Access to education, the gateway to employment, will not come cheaply or quickly to South Africa's huge illiterate, or barely literate, population. Measurable progress in creating new educational opportunities for the disadvantaged, however, is certain to be regarded politically as another vital measure of the government's performance in the run-up to the 1999 elections. If substantial gains can be made on the educational front, the public may be more willing to accept official explanations should the broadereconomic targets not be met. So far, the government has been as open and forthright about the magnitude of the education challenge and its limited capacity to find instant solutions as it has been in presenting the economic strategy or explaining the operations of the new political structures. It is still too early to see any major gains in the national educational profile, however.
Under apartheid, undereducation of the black population denied most an opportunity for anything beyond menial labor. The Central Statistical Service reported that in 1994 ten million people had no education, 86 percent of whom were black. In the same year per capita spending on white children not attending private school was 147 percent higher than the amount spent on blacks. Whites, who comprise only 13 percent of the population, received twice as many university degrees, certificates, and diplomas as blacks.
According to the macroeconomic strategy,
Progress in education shows up consistently in comparative studies as a key determinant of long run economic performance and income redistributions. Sustained improvements in the quality of public schooling available to the poor and greater equity in the flow of students through secondary and tertiary education are central to the Government's approach.
The ANC had given high priority to this task well before coming to power, and in 1990 it set up a special team that assessed educational reform and multicultural systems in some eighty countries around the world. Australia's efforts to integrate large numbers of Asian immigrants and indigenous people, for example, offered important lessons.
In March 1995 the Department of Education published a White Paper on Education and Training; the White Paper became the basis for a comprehensive National Education Bill that was passed six months later. The bill carefully balances power between the national and local educational authorities. Nineteen separate education departments that had served different racial groups and so-called independent tribal homelands were transformed into one integrated system of nine provincial departments. The national department is responsible for tertiary education, while the provinces handle primary and secondary education, with funding from the central government. Teacher training is a joint responsibility. The minister of education has been given new far-reaching powers to set national policy on a wide range of politically sensitive issues, including coordination, finance, governance, monitoring, staffing, student-teacher ratios, the curriculum framework, and the language of instruction. But the bill guarantees every person the right to basic education, to choose to be instructed in one of the eleven constitutionally designated official languages ("to the extent practicable"), to enjoy freedom of conscience, belief, and association, and to establish education institutions based on a common language, culture, or religion.
The government spent approximately $7.67 billion on education in fiscal year 1996. This sum amounts to nearly 7 percent of the gdp and represents a 9.6 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. Eighty-five percent of the national education budget goes for salaries to teachers and other personnel. As a result of the post-apartheid consolidation of parallel educational structures, there are at least 100,000 redundant personnel in the system, most of them white. In keeping with the spirit of reconciliation, President Mandela gave assurances that the jobs of teachers and other public servants hired during the apartheid era would be protected at least until they retire or leave voluntarily. Thus far few have done so. Most of the funds for new initiatives--building schools in poor areas, school fees of poor children, and special programs in youth education, adult education, and teacher training--to redress the inequities in education in 1996 were therefore financed out of the 9.6 percent budgetary increment. Although the National Education Bill includes a plan for free and compulsory education for all children, this will be introduced incrementally; the costs in the first year were only for first-year primary school pupils. In general, reform will have to be financed through the redeployment of money under the current budget ceiling in order to satisfy the aims of the new macroeconomic strategy, along with other pressing social needs in the new democratic South Africa.
Rather than dwelling on the need for more money, the education department is emphasizing qualitative changes through a two-pronged strategy under the banner "equitable learning opportunities for all." One element builds on grassroots interest in education. John Samuel, deputy director of education, estimates that 60 percent of the schools in South Africa owe their existence to local community efforts. The government is attempting to expand and reinforce such involvement by setting new national standards for the governance of schools. These standards make clear that parents are the main stakeholders in education and that they should be represented, together with teachers, students, and community leaders, on school governing bodies. By encouraging much greater local responsibility for developing and maintaining high-quality education at the primary and secondary levels, the government also seeks to mobilize local funding and in-kind contributions to improve buildings, equipment, and teaching. Evidence of success in this campaign is already accumulating.
The second element in the strategy is the implementation of greater equity in the distribution of funds and personnel among South Africa's provinces and within them. For example, per pupil expenditures in the more affluent Western Cape province were $800 in 1996, while in the neighboring province of the Eastern Cape the per pupil expenditure was only $450. Within each province, of course, public schools in traditional white enclaves have long enjoyed far larger government support than those in black townships. Related to the financial disparities are variations in student-to-faculty ratios: to create greater equity, the Mandela government announced a new national standard of a 35:1 student-to-faculty ratio for all primary and secondary schools. Each school is encouraged to work out its own plan of adjustment; the provincial departments of education oversee the redeployment of faculty. Such processes of local problem solving can become highly contentious, but they are essential to confidence building, conflict resolution, and national integration across South Africa.
Within the black urban townships, violent crime has been endemic for decades, and local community leaders complain that it has only been with the spread of violent crime to affluent white suburbs and downtown business districts that the predominantly white-run press has given publicity to this problem. No one disputes that underreporting of crime against blacks has been a problem, but today all groups in South Africa feel increasingly at risk and so are calling for action.
It is not the rate of criminal activity that makes South Africa so exceptional; it is the levels of violence accompanying crime. Overall, South Africa's recorded crime rate is 5,651 per 100,000 people, more than double the international average of 2,662 but roughly the same as in the United States, France, or Norway. The murder rate of 61 per 100,000, however, is more than eleven times the international average of 5.5, making South Africa possibly the most murderous society on earth. Between 1987 and 1994, the country's reported murder rate increased nearly 87 percent, although the figure for 1996, the latest available, showed a 5.4 percent drop from 1995. Carjacking, another highly visible crime that is often accompanied by violence, jumped 80 percent between 1992 and 1994. Nearly 75 percent of these crimes occurred in and around the country's media capital of Johannesburg, where an average of twenty-one cars were stolen each day.
Crime prevention is, of course, the classic task of the police in any normal democracy. But under apartheid the primary function of the South African Police Service (saps) was the suppression of political dissent. Stopping criminal activity, beyond that which directly threatened the white minority, was a much lower priority, and there is almost no tradition or expertise in criminal investigation in South Africa. Between 80 and 90 percent of criminal convictions were gained on the basis of confessions, obtained by what senior officials today disparage as the "choke and talk" technique of police intimidation. Today the saps must reform fundamentally while at the same time striving to show the public that it can and will reduce crime. As a senior saps officer has noted, police reform is like rebuilding a ship while it is in full sail during a hurricane.
Reform of the police is a top priority of the new government. With the passage of the South African Police Service Act in September 1995, eleven apartheid-era policing agencies were consolidated into a single police service organized at the national and provincial levels. Crash programs in training and evaluation have produced a police officer corps that is now 30 percent black, up from only 10 percent in 1994, while the total force remains about two-thirds black. The government also announced the country's first National Crime Prevention Strategy, a four-part attempt to strengthen the criminal justice system, design crime-resistant government systems (for instance, personal identity documents and a new vehicle registration system), institute educational crime prevention programs aimed at youth, and strengthen cooperation with South Africa's neighbors to reduce transborder criminal activity.
Over the past two years the minister of safety and security and the commissioner of police have repeatedly emphasized that the changes in the saps were aimed at meeting the requirements of a democratic government and creating a police service accountable to the community. Advice and assistance in transforming South Africa's police has been sought from other countries, notably the multicultural democracies of Australia, Canada, India, and the United States. Publication of the Police Plan for 1996/97--a plan that was formulated in a participatory and consultative manner and that was open for public debate--marked the first time the Department of Safety and Security informed the public about specific policing priorities and objectives. As noted in the plan's preamble: "We have learnt that an illegitimate police force that is not focused on crime, but on maintaining a particular political system, and which is disassociated from the community it serves, cannot effectively promote and maintain the safety and security of all the people."
Across the country the department has sponsored familiarization meetings between civic leaders and the police. This has been part of a broad effort to devolve power and accountability downward to the local communities. All members of the 140,000-member police force have begun to pass through a special course on human rights and community relations. In contrast to the highly centralized apartheid era, the national police expect to become engaged only rarely and only when requested by the local authorities. Two exceptions have been designated national priority areas: the mass violence in KwaZulu/Natal, where ethnic conflict, party rivalries, and crime threaten not only to destabilize that province but to undermine the new era of democratic peace nationally; and, the richest province, Gauteng (which includes Johannesburg), where organized crime, the rash of carjacking, and the tensions endemic to huge impoverished black townships are producing much socioeconomic turmoil.
Anecdotal evidence suggests police attitudes about their own responsibility and accountability are changing. Deputy President Mbeki told a Washington meeting of the US-South African Business Council how a car thief was recently apprehended as he tried to take a stolen vehicle into a neighboring country. In his possession was a notebook with the names and telephone numbers of many prominent South Africans, including the deputy president's. The thief tried to intimidate the senior arresting officer by claiming influence over the officer's superiors. To "avoid any complications" the officer-in-charge turned the case over to a junior colleague, but the younger man did not flinch, and the thief was eventually convicted. The deputy president used the incident to make the point that under apartheid the police worried more about not crossing their superiors than about catching criminals. Today democratic empowerment is helping to transform the way even the lowest police recruit views his or her assignment; this new commitment to serve community interests, Mbeki argues, will be the key to the government's success in fighting crime.
To secure and sustain the public's trust in the long struggle to reduce crime, the police and the politicians must be seen as honest and free of corruption. In 1995-96 the national commissioner of police increased the number of anticorruption units around the country from two to eleven. The police are also proceeding with hearings and trials on a wide range of misconduct, including the use of force to repress dissent under apartheid or to abet political violence. These efforts also serve the cause of reconciliation by encouraging those responsible for many of the worst actions under apartheid to seek amnesty by admitting to the wrong-doing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Thus far, corruption among politicians has not been alleged or uncovered. Were this to happen, of course, the public's patience with government explanations regarding the slowness of change or the need for sacrifice to make the country more economically competitive could dissipate quickly. There is probably no greater threat to the democratic, economic, and social transformation of South Africa than the corruption of government officials.
In the private sector, white-collar crime and fraud has been rising sharply, but the government is rapidly expanding its investigation efforts. On other fronts, concerted police work has produced results: by mid-1995, significant drops in crime were being reported from several of the worst areas. In downtown Johannesburg, for example, there was a 43 percent drop in carjacking, while in the suburbs housebreaking fell 30 percent.
In the townships, where organized crime has been deeply entrenched, police and citizens groups have successfully forged cooperative efforts not only to prevent crime but to press for stiff penalties for those convicted as a way to deter others--especially Soweto's unemployed and undereducated youth--from criminal activity.
Moegslen Williams, editor of the Cape Times, notes that during South Africa's 175-year history there have been two main threads representing the mainstream press: one white-owned and -controlled and, until the end of the 1980s, concerned primarily with the political, economic, and social life of the white population; the second and much thinner thread was the resistance press, dating back to the nineteenth century.17 There continues to be much debate about what constituted the resistance press. Was it only the underground, banned, and exiled voices of black liberation, or did it also include the mainstream English press, which claims a proud tradition of investigative and opposition journalism? Many ANC critics of the mainstream press consider the English-language press to have been, at best, opposed to the Afrikaner-dominated National Party, while it continued to brand the ANC a terrorist organization and practiced self-censorship in response to the government's efforts to censor the media. Most of the Afrikaner press and the state-owned national radio and television outlets continued to be staunch defenders of apartheid to the very end.
President Mandela, who has vigorously defended freedom of the press as one of the mainstays of democracy, also noted in a February 1994 speech that the newsrooms and board rooms of South Africa's media still lacked racial, gender, or ethnic diversity and suggested that this might limit the media's ability to cover the multicultural complexity and dynamics of the new South Africa. Eighteen months after Mandela's speech, Moegslen Williams was appointed editor of the Cape Times, the country's oldest daily newspaper. He was the first person of color ever named to edit a major metropolitan mainstream newspaper (other than the black township paper, the Sowetan). Currently there are five other people of color on the Cape Times editorial staff of sixty, producing a paper for a readership that is 62 percent nonwhite.
Another factor affecting the media's relations with the new government is more directly political. All parties in South Africa, except the ruling anc, have long had their own newspapers to carry their messages to the public. Most of the established papers still reflect partisan interests. Ties between the Afrikaans press and the National Party and even more conservative fringe groups remain close, while several of the English- language editors continue to support the small, white, liberal Democratic Party. Other English papers, most notably the Weekly Mail, Argus, and Cape Times continue to see their role as watch dog and critic of any government.
The anc, of course, commands a large majority in parliament and among the voting public. It also now controls the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which functioned during the apartheid era as little more than a propaganda instrument of the ruling National Party. The head of the SABC, Zwelakhe Sisulu, faces many of the same challenges of personnel and procedural holdovers from apartheid as do those who are attempting to make the police, education department, and other institutions more transparent, democratic, and responsive to the interests and needs of all races. At the same time, government leaders know they need the media in order to win public support for their policies, many of which will require more patience and sacrifice from the black majority. Mounting frustration prompted Deputy President Mbeki in remarks before the first session of the 1996 Parliament to declare the South African media, including the broadcast services, so woefully inadequate that it invites government intervention, perhaps to request a "propaganda hour."
Deputy President Mbeki's remark sparked an outburst of generally negative reaction from the country's editorial writers. Yet current market trends seem to suggest that the only papers that are making money are those with strong, if narrow, links to the conservative political opposition. Except for the Argus, liberal papers are steadily losing readers, who are either tuning into radio and television or are turned off by the lack of news and opinion relevant to their interests and needs. Faced with declining revenues, those in the press who might otherwise be receptive to expanding their coverage and to diversifying their staff in order to attract a wider black audience now say they lack the money to do so as this would risk further erosion of their white subscriber base.
The contribution of the media to South Africa's long-term social transformation will likely depend on the extent to which new and more open partnerships can be forged among government, the private sector, and civil society, similar to the processes noted earlier with regard to the macroeconomic strategy. In the case of the media, this need not imply a loss of independence and the freedom to criticize those in authority. But it would require that the media become more responsive to the economic, social, and political concerns of its audience, and that it take a consciously constructive approach to nation building.
In the United States, where there is also a growing debate about the appropriate role of the press and the media, the terms "public," "civic," and "community" journalism are gaining currency. Simply put, civic journalism initiatives make a deliberate attempt to reach out to citizens, to listen to them, and to have citizens listen and talk to each other and to use that information in ways that enable them to participate more fully in their communities and in the democratic process. Citizens become more than consumers of a news "product," and the press builds a wider and more loyal audience by becoming a much more integral part of community life. Media committed to public journalism, whether print, audio, or video, do not deal exclusively with public affairs. Any mass medium, to succeed in the market place and to be effective, has to handle a wide variety of informational and entertainment needs. Public journalism, however, is committed to making public affairs a central and vital concern.
Public journalism has many critics--reporters, editors, and management--within the U.S. media. Some see a threat to journalistic independence and integrity, while others see huge financial risks in focusing deeply and narrowly on grassroots community interests. Yet a trend toward greater community engagement by urban and regional newspapers across America does appear to be emerging. South Africa would seem to be an especially promising arena in which to practice and develop techniques of public journalism. Citizens today are confronted by issues fundamental to civic and community rights and responsibilities: the separation and concentration of power at the national, regional, and local levels and the role of the state in the economic and social life of the country. And despite the enormous gaps in income, resources, and access to opportunity, there appears to be widespread public interest in these issues, from the poorest townships to the wealthiest suburbs. The careful and enlightened deliberative political process culminating in 1996's constitutional agreement has established a vital base for further civic engagement and consensus building. The economic and social challenges, however, are much more complex, though often less immediately compelling, and meeting them will be more difficult than the final leap from apartheid to democracy. It is on the difficult and contentious economic and social issues that the government needs to build public support and understanding.
If the South African media are to play a more vital role in helping to inform and to empower citizens, the information and opinion conveyed by the media will have to do more than raise the public's consciousness. Public journalism goes beyond agenda setting by providing information relevant to the clarification of core values and helping to organize the political debate with that goal in mind. This does not mean advocating particular priorities but, rather, assuming the new and now more important role of acquiring a better understanding and then communicating clearly the competing beliefs and priorities that underlie each public problem.
As all sides discovered in negotiating the peaceful transfer of power and framing a new constitution, within each of South Africa's cultural groups certain core beliefs were beyond compromise. Yet the extremes of these positions were also impossible for others to accept, for this would have undermined the viability of the democratic process. Sustaining this process in reaching a new accord between business, labor, and the government over key elements of the new macroeconomic strategy, or in redistributing education and anticrime resources, depends on the same process of compromise. The special challenge facing South Africa's media is to assist in reconciling conflicting interests by ensuring that they do not coalesce around racial, ethnic, or other grounds that defy compromise.
Deputy President Mbeki's concerns about the media's treatment of the government must be seen in the special context of post-apartheid South Africa and deserve a constructive response. Promoting public journalism may be a partial answer. Proponents of public journalism offer not a formula but a general approach that would allow the media to play a fuller role that is implicit in the democratic process, conveying information in ways that can lead to public discussion and then turn into action. For example, public journalism might deal with crime prevention, in the following way:
Raising the necessary revenue for the increased reporting that public journalism demands will require difficult adjustments within newspapers and other media. External funding from private and foreign donor agencies may also be necessary, at least during the initial stages. But the long-term returns could be substantial in helping South Africa consolidate democracy and in ensuring that the media plays an expanded and constructive role in that historic process.
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