Fifty years after the Soweto uprising, South Africa’s schoolchildren are still being failed. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova mark June 16 with a retrospective that asks not what went wrong but what went right – and finds that racial harmony, against all the odds and against the global trend, is the unexpected success story of post-apartheid South Africa.
Then they turn to the ledger of failure. Eighty-one percent of grade four learners cannot read for meaning. Almost a million children drop out before matric. The pass rate is a statistical illusion. BEE has been treated as a goal rather than a tool and produced legalised looting – R65,000 to fix one pothole, R26 for a single-ply toilet roll at Eskom. And the first trillionaire in human history was born in Pretoria three years before June 16 1976, but South Africa blocks his satellite internet service from connecting 5,000 schools that still do not have textbooks by June.
They also get into Geordin Hill-Lewis removing John Steenhuisen as agriculture minister, the DA stamping its authority on the government of national unity, and the World Cup – Bafana losing badly, African nations trolling South Africa with Mexican jerseys, and the Japanese fans who cleaned up the entire stadium after their match.
Sharp Sharp is a podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency and Scrolla.Africa. New episode every week.
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