Source: Democratic Alliance
Title: Leon: South Africa must learn to win again
SPEECH BY TONY LEON, LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION PARTY, THE DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE
Westville Boys High School is not only well known for its academic excellence, but for its sporting prowess.
I am certain, therefore, that the students and staff of Westville Boys would have noticed the curious paradox in South African sport today-namely, that there are many individual successes, but many team failures.
This weekend, for example, Makhaya Ntini took his 150th test wicket and set a new national record for the number of wickets taken in a four-day series.
In golf, Ernie Els won the Hawaiian Open, while Trevor Immelman won the South African Open for the second year in a row.
But our team sports have not won a major championship since Bafana Bafana were crowned African champions eight years ago in 1996.
The cricket team, thankfully, seems to have turned its fortunes around in the series against the West Indies. But our rugby and soccer teams are still in disarray. This weekend Bafana Bafana lost to Senegal after scoring an own goal.
Because of misdirection and interference from the Minister of Sport, our teams end up fighting their battles in the back office and the dressing room before they ever take the field against their real opponents.
Winning isnt everything, of course. Good sportsmanship comes first. But in sport, as in everything, the most important thing of all is to try your very hardest and perform to the best of your ability.
It seems that our national teams have forgotten this lesson.
They seem to spend far too much time on team-building exercises and not enough time on the basic training they need to win matches.
That is not to say that team-building is unimportant. In a diverse society such as our own, we cannot achieve common objectives without forming new bonds with each other. We have to work on bridging our differences and building a new sense of unity. That is not only true of sport, but of everything we do.
And yet we cannot forget about winning, about achieving the goals that we have set out to accomplish.
Above all, we must reward excellence, and honour people for their achievements.
There were several students here at Westville Boys who performed exceptionally well on their matric exams. One, Michael Gorven, had made it into the top ten in the province, and another, Jeffy Soo, made it into the top twenty. But due to a computer error, they were both left off the list of the top thirty achievers.
Other schools in the province seem to have experienced similar problems.
Some matriculants who had passed were told that they had failed, and the reason turned out to be that a computer had failed to calculate their results properly.
The Democratic Alliances public representatives in KwaZulu-Natal immediately took up the issue with the education authorities. DA MP Gloria Borman approached MEC for Education Narend Singh, and he responded quickly to her inquiries. Thankfully, the results for these Westville students have been corrected.
But we need to know whether there have been other mistakes. At the very least, this problem cannot be allowed to occur again.
We need more transparency in the grading of matric exams so that we can be sure that the results are fair and accurate. I have therefore instructed the DA provincial leadership to ask the MEC to conduct an audit into the matric results in order to
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