The World Bank -- IMF’s Obedient Servants
The Minister of Education’s efforts to put a clear face upon the State’s plan to further cripple one sector of education so as to patch up another are misguided and unconvincing in the extreme. Worse are the efforts of the officials of the National Professional Teachers’ Association (Naptosa), the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) and the Cape Teachers’ Professional Association (CTPA) to cover up for the provincial and national education ministers. While claiming for their organisation the status of ‘trade union’ the Sadtu officials in particular have not only betrayed the interests of teachers as workers, they have compromised in the most dangerous and arrogant way the basic principles that underlie the continuing struggle for an unsegregated, democratic system of education in a democratised South Africa.
They have failed miserably and culpably in a simple duty towards pupils, teachers, parents and the whole of South Africa’s population. They have refused to understand what really lies behind the anti-educational, patently disruptive and illogical policies that have emerged in regard to the restructuring and staffing of schools as part of one educational system. The facts in the matter that have angered the teaching profession and parents have been hidden by both officialdom and their willing hands among teachers who work within the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC). This Council has become a hunting ground for teachers of two unwanted types.
The first is the group willing to use both their ‘trade union’ status and their access to the ELRC to claim promotion and recognition within the bureaucracy that is rapidly mounting up in education. The second is the group that out of some distorted sense of obligation to the bureaucracy back them even to the extent of driving a dagger through the heart of one of society’s most vulnerable institutions - its educational system.
It is servility and dumb obedience that seem to drive their support for what can never be justified by Minister Bengu or any of the Provincial ministers of education or any of the spokespersons who have acted for these ministers. These teachers ought to be aware of one most important thing that educators need to tell learners, workers and all other sectors of the population.
This very important thing is the fact that the ‘transformation’ of South Africa at this stage of our struggles was dictated by a compromise (sell-out)by, on the one side, those in government at the time and that section of the liberatory movement that is now the GNU with, on the other, the new global force that dominates South Africa and all other ex-colonial countries on the continent of Africa. The fact is therefore that for the past ten years and more that compromise was been worked out, and that at the Kempton Park talks the conditions under which a ‘government of national unity’ would be allowed to be formed and to run the country were agreed upon. These conditions were spelt out by the global forces of capitalism-imperialism. These conditions make up a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) covering all the important basic economic, political, social, educational and inter-national reforms which the World Bank and International Monetary Fund insist should be fulfilled before considering granting loans to any country.
There is more than ample evidence of the GNU’s readiness to carry out such agreements, even in the face of fierce opposition. The effects of the operation of structural adjustment policies upon the lives of people in many countries have become known to those able to gain access to the facts and willing to inform others about them. But the successive South African governments of PW Botha, FW de Klerk and NR Mandela have chosen, each in its time, to remain silent about the SAPs that have been forced upon this country, each pretending instead that the Government, including the GNU, has acted in the best interests of the country.
In recent times the economic ‘reforms’ or structural adjustment policies have been implemented in South Africa under the watchful eye of World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) monitors who live in Southern Africa to oversee, advise and caution governments that are under orders to carry out WB-IMF-dictated ‘reforms’.
We have had subsidies on essential foods -- like bread -- removed on orders from the WB-IMF. Company taxes have been slashed heavily (from 48% to 30%) to encourage oversees companies to invest here. The loss to the Finance Ministry has been made up by the imposition of VAT upon all the country’s consumers, poor and rich, to ‘spread the burden’. Tax holidays have been granted to the investors on ‘advice’ from the World Bank. Free education, free medical services, living wages have all been declared ‘unwelcome’ to this capitalist body. The instruction to sell off State assets to reduce the country’s debt, the order to sack 100 000 State employees, including nurses, doctors and teachers, have come from the WB-IMF. The GNU - sent to parliament partly by support from the trade unions - now seeks to brow-beat these same unions into accepting ‘flexibility’ in wage determinations - as demanded by the World Bank.
It is in return for meeting all the demands of the World Bank and IMF and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that the government’s plea for international loan capital and direct investment will be met. The privatisation of State businesses and land is a non-negotiable condition for financial support from the WB-IMF. The ‘downsizing’ (the new word for the ‘reducing’) of the civil service, teacher corps, hospital workers and other State employee groups is likewise a non-negotiable condition in the books of the WB-IMF.
All this is what determines the policies carried out by the Minister Bengu and his train of provincial ministers of education, directors and all the other obedient servants to be found in the teacher unions wedded to the ELRC. Their decisions are bound by their carrying out WB-IMF policy. Not achieving equity! Not redistribution of services! Not serving the interests of parents, teachers and pupils. It is the education ministry’s response to the bullying prescriptions of the Group of 7 (G-7) wealthy nations (and a subservient UNO) working through the World Bank and the IMF that now shapes the ‘reforms’ that loom ahead. When the teacher spokespersons for the Western Cape’s Education Minister Mrs. Olckers claim that retrenchment is ‘an economic imperative’ they are at the same time speaking for the WB-IMF. But their simplistic explanation is that ‘there is no money’. And a bemused Vergotine of the CTPA chants ‘equity’ in the absence of any understanding at all. When the Cape and Gauteng Education directors and/or ministers declare arrogantly that retrenchments are non-negotiable and that no amount of protest will make any difference they are echoing what their master’s voice (that of the WB-IMF) has enjoined them to say.
South Africa is not the only country that has been subjected to this economic and political bullying. It is also what Zambia and Zimbabwe had to bow to. For Mr. Mugabe’s government was refused a desperately-needed IMF loan of 60 million US dollars because the WB-IMF was dissatisfied with the pace of privatisation and the government’s policy towards ‘white’ land ownership. When the WB-IMF forced the Zambian government to remove the subsidy on maize-meal, the country was torn apart by food riots. Four WB-IMF and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-US) persons were sent to Russia as ‘advisers’ to ensure Yeltsin’s election in June this year. Loan funds totaling 10 billion US dollars were desperately needed to finance Russia’s ‘reforms’. The WB-IMF-CIA held back these funds and would have withdrawn them had Yeltsin not been reelected and had any left-wing party won the election. Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Peru have all been hammered by the WB-IMF and WTO ‘conditionalities’ into becoming virtual economic vassals of the United States.
In the same way the flow of funds to develop the infrastructure of South Africa’s economic and social needs will depend upon how far the obedient servants of the globalised forces that control the economies of this country (and of hundreds of others) succeed in satisfying the conditions (or conditionalities) of the unwritten, unpublished but real Structural Adjustment Programmes under which the masses in South Africa are held to ransom.
The ‘remedies’ the Education Minister is now attempting to apply cannot even remotely succeed in correcting the education inequalities of the past. His policies are a desperate effort to stave off a worsening of conditions in some areas of schooling by trashing education in other areas. The WB-IMF’s SAP demands that the teacher corps be slashed, that pupil-teacher ratios be increased - to decrease State spending on education and to use the “savings” mainly to reduce State Budget deficits and current State debt. That will not happen if the wizards in the education ministry redeploy retrenched teachers elsewhere. This would mean continued employment and payment of such teachers and thus negate the budget cuts ordered by those who give the instructions -- the WB-IMF. If there were a possibility of their being honest the verbal tricksters who speak of redeployment in an attempt to disguise the harsh realities of sacking, firing and discarding educators would speak the truth and tell things as they are.
Let them realise that thinking teachers and parents know that to advance economic development in an industrialising society the spread of skills of all kinds among the youth and among the under-utilised adults is a pre-condition. A bullying order to sack teachers, crowd the classrooms and spread demoralisation throughout the system cannot achieve that aim. The most elementary demands of the trade unions for the upgrading of skills and the modernisation of the work-force begin to be realised through children in Grade 1, through the primary and secondary schools and through to colleges, technikons and universities. To eliminate illiteracy, to ‘build a better life for all’, needs more teachers, more schools and a dedication to honest service.
On January 25 this year the Minister of Education promised some R1.2 billion extra to build schools. That is on record in the SABC television archives. At that time, perhaps, the children were the first concern.
Upon whose instructions and in whose interests are the minister and his minions acting now, six months later? We have tried to make clear upon whose instructions. But their actions are certainly not in the interests of the country’s children. For them the Teachers’ League of South Africa has throughout the education struggle demanded free and equal compulsory education in a single, non-’racial’ education system.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL.66 #5, OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE TEACHERS’ LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, JULY-AUGUST 1996]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
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