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Date
: 22/08/2006
Source: KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government
Title: Ndebele: Legislature Report
Report by KwaZulu-Natal Premier S Ndebele to the KwaZulu-Natal
legislature taking legislature to the people, Kwangwanase
Honourable Speaker
Members of the Executive Council
Honourable Members
Members of the public
Towards a KwaZulu-Natal free from illiteracy
I wish to invite Honourable Members to imagine being placed in a
rural Chinese village, where texts are written using Mandarin
characters and Mandarin being the only language spoken.
I doubt that there would be a handful of members, if any, who would
be able to read or write Mandarin in that or any other context for
that matter. This situation Mr Speaker is what between 1,5 million
and 2 million citizens of KwaZulu-Natal face on a daily basis
because of not being able to read and write in their own mother
tongue. This represents between 17% and 22% of the total population
of KwaZulu-Natal.
Although the percentages of illiterate people living in rural
districts - between 26% and 46% - tends to be higher than the
percentages of illiterate people living in urban districts, which
are between 8% and 12%, the absolute number of people living in
rural districts is lower than the number of people living in some
of the urban districts. In other words, the statistics indicate
that there is a higher concentration of illiterate people in
eThekwini, Msunduzi, Empangeni/Richards Bay and Newcastle, despite
the percentage of people who are illiterate being lower in these
areas.
Mr Speaker, it is significant that the Legislature is meeting in
the District of Umkhanyakude. It is in this district that at 46%,
we have the highest rate of illiteracy in the province of
KwaZulu-Natal. In the Age of Hope, we can only but give hope to the
people of this district in the message we bring to this house
today.
Illiteracy remains one the most devastating legacies of apartheid
that we have not yet dealt with in a decisive manner. Illiteracy is
an affront to human dignity and it cannot be left untouched.
Section 29 (1) of our Constitution declares that, "everyone has a
right to a basic education, including adult basic education". In
that regard, then illiteracy is unconstitutional.
South Africa, as a whole and our province in particular, has
committed itself to the realisation of the education for all
frameworks adopted in Dakar in 2000 and the millennium development
goals which call on all nations to half the rate of illiteracy by
2015. We in KwaZulu-Natal want to do more than just half
illiteracy. We want to eradicate it by the end of the 2008/09
financial year!
A Mass Campaign to eradicate illiteracy
When our people gathered to adopt the Freedom Charter in Kliptown
in 1955, they declared that, "the doors of learning and culture
shall be opened". They further stated that "adult illiteracy shall
be ended by a mass state education plan".
It gives me great pleasure to announce the Masifundisane Adult
Literacy Campaign to eradicate illiteracy in the KwaZulu-Natal
province in the letter and spirit of the injunction given to us by
the Freedom Charter. We understand a mass campaign to mean the
mobilisation of large numbers of ordinary people to a common cause
of immense social value, in this case the eradication of
illiteracy.
Our country has enough experience of mass mobilisation. From the
Defiance Campaign of 1952, through to the mass organisations of the
1980s, we have garnered sufficient experience and skill to mobilise
our people toward a social good. It is through mass mobilisation
that we as a people removed what many thought was the unmovable
boulder of apartheid. Today apartheid is history, tomorrow
illiteracy will be history.
It is of crucial importance for us to understand where the masses
are located if we are to succeed in executing a mass campaign. We
know that the masses of our people can be found in various social
organisations and structures:
* in religious forums
* in villages, townships, informal settlements
* in community organisations
* in education institutions, etc.
We know that we cannot mobilise people into a monolithic force
through directives from the top. We have to organise the delivery
of literacy teaching and learning according to the specific
identities, social locations and geographic habitats of our people.
This requires flexibility and adaptability to the multiplicity of
local contexts within which people live their daily lives.
In this regard, I am calling on traditional leaders, the churches,
the mosques, the temples, the business sector, workers'
organisations, education institutions, government departments,
community-based organisations, and all organs of civil society to
join us in this mass campaign to eradicate illiteracy in our
province. In the spirit of letsema-ilima, I call on volunteers from
all walks of life to give some of their time to this noble cause.
As the poet would say, "Ask not what your country can do for you,
but what you can do for your country."
In the spirit of the 1980s slogan of "each one, teach one", the
Masifundisane Adult Literacy Campaign is to be driven by the desire
to involve every one of our people who is willing and ready to
contribute to this historic mission.
The naming of this campaign as Masifundisane has been deliberate.
In his speech to departing Conrado Benitez Brigadistas in Varadero
on 14 May 1961, Fidel Castro had the following to say:
“You are going to teach, but as you teach, you will also
learn. You are going to learn much more than you can possibly
teach. Because while you teach them what you have learned in
school, they will be teaching you what they have learned from the
hard life that they have led. They will teach you the
’why‘ of the revolution better than any speech, better
than any book.”
In this quotation, it is evident that those who will teach the
illiterate how to read and write will also learn from the life
experiences of those they will be teaching. Castro's statement is
fundamental in its implied assertion that illiteracy does not equal
ignorance. All involved will learn, they will teach one another.
Hence the appropriateness of "Masifundisane" "let us teach one
another.
The campaign will adopt the metaphoric structure of six "brigades"
as our primary form of organisation. We shall name the various
brigades after deceased prominent South Africans. We still need to
consult the families of these heroes and heroines before we make
the names public. Because of the significance of the literacy
campaign, the provincial cabinet took a decision to name the
premier as the campaign commander.
In this regard, the premier will be the chief patron of the
campaign and will be regularly briefed by a Provincial Committee on
Literacy, which will be made up of the Office of the Premier, the
Department of Education and key stakeholders, and chaired by the
MEC for Education, Honourable Ina Cronje.
The Provincial Literacy Committee, through the assistance of a
Provincial Literacy Secretariat which will run the day-to-day
activities of the campaign, will consult various organs of civil
society to ensure maximum participation in the campaign.
The Masifundisane Campaign will proceed on a staged basis, the
first stage beginning in September 2006 and ending in March 2007.
The first stage will largely be a gearing up stage, but will also
target the first 40 000 illiterate adults from age 15
upwards.
In regard to Government departments, I want to issue a directive
that requires them to ensure that by August 2007, there are no
illiterate adults in any of our provincial departments. All
government cadres should be able to read and write. Those
government employees who are literate should volunteer to be tutors
in this regard.
A context-based literacy programme
Mr Speaker, I wish to briefly state my position in regard to the
content of the literacy programme under Masifundisane. The campaign
has adopted the Global Campaign for Education's International
benchmarks on adult literacy (2005), cited in the final report of
the national Ministerial Committee on Literacy June 2006, which
states:
Literacy is about the acquisition and use of reading, writing and
numeric skills and thereby the development of active citizenship,
improved health and livelihoods and gender equality.
This understanding clearly requires us to go beyond merely learning
the alphabet and to locate the word in the world, as it were to
teach literacy in the context of the daily lives of those we are
targeting through our campaign. It requires us to teach the
alphabet in the context of teaching about citizenship and
democracy, gender equality, health, HIV and AIDS, economic
functionality, social security and other key issues.
At the end of the campaign, a person should be able to read basic
texts, including religious texts, storybooks, school reports and
instructions on medicines. They should be able to write a simple
biography of themselves in order to define themselves, other than
being defined by someone else. They should be able to fill forms,
such as social grant forms and bank forms.
Mr Speaker, it is these good tidings that I felt compelled to bring
to the people of Mkhanyakude and the people of KwaZulu-Natal. The
people of our province should see in concrete what it means to be a
developmental province, a province that puts them and their
livelihoods at the centre of everything we do.
As the song writer says:
God's spirit is in my heart. He's sent me to give the good news to
the poor, tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more, tell
blind people that they can see, and set the down-trodden
free.
In the spirit of the Preamble to the Constitution, let us free the
potential of our people. Let KwaZulu-Natal be the first province to
be declared a territory free from illiteracy
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