On 13 September 2024 president Cyril Ramaphosa unilaterally signed the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA) despite on-going consultations and seemingly paying scant consideration to members of the GNU. This quickly saw a displeased Democratic Alliance (DA) staging a protest march in November. In no time it also had Afriforum, Solidarity and the Solidarity School Support Centre mobilising in the opposing corner, threatening potential legal pugilism.
No way that these lobby groups would not come out swinging especially when their membership base, a majority of whom are white Afrikaners, saw this as the ANC-led government’s punching below the belt at minorities in general but Afrikaans and Afrikaners in particular.
What ANC spin has touted to be an Act essentially meant to safeguard the best interests of the public school learner suddenly revealed the smallanyana skeletons of simmering age-old ideological rivalries between the transformation left and the conservative right. The Act has since become weaponised as an affront – entry-level swaart gevaar tactics to repress minority interests and culture – an ideal battleground for the aforementioned would-be litigants who’ve always fashioned themselves as the volk‘s last vanguard if the day ever came when the commies would take up the pitchforks.
In the other corner, SADTU rushed to support the bill. Obviously they wouldn’t be outdone and simply had to show that they too had a revolution to defend from whites who clearly hadn’t gotten the memo that this was still a democratic country, like it or not. The Union’s Dr Mugwena Maluleke stated, “This is a victory for equitable access to education. No child should face barriers to learning due to their background.” The ANC Youth League expressed the same sentiment.

The major points of contention in the Act lie in clauses 4 and 5 which the DA contends, ‘give the state too much control over who gets an education at any particular school, and in what language.’ Clause 4, detractors argue, gives way too much power to the Department of Basic Education (DBE) in as far as admission policies and monitoring issues of inclusivity are concerned. (It should be noted that the implementation of these sections was delayed by three months to allow for ‘a national consensus and national cohesion.’ The law was, however, promulgated in its entirety on 20 December. )
Furthermore, Clause 5 also requires ‘SGBs [Student Governing Bodies] to submit their language policies for government approval to meet the linguistic needs of the wider community.’ For government this would be the panacea to ‘address historical language-based exclusion.’ But for Afriforum and Co it could potentially ‘undermine certain pupils’ educational rights, like those who rely on Afrikaans as their primary language.’ It didn’t help that shortly after the signing, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said the bill ‘will go a long way in making education affordable more especially in the suburban areas, where majority of schools are Afrikaans teaching, whereas the broader community around the school are English speaking.’
However, at least one educational expert, Mary Metcalf, has come out favourably for the contentious law. She told Polity.org that the Clause does not necessarily deprive SGBs from having control over language policies provided that they had the approval of the head of department and did not deviate from the Constitution. In another interview, she also touched on a matter overlooked by critics but which is undoubtedly of significant importance on the ground. ‘My expectation is that there will be very careful interaction with provinces in terms of Grade R and realistic dates of implementation that match careful planning,’ she said.

The new legislation also seeks to effect other fundamental changes which could have serious implications for those who fall foul of the law. ‘In a move to strengthen Early Childhood Education,’ said Ntshavheni, ‘the BELA Act makes Grade R [minimum 4 years old, turning 5 in June of that year] the new compulsory starting age for school. It also holds parents accountable by criminalising the failure to ensure their children attend school. There is no reason for a child not to attend school in South Africa at a Basic Education level because education is free.’
There are those who see the introduction of the Act as nothing but government’s attempt at deflection for its governance failures and the inability to build new schools. This finds further substantiation in the fact that the R16 billion required for ‘universal Grade R access remains [according to the National Treasury] an “unfunded mandate.”
Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube has since ‘been tasked with drafting regulations and ensuring system readiness for the Act’s implementation’ which the DA considers as something of a godsend given that ‘the party will be able to shape the context and framework of decisions to be taken on the legislation.’
Despite the hullabaloo in the aftermath of the bill’s passing, it appears that for now, it’s still business as usual. Solidarity and Co have halted legal action pending Minister Gwarube’s drafting of the guidelines. It seems for now that some of the concerns that had gripped some citizens around compulsory Grade R have been allayed – more accurately, postponed.
With Grade 1 being the starting education age in past years meant a surge in that grade’s intake and smaller Grade R numbers in Colesberg. One source points out that at one point Lowryville had five Grade 1 classrooms and only one for Grade R. As previously written, Kuyasa’s S. S. Madikane Primary School currently has two Grade R classes with dedicated staff to man them. At Lowryville Primary, the situation hasn’t changed. One must, therefore, wonder what implications a full implementation of the Act might mean for these schools given that scores of Kuyasa’s children (some four years or older) are currently in Early Childhood Development and day care centres.

Although one is appreciative of government’s efforts at redress, it’s often disappointing that these usually end up a scrap between political ideologues. As research has shown, mother tongue education ought to form the cornerstone of a child’s education. The Xhosa child has as much right to learn in his native tongue as the Afrikaner. But from a purely anecdotal vantage, one must wonder whether the indigenous languages have been developed sufficiently enough to meet the learning areas of modernity, primarily in the fields of TEMS (Technology Engineering Maths and Science). It’s all good and well to teach these in the native tongues but what happens when the child reaches a grade when the mother tongue runs out of words to adequately teach them? You might remember that only in 2018 was the first isiXhosa PhD thesis written and published at Fort Hare, a black university now a 109 years old. Is it not a tad counterintuitive to scream for language inclusion when those languages fall short at allowing the school learner to realise his full development within them? We’re all for transformation but one can’t help that, in pursuit of meeting supposed transformation objectives, we often find ourselves putting the cart before the horse.