Give the children of the poors access to education

By Faith ka-Manzi 16 January 2007

Education rights have ceased to be a race issue but have become a class issue. It is not only Africans who are need of finance to educate their children, poor Indians, Coloureds and whites also go through the same despair experienced by Black people as the new school year approaches. People have been retrenched mainly due to the accessing of our economy by foreign investors. Factories which were main organs of employment have been shut down and the working class find themselves unemployed and unable to fund their children’s education. The privatization of basic necessities have meant the scaling down of jobs also increasing the number of the unemployed.

Innitiatives like Black Business Empowerment have ensured that a new class of Blacks emerge. A class which is not concerned with the economic needs of the rest of their communities except to fatten their own pockets. The overriding of our country’s sovereignities by economic agreements with rich countries who haul in their own industries in this country and in fact the rest of Africa is worsening the poverty of the people of the third world.

The inaccessibility of land to the poor is also fast tracking their inability to use the land as means of survival and also for food sovereignty. So why can’t the powers that be, if the countries of the third world still have some powers at least give one thing to the poors, free access to education. Education does not necessarily lead to riches but it does become a means to an end. It gives the children of the poor alternatives in life.

Rampant crime in this country is a sign of frustration by the masses who are unemployed and also illiterate as well as landless. When people are unemployed, landless and illiterate, they become restless and destruction follows suit. I don’t also believe that a lot of people in prisons are illiterate, some of them were frustrated by the lack of job opportunities. Globalisation of third world natural resources and the privitazation of basic necessities are some of the causes of the lack of equal economic opportunities.

Section 29. (1) of the Constitution Act puts it clearly that everyone has a right to basic education including adult basic education and also further education and that the state through reasonable measures must make it progressively available and accessible. Section 10 also of the Constitution also provides everyone with inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.

If the state does not adhere to these rights and does not threat the children of the poor with dignity, they must not cry wolf when these children take the law into their hands and turn the country into a jungle. The dignity and the future of these young people is not respected and protected if access to education is not ensured. It seems as if the only education that is dignified and ensured and protected is those of the children of the elitists to esnure that their children become the heirs of the country instead of having the country belong to all those who live in it. After all what benefit is it for the poor children to live in the country where they go to bed hungry, have no land and no basic necessities. If the powers that be ensures the dignity and protect the education of the children of the poor, there will be no sleepless nights for their children in the future because the children of the poor will not leave them alone. They will also want to drive BMW’s, live in Umhlanga and shop at expensive malls. This is an alert which the powers that be should take heed of because a hungry, landless person is very angry and lessons from the past should also be taken seriously because if not they always repeat themselves.

Independent Media Centre