A POLITICAL threat looms large as this year gets fully under way, with the global economic crisis continuing and the jobs massacre of the fourth industrial revolution picking up pace, says Terry Bell in his first Labour Wrap for 2018. That threat, he says, is to parliamentary democracy.
He quotes American academic Larry Diamond who has pointed out that, in recent years, at least 25 countries once seen as “democratic” can no longer be regarded as such. And many of these, he says, slid into authoritarianism subtly and legally, the classic example being Turkey.
As a result, says Bell, every worker and every person concerned with the retention and extension of democratic norms should be on the constant lookout for signs that democratic norms are being eroded. This, he maintains, can often happen behind a veneer of reforms claimed to be both necessary and progressive.
An example of this “camouflage” is the barrage of positive rhetoric about the annual matric results that attempts to hide the dismal state of South African schooling. And he maintains that the country is about to be subjected to another bout of such “misleading propaganda” on the education front, and one that amounts to an erosion of democracy.
His target is the provision in amendments to the Schools Act that would curtail the authority of school governing bodies. Government, he says, has maintained that this is necessary because such bodies have failed.
This is true, says Bell. But the responsibility for the failure lies largely with the government. No proper training was provided for school governors, and various other aspects of schooling inherited from the apartheid past were never adequately dealt with, if they were addressed at all.
He admits that there exists corruption at various levels with some schools; that only a small minority of governing bodies actually function — and fewer function well. But the answer, he contends, is not to go back to a system of state control and that instead, the democratic potential that exists should be nurtured and expanded.
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