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The African National Congress Youth League (Young Lions) and the Young Communist League of South Africa (Ufasimba) in the province of Gauteng jointly welcome the release of 2009 Grade 12 results.

These results indeed constitute qualitative development!

The ANCYL and the YCLSA would like to congratulate all learners who have passed and who achieved university endorsements. In particular in our province of Gauteng there are learners who have performed exceptionally well. We are excited by the achievements of the 84 learners who superbly achieved eight distinctions and Tiega Alberts, the province's top achiever who got 10 distinctions. We salute and welcome their performance. Their performance should serve as an inspirational model and benchmark for all learners to enrol for Grade 12 in the province this year 2010. This includes learners who have not made it. We call on all those learners who did not make it to improve their results in the interests of safeguarding their future and prosperity.


We are however disappointed with the performance drop rate from 76.4 percent in 2008 to 71.8 percent in 2009. We commit ourselves to work together with all interested bodies in education, from the provincial department of education, trade unions, student formations COSAS and SASCO, school governing bodies as part of correcting this downturn in performance.

We note the many challenges faced by learners from working class and poor areas in the province. The vast majority of learners from working class and poor households and communities have had to pen down the future whilst simultaneously struggling with their communities for access to resources that will enable their material reproduction. Despite all the important progress our country achieved since 1994 democratic breakthrough, the community protests experienced in many parts of the province are part of indicators that the working class and the poor continue to be haunted by lack of adequate facilities that also define learning environment in respective communities.

We also highlight the fact that, Grade 12 examinations like all other school examinations are still written in the context of racially differentiated schools. We celebrate those top achievers who come from historically disadvantaged communities. Children in township and rural communities are still subjected to learning under the conditions marked by infrastructure backlogs, insufficient learning resources and inadequate academic support.

The ANCYL and the YCLSA also note that institutions of further and higher learning remain citadels of class, racial and gender privilege. We are urgently waiting for the findings and recommendations of the Ministerial Review Committee on the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). The YCLSA and the ANCYL will jointly embark on a provincial campaign aimed at addressing the immediate challenges in working class schools and the crisis of education being made a commodity. In this regard we shall be guided by ANC 52nd National Conference resolutions on making quality education free to the first university degree as well as the ANC-led alliance 2009 electoral manifesto to expand non-fee paying schools and school feeding schemes.

We congratulate the Gauteng Department of Education for the 720 bursaries for the top achievers. The good about these bursaries came as an announcement by the province's education MEC comrade Barbara Creecy during the official ceremony of the unveiling of the 2009 Grade 12 results in Johannesburg, today Wednesday 7 January 2010.

As the YCLSA and the ANCYL we call on the private sector which expropriates the surplus value created by the working class to redirect this money to education by offering bursaries. Exploitation of the working class and its inseparable consequent inequality remain our key points of motivation why we shall continue our joint campaign for the transfer to the people as a whole of ownership of the means of production, control of the production process and surplus created by workers during production. We are aware that this would at any instance require guarding against unintended consequences including potential retrogressions such as re-privatisation. We commit to work together in combating any such tendencies in whatever form they would seek to manifest themselves. Our country has huge resources, but unfortunately these are largely used for private wealth accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Were these resources used for important necessities such as education our country will be prosperous.

The YCLSA in the province will be launching it annual programme, the Joe Slovo Right to Learn Campaign as part of encouraging learners to go to school and also to deal with the bottlenecks and frustrations faced by both parents and teachers during the first days of school re-opening.

A detailed programme will be unveiled by the leadership of the YCLSA and the schools to be visited in conjunction with our allies in the education alliance, namely SADTU, COSAS and SASCO.