Prospects of an equal society post-apartheid society.

At the fall of Apartheid and the rise of Democracy, hope was overflowing with regards to the prospects of employment, development, and justice. This is the time when we all thought that all previous imbalances would be reconciled and justice would prevail.

The fall of apart was morally correct and 100% ethical. Looking specifically at the policies that were put in place in order to achieve the goals. Policies such as the RDP Reconstruction and Development  Programme sought out to “to bring social transformation to South Africa” this was intended to touch on most if not all the social ills of the past and shift the South Africa majority a gear up.  Although the blueprint was done in consideration with other factors that could fuel up the process and those that might hamper the process little was paid to the issue population growth. The population growth becomes a relevant factor as many scholars argue that there’s a cycle that exists along poverty lines.

 Now my Question is, how does this very cycle threaten the prospect of us achieving the social transformation that we seek to achieve? Because if there’s a cycle that exists for poverty then the poverty short-term goals that we aim to achieve will be carried through to the other generations. The degree of naive beliefs is also a factor because even when we seek to develop the poor and try to shorten the gap between the Haves and Have not, it all sounds practical but in the real sense is that they have are not stagnant therefore development also takes place in their part of the court. There is statement does not suggest that developmental projects are futile exercises but that when looking at development we should not look at it as a way of breaching gaps but away of improving the conditions of living and this would differ in the degrees of the status quo of who is being developed.

The comparative approach, therefore, limits us to judging success with the status of the haves at that moment.  Now in terms of measuring success this will always seem as if they have not’s are still far behind the developmental line because development does not only occur where it’s needed but it also occurs in the part of the developer, its more or less parallel but another thing that you might notice is that at times it happens at an accelerated speed in the developed corner.

Let me use a scenario of a small town in South Africa where a businessman (T-boss) has a shop and two cars the shop is located in an area where the locals are poor. And in the other corner, we have T-man someone who is a local and is a customer at the store of the businessman. Now the local community receives help from the government with the rollout of 500 “affordable” RDP houses this lift the standards of living for T-man and he, therefore, decides that I am going to buy a double bed since am staying in a proper house. Now because Tman has moved a notch and can now concentrate on other things than building a house for his family. He then buys the double-bed from Boss's store after saving for a long. 

My point in that scenario is that because Tman’s living conditions have been uplifted so is T-boss and in some cases, you will find that T-boss’s business will be receiving other orders from other locals, this making his business boom. And he may also think of investing the profits to get more money. Now what happened on the left also happened on the and thus Tman will never be at the same level as T-boss.  Unless Tman wins the lotto and his doesn’t get confused with the money and think it will never end or Tboss is a Malema case.

We should never measure success by looking at other but by the standards, not everything in life is a race that we must run because there’s a victory to be won for the first three competitors. Sometimes we need to run against time (standards). Your success cannot be measured by someone else’s or you will never set a record.

Therefore the aim should always be to improve the living conditions of ordinary(all) South African we can never have a state where pap and meat are what everyone eats, or else someone will always be far ahead.

Measuring the success of development

Prospects of an equal society post-apartheid society.

At the fall of Apartheid and the rise of Democracy, hope was overflowing with regards to the prospects of employment, development, an nd justice. This is the time when we all thought that all previous imbalances would be reconciled and justice would prevail.

The fall of apart was morally correct and 100% ethical. Looking specifically at the policies that were put in place in order to achieve the goals. Policies such as the RDP Reconstruction and Development  Programme sought out to “to bring social transformation to South Africa” this was intended to touch on most if not all the social ills of the past and shift the South Africa majority a gear up.  Although the blueprint was done in consideration with other factors that could fuel up the process and those that might hamper the process little was paid to the issue population growth. The population growth becomes a relevant factor as many scholars argue that there’s a cycle that exists along poverty lines.

 Now my Question is, how does this very cycle threatens the prospect of us achieving the social transformation that we seek to achieve? Because if there’s a cycle that exists for poverty then the poverty short-term goals that we aim to achieve will be carried through to the other generations. The degree of naive beliefs is also a factor because even when we seek to develop the poor and try to shorten the gap between the Haves and Have not, it all sounds practical but in the real sense is that they have are not stagnant therefore development also takes place in their part of the court. There is statement does not suggest that developmental projects are futile exercises but that when looking at development we should not look at it as a way of breaching gaps but away of improving the conditions of living and this would differ in the degrees of the status quo of who is being developed.

The comparative approach, therefore, limits us to judging success with the status of the haves at that moment.  Now in terms of measuring success this will always seem as if they have not’s are still far behind the developmental line because development does not only occur where it’s needed but it also occurs in the part of the developer, its more or less parallel but another thing that you might notice is that at times it happens at an accelerated speed in the developed corner.

Let me use a scenario of a small town in South Africa where a businessman (T-boss) has a shop and two cars the shop is located in an area where the locals are poor. And in the other corner, we have T-man someone who is a local and is a customer at the store of the businessman. Now the local community receives help from the government with the rollout of 500 “affordable” RDP houses this lift the standards of living for T-man and he, therefore, decides that I am going to buy a double bed since am staying in a proper house. Now because Tman has moved a notch and can now concentrate on other things than building a house for his family. He then buys the double-bed from Boss's store after saving for a long. 

My point in that scenario is that because Tman’s living conditions have been uplifted so is T-boss and in some cases, you will find that T-boss’s business will be receiving other orders from other locals, this making his business boom. And he may also think of investing the profits to get more money. Now what happened on the left also happened on the and thus Tman will never be at the same level as T-boss.  Unless Tman wins the lotto and his doesn’t get confused with the money and think it will never end or Tboss is a Malema case.

We should never measure success by looking at other but by the standards, not everything in life is a race that we must run because there’s a victory to be won for the first three competitors. Sometimes we need to run against time (standards). Your success cannot be measured by someone else’s or you will never set a record.

Therefore the aim should always be to improve the living conditions of ordinary(all) South African we can never have a state where pap and meat are what everyone eats, some will always be far ahead.

My candlelight dinner

Lukewarm coffee and cold pizza... and I picked up the candle from the waste heap close to the house the other day... I guess I saved it for a rainy day.. somehow I did I know that it would come soon. But this time it did not have to rain.... just the sight of clouds... that's all it took for the electricity to trip...

I feel for my learners who study most effectively when it's quiet and everyone is sleeping, radio's are off and cars safely parked behind the houses and so-called "shacks" which I call homes

A few weeks back we went on a service delivery protest and they said we don't pay for municipal services but at least we buy electricity. Why is it so difficult for us to get the quality services especially if we pay for them?

If we pay for electricity and you fail to ensure that we have it when we have units. How can you assure us that we will have other services even after we pay for them?

Language hypocrisy and the symbolism of supporting indigenous Languages

“On a winter's day in 1976 more than 20 000 pupils from the African township complex of Soweto began a protest march against a Bantu Education Department regulation that Afrikaans be used as one of the languages of instruction in secondary schools. Several hours later, police and youths were engaged in running street battles all over the dusty township.”down-afrikaans

I choose start off with this quotation just to make sure that we are on the same page with regards to the events of June 16. It would too naive for me to round off all events leading to this day only to the protest because in reality there’s a much bigger picture and this day is only a piece in the puzzle of the movement towards liberation.  The phrase I quoted embodies the one of the aspect that I would really like to focus on, which is the language aspect.  

There is a lot of literature out there that covers reason why the youth took to the streets on the morning of 16 June 1976.  These reasons would include reasons such as the language clause that proved to be unworkable due to a shortage of teachers, a lack of Afrikaans textbooks and a grudging acceptance that pupils would have immense difficulty in coping with three languages as mediums of instruction; it was quietly forgotten by the whites who ran African education. Our brothers and sisters then took a stand when they felt they have had enough. Their stance was that they will march but it was during this march that they were confronted by bullets at the hands of the Police who did not ask questions.Events on June 16 During this time the mission of the students was clear and could not be interrupted by the police son fought as well as they could, with the arms that they possessed then.

However for today this will not be my focus but I would like to concentrate on our current disposition. In explaining the missions of generations no one puts it out better than Frantz Fanon, when he says "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it."The wretched of the Earth

The decisions taken by the South African youth of that 1970’s has a direct link to how the youth think and feel about languages today.  These are the same reasons why some youth today see Afrikaans as an oppressive language, English as a language for the liberation sometimes English can lead to some debate on whether it is also oppressive or a tool for liberation taken its colonial roots. It is quite common for teachers to attribute the poor high school performance to a language barrier of the medium of instruction.

The hypocrisy today is that we find black elites especially those "vuvuzeling" about the value of indigenous languages in poor public schools while they are sending their children to private school and model c schools. The situation is even worse when teachers send their children to model C schools.  This situation makes me wonder if the teachers trust in the way they themselves teach. These are the teachers who will teach the young Thabo English in Sesotho/physics in Setswana while the end year paper will be in English. These are the same teachers that would strike in public schools a month or two before learners write their common paper.

Earlier this week I heard about a Setswana novelist who spoke about the conservation of the Setswana language. What he said sounded very sweet taken that he had written books in Setswana. However I was disappointed when he began to talk about the translation of his books to English. I then thought to myself there’s hypocrisy at play here. Because by translating books to another language it does not ensure the growth of the latter and it may even lead to the fade of the original language.  For him as a writer this means that he might get more gains as his story would be told to many more people even the non-tswana speakers.  It is also important to note that the fact that there’s and English copy available may even drive the Setswana speakers to even buy the English Copy.

What then should be the mission of young South African today?

During the apartheid era it needed more than one native scholar to say "We've had enough"; more than one demon­stration put down before we could today hold our 'own. Ours on this day is to oppose all forms of hypocrisy and rise up to the true advancement of indigenous languages in ways that does not divide the African people. For the better part of our lives we have been taught that the only lingua franca that can unite people is English but what about our own indigenous lingua francas such as tsotsi taal? Sfanakaloku?  Shouldn’t we explore these? Our mission is to advance our all indigenous languages without any superseding the importance of any other. We should not lose meaning and importance of the stories we tell through translation especially if it’s not going to benefit a language but even threatens it greatly.

In the opposition of hypocrisy we should be aware of the value of English and therefore seek to transform its nature. We should strive to change institutions and policies so that they make it easier for the African child to learn through it. While the perfect positioned people for this would be English teachers it’s the responsibility of all South Africans to support this struggle of this day and age!!! We should build a citizenry competent in English; people should be able to speak back on the terms of the language itself. Schools systems should introduce English early in ones schooling career with competent and motivated teachers. The school curriculum should put measures in place to ensure that the language is spoken as often as possible but it should never supersede.

In a rainbow nation like ours we should pride ourselves multilingualism, multi-culture and our ability to still compete with the world in English. I believe this is what our fallen comrades, brothers and sister were fighting for.

Controversy opens platforms for engagement……

Thabiso Nkohli

An equal society = a myth in South Africa

Prospects of an equal society post apartheid society.

At the fall of Apartheid and the rise of Democracy hope was over flowing with regards to the prospects of employment, development and justice. This is the time when we all thought that all previous imbalances would be reconciled and justice would prevail.

The fall of apart was morally correct and 100% ethical. Looking specifically at the policies that were put in place in order to achieve the goals. Policies such as the RDP Reconstruction  and Development  Programme sought out to “to bring social transformation to South Africa” this was intended to touch on most if not all the social ills of the past and shift the South Africa majority a gear up.  Although the blue print was done in consideration with other factors that could fuel up the process and those that might hamper the process little was paid to the issue population growth. The population growth becomes a relevant factor as many scholars argue that there’s a cycle that exists along poverty lines.

 Now my Question is, how does this very cycle threatens the prospect of us achieving the social transformation that we seek to achieve? Because if there’s a cycle that exists for poverty then the poverty short term goals that we aim to achieve will be carried through to the other generations. The degree of naive beliefs is also a factor, because even when we seek to develop the poor and try to shorten the gap between the Haves and Have not, it all sounds practical but in the real sense is that they have are not stagnant therefore development also takes place in their part of the court. There is statement does not suggest that developmental projects are futile exercises but that when looking at development we should not look at it as way of breaching gaps but away of improving the conditions of living and this would differ in the degrees of the status quo of who is being developed.

The comparative approach therefore limits us to judging success with the status of the haves at that moment.  Now in terms of measuring success this will always seem as if they have not’s are still far behind the developmental line because development does not only occur where it’s needed but it also occurs in the part of the developed, its more or less parallel but another thing that you might notice is that at times it happens at an accelerated speed in the developed corner.

Let me use a scenario of a small town in South Africa where a businessman (T-boss) has a shop and two cars the shop is located in an area where the locals are poor. And in the other corner we have T-man someone who is a local and is a customer at the store of the businessman. Now the local community receives help from the government with the roll out of 500 “affordable” RDP houses this lift the standards of living for T-man and he therefore decides that I am going to buy a double bed since am staying in a proper house. Now because Tman has moved a notch and can now concentrate on other things than building a house for his family. He then buys the double-bed from Tboss’s store after saving for a long. 

My point in that scenario is that because Tman’s living conditions have been uplifted so is T-boss and in some cases you will find that T-boss’s business will be receiving other orders from other locals , this making his business boom. And he may also think of investing the profits to get more money. Now what happened on the left also happened on the and thus Tman will never be at the same level as T-boss .  Unless Tman wins lotto and his doesn’t get confused with the money and think it will never end or Tboss is a Malema case.

We should never measure success by looking at other but by the standards not everything in life is a race that we must run because there’s a victory to be won for the first three competitors. Sometimes we need to run against time (standards). Your success cannot be measured by someone else’s  we need to work on improving on what we had yesterday.

Therefore the aim should always be to improve the living conditions of ordinary(all) South African we can never have a state where pap and meat is what everyone eats , some will always be far ahead.

The struggles of an African scholar

 There is a continuing attitude that previously disadvantaged people should just get over what happened in the past and begin to move on.  But along with this tendency we find that people that propose such are at the sweet end of the stick, choosing to overlook the struggles that the African child has to go through because of this sore “past”. It is also said that “your parents were the ones who endured the struggle so why should you pretend as if you were there?” quite frankly I might have not been the  but there’s a ripple down effect of the pain and sadly it still exists even after eighteen years of freedom .

These effects should never be undermined. The African child had to endure horrible conditions to make it the academic arena.  Firstly pressure by parents to archive higher than they did during their school years which were cut short as most had to go and work. Secondly the pressure to cope with the work, mind you this is done with little assistance from parents, worst of all in the cases where one is the only child and both parents are working getting a little income due to their state of education.

 From primary education I was given home works that I had to do on my own with the little understanding that I had of English, because the little I had was far greater than the one my parents had and yet I was still judged with the same standards as the one who has had the advantage of a library at home, being taught in their mother tongue and parents were also well educated relative to that of the African child.

Financial stress as one learned to always share the little that the family had "noma kanjani" and as one starts to move up the costs of living becomes greater ,  from the school Uniform to the other extra curricula activities . This reminds me of a time in my multiracial High school where learners were supposed to go an academically enlightening tour to the United States. Most of my African brothers and sisters  in fact all of us did not go on tour as it was also expected that for you to go you had to pay close to R20 000 .This was too much for the African family struggling to all read meet the finances involved with their child attending such a school in the hope of getting a better education.   And well people did sponsor sadly none were black and we therefore had no teacher for the term of the tour and  the days it took the teacher to get over jet leg. Again the African Black child was compromised yet we wrote the same exam and some did well some not so well in fact some didn’t have much to do.

And it’s also because of this financial stress that we have so little black academics, because without financial aid it’s almost impossible for you to study beyond a degree in education. But luckily we all made it to Varsity , well some not as good as the others . Yet it still remains bolded in our minds that a bachelors degree as the key to employment  and because we want to plough back to our struggling families we say “ if only i can get a degree and start working “ so that I can pay back the loan that got me through varsity , so that I can build the house that we never had because I took away so much form the little that we had, so that I can help my brothers and sisters, so that I can buy myself a car . And for me to study further I must make sure I studied hard with this language that was not my mother tongue , to understand it , I had to translate it in to a language my mind would understand. Eish.... The language of my dreams Sesotho.

 Relative to the other family which could afford me to buy their child a car as a present for passing their drivers license at the age of eighteen, mind you this is while they were high school. Never mind  that let’s look at the savings that they were able to put up for school from what they had “at hand”. While the other African student will build a grey brick (Block stene) house for their family  the other will get a first brick house as a bonus for completing their bachelors or more  to study up to their PHD with no hustle. And throughout creating an understanding of  what I was taught was never a problem because “Pa” is “Pa” in the language of my dreams.

 Because we attend a public school our chances of seeing the gates of the University were so little i had only 7 subjects that I could do  in matric well my friend had more than that excluding the piano lessons and dancing (N4 diploma in performing arts) .  But its however unfortunate that the bar we have to jump over remains the same. Even when we had finally made it to the University and our tuitions were not the only problem we were facing, we battled against competition for material things. I still had the burden of buying more shoes which my financial aid doesn’t cover because I had to walk in the rain , sun and the cold to get to campus,  The campus around the corner is about four kilos from where I stay .

And the rules changed, and a Father of mine sitting on the other side of the table that I thought would understand my daily struggles, wants to send me home? He strategically deals away with my reasons for the poor performance in the previous term and says that he had much harsher conditions when he was a student but he doesn’t go in detail to what were the conditions during his time. The so learned figure chooses to ignore one of the principles that our education is founded upon. The notion expressed by Bloom that “All students can learn successfully just not the same way and at the same time”. He the disregards the merits of my case and does his contribution to the Black Continent adds on to the cycle of poverty by sending me home.

And well I am not complaining, I am just acknowledging the status quo and highlighting the African child will remains the hardest worker. Big ups to the African scholars performing well in the high schools, Universities, both local and abroad cause the material conditions remain the same.

                       

                              We were knocked out but we rose and we shall keep on raising because Africa awaits.

T