OPINION: While the country cries for skills, the country scores an own goal by constraining options of entry to higher education, writes Dr Pali Lehohla.
IT IS A case of there being many mansions in my father’s house. If it were not so, I would have told you. Yet, when you knock on that door, you are told many are called but few are chosen.
South Africa is facing a serious crisis of skills and it is constraining its journey out of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Statistics exhibit a disturbing trend in the post-apartheid state.
The proportion of skilled labour across all ages among black people is low and has stagnated throughout the 30 years since 1994. The trend is most depressing among blacks youth aged between 15 and 24, where the proportion of the skilled in employment has stagnated and started regressing in the past three decades. Among white people, the proportions have been increasing apace at each measurement point and it is almost three times the level of that of black people.
In almost a similar way, the proportion of the skilled Indian population has grown rapidly, and it is catching up to that of whites. While coloured people are also low among the skilled employed, they remain marginally higher than black people.
The academic year for universities started a week ago. Unlike the ugly scenes of congestion witnessed at the doors of universities by students that have to claim their spaces at different campuses and, at one point, claimed a life, this time around the arrangements appear to be running smoothly, thanks to information technology.
It is said the spaces at university for first-year entry are fewer than 200,000, against at least 300,0000 students qualifying from high school for entry. Although universities are spoilt for choice regarding enrolling the best students, the artificial scarcity excludes the resources we most need.
The country has been slow in expanding the size of its institutions so that no one who qualifies is left behind. While the country cries for skills, the country scores its own goal by constraining options of entry. Private providers have seen the opportunity and have entered the market, but with unaffordable price tags, thus setting price barriers that keep those who have achieved entry into higher education at bay.
The technology platforms through which students apply and are admitted to their university of choice or otherwise might have solved the problem. However, this ignores multiple barriers. Students are subjected to a level of madness that only those who have operated on the trading floor can understand. In a matter of three days after receiving an admission letter from a university, the student should respond about whether they are accepting admission.
This happens without the assurance that a bursary is available. A notional one through a policy statement based on threshold finance of parent/parents exists. But the question of qualifying or being disqualified to bursary access is as clear as mud, given the murky conjugal relationships in South Africa.
Approximately 62% of fathers claim conjugal and paternity rights against 38% of mothers. It is a severe disequilibrium whereby, according to the statistician-general report of life births, it says only in 38% of all births the name of the father is reflected on the birth certificate. Thus in 62% of certificates are mother’s names only. Given this glaring social dissonance, how does the tone deaf policy on affordability find resonance with this loud problem of ecological fallacy?
When social policies fail to take time to appreciate the dysfunctional filial nature of black people in South Africa, the education of black people will continue to suffer and produce and reproduce patterns witnessed in the form of gender-based violence, femicide and infanticide.
Failure of policy to follow the path of evidence is as good as the hollow call that there are many mansions in my father’s house. If it were not so, I would have told you that it is evidenced by its confirmatory pyrrhic message pasted on the next door that reads: “Remember that many are called but few are chosen.” South African youth cannot win. The game of life is rigged from birth, by men and the government machinery.
* Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the DFA.
– BUSINESS REPORT
