discourse and practices.
Neo-liberalism has also sought to appropriate powerful and liberatory concepts of "democracy", "empowerment" and "civil society" to attack the role of the state and to justify the withdrawal of the state from its social responsibilities. Neo-liberal decentralisation projects itself as democratisation and giving power to local communities when its interests are actually to decentralise responsibility for payment and sustenance of educational provision. It usually involves putting the costs and burden of educational costs onto poor local communities, under the notion of cost recovery and "community responsibility", as part of a withdrawal of the state from its responsibility. This model uses all the democratic lingo as a cover for asking poor communities to pay for their education and other social costs. This is usually accompanied by neo-liberal measures of outsourcing, privatisation and liberalisation, under the guise of decentralisation and democracy. These measures are usually vicious attacks on the poor and working people - in many instances under the cover of self-help schemes and volunteer corps (as a substitute for social provision by the state). In such instances, poverty ends up being blamed on the poor, under the guise that the poor are unable to embark on self-help projects to change their conditions. But the real rationale behind this is the withdrawal of the neo-liberal and post-colonial state from its social responsibilities.
Whilst the idea of self-help or volunteer corps can be, and should be made, a transformative one, under neo-liberal conditions and the weaknesses of the African post-colonial state, it can also act as a rationale for the state to abdicate its responsibility to perform its socially necessary functions. It asks of working people and the poor to improve education under any conditions - including the most scandalous under-spending on education and the worst abdication by post-colonial states of their social and educational responsibilities. In other words, the poor and working people are expected to change their conditions without any support from the state, as part of rationalising privatisation, liberalisation, outsourcing and the general weakening of the state - in essence, right wing and neo-liberal volunteerism. This is one of the most important struggles we have to wage against the effects of neo-liberalism on education.
Related to the challenge of neo-liberalism is that of decentralisation and curriculum transformation. When we think about and call for democratic decentralisation, we also need to factor in the question of harnessing community views and participation about the transformation of the curriculum. Whilst seeking to build national unity - an important imperative on the African continent today - we need to ensure that the process of curriculum transformation to cater for regional and local diversity is factored into considerations of decentralisation. Whilst emphasising national co-ordination, we also need to ensure that processes of curriculum transformation benefit from regional and local democratic transformation, rather than being bureaucratic, expert and top-down processes. At the same time we need to guard against the neo-liberal commodification of education which pushes commercial subjects and sidelines the social sciences. We need an appropriate balance between science, commercial and social sciences, and in order to achieve this, we must put in place mechanisms to involve communities in curriculum transformation, without abandoning the role of the central state in co-ordinating and guiding these processes.
Decentralisation and transformation of gender relations Ironically, it is women who are to be found in most of the SGBs because they are the ones who bear the brunt of supervising the education of their children and ensuring their educational rights. Whilst taking on SGB responsibilities is an extension of the unpaid labour women take on in looking after children, it provides an opportunity to empower women, and transform gender and family responsibilities. It is a way for women to effectively participate in the transformation of education.
The challenge in this regard is how do we oppose unpaid labour by women, whilst at the same time using such opportunities to empower women through democratic decentralisation of education and school governance?
Competing imperatives on decentralisation I would argue strongly that in our context, we need to balance between two necessary, but potentially conflicting, imperatives in the theory and practice of decentralisation. We need to balance between, on the one hand, the absolute necessity for national co-ordination, nation-building, nationally driven human resource development and, on the other hand, effective local, democratic and decentralised participation. In order to overcome the legacy of apartheid, there is a need for overall central government co-ordination.
Given this reality and the apartheid legacy, we need to be careful that we balance the imperatives of, on the one hand, national unity, building of new institutions, a new national education culture and curriculum, and, on the other hand, effective local democratic participation and initiatives. We must avoid centralisation that stifles local democratic participation, while at the same time avoiding decentralisation that simply continues to fragment our education system further along apartheid lines. This was one of the critical and most complex challenges we faced as we were drafting the constitution and passing new laws for education in our country during the first term of democratic government. Much as the legislation went a long way in trying to reconcile these two sometimes contradictory imperatives, the challenge now is in the implementation of this new framework, and that centrally still requires strong national co-ordination.
As I alluded to above, we need to emphasise not just decentralisation, but democratic participation as well. Decentralisation, as I have shown, does not equal democracy. In fact, in many instances, decentralisation can be used to subvert a democratic agenda. The danger of decentralisation without safeguarding democratic participation in a country characterised by huge class, national and gender inequalities could be the reproduction of apartheid patterns of educational inequalities.
The potential for decentralisation to reproduce apartheid inequalities also means that for democratic decentralisation to be effective, we have to address the huge infrastructural backlogs. In fact, we need to consistently argue for additional funding for education to deal with our infrastructure backlogs. Much as we know that there are many other competing priorities in health, social security, and other areas, there is an argument for prioritising our schooling system for targeted assistance to equalise infrastructure.
Building a strong public schooling system for effective democratic decentralisation Another form of decentralisation is the encouragement of private schooling. It is my view that while the constitution allows for the establishment of private schools as a small part of our system, this form of decentralisation should not be given much support by the state. Rather, the public schooling system needs to be strengthened as part of our nation-building efforts. Only through the establishment of strong state leadership in a decentralised public school system can we ensure that national priorities are established and implemented while local conditions are also taken into account and catered for.
Probably the biggest weakness of our new public school system stems precisely from the fact that we have had to rely on private resources for running our public schools. The shortage of resources to allow us to equalise funding to schools without at the same time destroying the quality of education at the former white, now largely middle class, schools, led us to opt for a policy which allowed for SGBs - with the approval of parents - to charge school fees. This was aimed at keeping the middle class within the public school system rather than having them move into private schooling. Private resources coming into the system from middle class parents would allow the state to divert more money to support public rural and township schools.
This has happened to an extent, in that there has not been a large middle class flight into the private school system. However, the extra funding that the state has been able to invest in poorer schools has clearly been insufficient. The result is that a two-tier (or rather multi-tier) system of schooling - largely dependent on the level of community affluence - has developed. We could see that this result was likely at the time we passed the Schools Act, but we were faced with a difficult situation and we had to compromise.
The main issue facing us now is how do we consolidate our success in establishing SGBs and preventing the deterioration of the better public schools while moving more decisively towards greater equity?
In summary, then, it is clear that decentralisation can - but does not necessarily - promote democracy. But when decentralisation, including the decentralisation of finance through user-fees, leads the public school system to rely on private money - especially when this creates a market in education and turns education into a commodity rather than a public good - there will be severe limitations to the contribution it can make to democratisation and social equity.
I hope that this conference will help us to look for solutions to this problem by examining theoretical, comparative, and practical issues and helping us to understand our options better.
I thank you.
Blade Nzimande
General Secretary SACP