The BELA Act might be a proxy for more significant issues.

This was published on 03 November 2024 in an edited version under the headline "The supply-side dynamics of national human development issues."

The unfolding 'tension' surrounding the BELA Act in South Africa is a complex and multifaceted issue. This tension, primarily between the determined and resourceful Ethnonationalist Afrikaner Leadership Complex and the state, is not a simple matter of a shift in language and cultural beliefs among South Africans. It manifests deeper issues rooted in the evolving elite politics.

Officially, the majority party's revolutionary project to transfer power to "we the people", where such power is political, economic, and social control is not complete. The constitutional order has decisively transferred political power to "we the people"; we now vote political power in or out of the state. The capability of those we commissioned, through appointment or election, to use the transferred political power to further transfer economic and social control to "we the people" is the source of the general discontent in an otherwise democratic South Africa. 

Education, culture, and (acutely) language have, in the unfolding BELA Act tensions and discourse, foregrounded the education system and its infrastructure as a core template of social and economic dominance that South Africa needs to have an honest national dialogue about. RSA's competitiveness is choked by gross underperformance in the education sector, and the contours of inequality are set in the skills deficiencies the education system perpetuates.

It is inarguable that basic education determines a nation's social outcomes. A failure in the primary education of society is an investment in its perpetual exclusion from the global club of innovative nations. It breeds national anarchy as the normative context of nationhood was never inculcated at the primary education level. The RSA education system, whilst non-racial and equal in law, is still etched in the templates of social and economic domination set out in the grand apartheidisation decade between 1950 and 1960. During this period, education was not treated as a fundamental human right or an enabling right. It was a public good to the extent that it served the public, as defined in terms of the racial segregation policies of the day.

In that decade, South Africa saw the promulgation and efficient implementation of acts that would shape the country's future. These included the Group Areas Act, the Resettlement of Natives Act, the Immorality Amendment Act, the Population Registration Act, the Separation of Amenities Act, the Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act,  the Extension of University Education Act, the Bantu Authorities Act,  the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, the Urban Councils Act,  and decisively on basic education the Bantu Education Act which dealt with skills development ceilings for those not racially classified as white. These historical decisions continue to cast a long shadow on our present, underscoring the weight of past decisions on the present.

The policy architecture which made apartheid work had as a costly collateral to social cohesion the privileging of race-based education and, by extension, languages that were for decades, and potentially still, not seen as being ethnic to those that use them. Separate development was not about developing everyone equally but separating all for an asymmetrical development of some at the gross expense of others. Separate development morphed into a structural template, which, unfortunately, is still the lens of discourse in most equality matters; this is pronounced in the operations of and within the education system. 

Those who led the promulgation of the BELA Act argue and eventually facilitated into the law that the Act aims to regulate further the merger or integration of the public schooling system. Integration of schools is an amorphously complicated assignment for a previously state-tormented society like South Africa. Integrating the country’s foremost human custodial institutions and public basic education schools, keeping 19 to 22 million learners per year for 12 years and assuming a zero-dropout rate, requires extraordinary knowledge about institutional ambidexterity in a historical context. Society's choices about what becomes the integration drivers should not only be conceptualised in a hermetically sealed historical context but should borrow wisdom to a future we might never be part of.

Going through declarations, position statements, legal arguments, and general discourse against the BELA Act points to acute concerns about its implications on language and culture, access to historically gerrymandered education infrastructure, the need for and suspicions about racial integration, and social cohesion issues. Given the ravaging impact of the legal and social engineering of the 1950s and how its benefits continue to project in racial terms growth and development standards spatially, any attempt to recalibrate the education system as a template of social and economic domination or definition would require more than trusting the bona fides of those commissioned into the public service; elected and appointed. 

Notwithstanding its gaps and cultural rights insensitivities, the BELA Act directs South Africa to the supply-side dynamics of national human competence development issues. Its provisions interrogate more than legislate the skills, knowledge, and attributional matters of primary education concerning both the nation's social cohesion exigencies and the capability of the state and the economy to be globally competitive. The opportunity to dialogue about its implications might be a window to reframe the discourse from what it is settling as.

Beneficiaries of the apartheid system do face genuine threats, including the potential erosion of what apartheid curated as "their" important "social" norms and institutions. As a curated social enclave, they may have long prized "own well-being and own values" over the defence of what "we, the post-1994 people", have defined as our shared values. The tonality in the documents arguing against the BELA Act is to be expected and not understood as a sign of rebellion against the status quo. The own affairs mentality has morphed into a privately fundable reality, and legislating against it might further polarise an otherwise culturally and socially fragile South Africa. 

With the identity vote gaining traction among South Africans, and particularly Africans, acutely displayed in the May 2024 election outcomes in KZN, the need for a national dialogue becomes increasingly urgent. The question is: What is the state's readiness to address the language and culture issues once African languages demand or reach a science and commerce sophistication the privileged 'other' languages have reached? The mooted national dialogue might be a chamber within which the genuine issues behind the BELA Act could be ventilated, underscoring the situation's urgency. It is unimaginable that education will not occupy a more significant portion of the dialogue.

To the extent that South Africa is ready to face the next wave of demons from its past that continue to torment it, several questions about the BELA Act require answers.

 

1.   Is the Act about privileging English over all other 11 of the 12 official languages? Does this mean that if France or Portugal colonised South Africa, would it be incorrect to assume that the BELA Act would privilege those languages?

2.   If most parents choose to enrol their children in a single-medium school and are comfortable with the language, would this translate to exclusion based on language, as most peripheral arguments go?

3.   To the Afrikaans' single-medium defending leadership complex, to what extent is the opposition to the BELA Act a matter of racial purity? What is the diversity and non-racialism readiness of the teaching and management school community to the prospect of massifying Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the event non-Afrikaners embrace Afrikaans?

4.   Will the argument still stand if other ethnic groups elect to have their indigenous languages as a medium of instruction? What affirmative programmes are put in place to advance other Indigenous languages into languages of commerce and science?

5.   With the growth and penetration of China, and by default Mandarin, does it mean the thrust of the BELA Act might privilege Mandarin, and potentially Swahili, on the strength of majority and demographics-inspired access reasons rather than cultural rights rationality?

6.   The elephant question is, are the BELA Act access issues purportedly dealing with language- or infrastructure-based?

 

The basis of RSA’s democratic order is healing past divisions and establishing a society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human rights. Human dignity, equality, and advancement of human rights within a non-racial and non-sexist context of coexistence are values undergirding our society, free of prejudice. The state is thus obligated to respect, promote, protect, and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights and create an environment within which the founding values of the Constitution can be lived.

A nation’s worst enemy is not always its contestations on tangibles; the fear that lives within the walls of households about matters such as culture spurs citizens to less expected behaviours. Expectation of freedom, even by those who may have denied others before, is a powerful motive. Once entitled to what you have, which qualifies as a human right in a freedom-espousing constitutional and democratic order, it will always be difficult to accept losing the entitlement.

All too often, society, mainly organised civil society, faces a basic dilemma between what is best for its sectarian interests and what is best for the nation. This constitutes the paradox of post-liberation or post-conflict society’s leadership, where few to no one knows all the rules in the playbook of a newfound context of freedom. If honesty guides it, the National Dialogue will be the next friend of RSA’s democratic order.