BY T.J. FIGUEROA
CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Hundreds of thousands of teachers across South Africa scored a victory June 10, when the government agreed to nullify planned layoffs and negotiate teacher-pupil ratios on a national level. Three teachers unions, led by the largest - the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), which is overwhelmingly black - had planned a countrywide strike if their demands were not met. The teachers had broad working-class and student support for their actions. Their actions struck a blow in favor of nonracial, unitary public education.
"The media say we're greedy, that we don't care about the children," said SADTU member Ezad Jacobs at a celebratory march of 5,000 teachers outside Parliament here June 11. "But that's a lie. We were prepared to strike to transform education in this province and in this country, which is still a mess left over from apartheid." Marchers expressed their support for the agreement, but many also pointed out that it would take further struggle to get the National Party-run provincial government here to implement equitable education.
When it took hold of the reins of government following the first democratic, nonracial elections in 1994, the African National Congress inherited an education "system" in which the large majority of funding was directed to white schools. Certain provinces - such as the Western Cape - received substantially more for education than others. Black township schools were - and still are - poorly equipped, understaffed, and in generally bad shape. Schools in rural areas are often nothing short of a disaster. A persistent remnant of the apartheid era is the unequal distribution of teachers by province. A township school on the flats of Cape Town might have one teacher for every 40 students. But in the rural Eastern Cape, that ratio might be more like 1:70.
The ANC government early on abolished apartheid education, which included entire separate structures in the apartheid "homelands." Today, the largest item in the national budget is education spending.
But the government says it cannot go beyond its budget and would not allocate more funds to the nine provincial education departments. As a result, tens of thousands of teachers hired as "temporaries" were to be laid off. Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu told Parliament that "the situation where whole education budgets of provinces are consumed by educator salary bills is not sustainable ... and therefore untenable. We cannot compromise the fundamental principle that the public service is budget driven."
Teachers reject this view. SADTU protested that provincial education budgets should not determine the number of teachers to be employed, and teacher-pupil ratios should not be determined by provincial education departments. The union demanded that the ratios be determined nationally.
SADTU president Willy Madisha said that if the regulations remained, "there will be massive job losses as every province will determine the number of teachers it wants to employ and the teacher-pupil ratios will not be the same. There will never be a balance and inequalities will remain."
Bengu signed the agreement with SADTU representatives only hours before the walkout was to begin. It includes a moratorium on provinces retrenching permanent or temporary teachers occupying posts deemed "necessary" or "substantive," and giving all temporary teachers employed before July 1996 permanent status. Meanwhile, negotiations on redeployment of teachers to poorer areas will continue. Targets for teacher-pupil ratios are now to be decided at national level. The agreement does not cover the several thousand temporary teachers who have been laid off. SADTU says it will continue to try to win their jobs back.
What was to have been a national protest march June 11 turned into large-scale teacher celebrations in cities and towns throughout the country, at which the union leadership reported on the agreement. Tens of thousands participated in marches and festivities.