COME ON KIDS. YOU CAN DO THIS

Around the middle of August, the country’s share price (the rand exchange rate versus other currencies) began to strengthen. It is now about 5% better than that low point. Everyone will have a theory why this should be, but any suggesting that it reveals an optimism that our leaders know what they are doing is hard to accept. As you read this, the Constitutional Court could be handing down judgement on whether the Municipal elections, scheduled to be held next month, should go ahead or not. The ruling party seems to have failed to get its ducks in a row over this one and are frantically quacking for a postponement. Their unpreparedness is obviously related to their failure to pay staff salaries. Perspicacious commentators are wondering if the era of buying votes with a T-shirt and a bucket of (extremely colonial) fried chicken may be ending. The hospitality and travel industries are probably close contenders for being the sector most damaged by the official reactions and responses to the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic 18 months ago. However, it is education where the disruptions will be felt the longest and deepest. The industry has been forced into the near total abandonment of the simple model of what used to be “talk and chalk”. Resource rich communities quickly adopted internet-based teaching methods, but these too have proved problematical because very few people have ever been trained in these skills. Further, as the options and outcomes changed, the poor souls at the front of the classrooms were expected to cope with the utter horrors of so-called “blended” classes where some learners were still at home and others were back at their obscenely over-sanitised desks. Even worse is the fact that the cast members of this tragedy – and for schools one needs also to factor in the parents – are able, day to day, to select which stage to appear on. Syllabi and planning were early victims of this shambles and undoubtedly the amount of knowledge transfer possible in the sometime savagely curtailed semesters has been minimal. But right at the forefront for fixing this debacle is the KZN Department of Education’s 12-point plan. Its idea is to enlist motivational speakers (!) who will “work on the “pupil’s psyches”. Apparently, this will more adequately prepare them for final exams than drills of times tables, exercises in grammar and writing and poring over diagrams of how the body works. Terrifying. BTW the motivational gurus will reach their huge audiences by radio. Really? And now it seems that the once respected previous Minister of Health Dr Zweli Mkhize has long been infected by the terrible illness so common amongst politicians. That is the inability to distinguish between his own money and government money. It is obviously so easy to do. You pop out to spend a couple of million on stuff for the office and before you know it you find you have bought private household essentials like luxury cars, handbags, and holidays. There is a related nonsense emerging from the assertion that government have sold 51% of SAA, the national airline, to a private consortium. Only it seems that the consortium’s money is not entirely private, and the smoke and mirrors are back at work obscuring exactly who owns what. The simple puzzling question in all of this is just why anyone thinks the nation or indeed anyone needs an airline that is going to start life with a record of appalling management and a debt at lease the size of the herd of our president’s prize buffalos. For folk who can’t see the point of soccer, the sports channels have become a punishment. The next round of matches in the very long sequence of international fixtures that will ultimately determine who gets to attend the World Cup in Qatar next year, has begun. The list of hopeful countries is like a geography quiz answer sheet, and one does marvel that they all apparently have both the manpower and real estate to host 22 people kicking a ball on a flat grassy patch. Like the Faroe Islands, Andorra and San Marino ? James Greener Friday 3rd September 2021