Schools in harm’s way

AS THE 45th commemoration of the June 16, 1976, student uprisings approaches on Wednesday, those still in school find themselves confronted with a new enemy – Covid-19.

Unlike their forebears of 1976, modern-day pupils do not have to run the gauntlet of a bloodthirsty ogre bent on imposing his language on them. But, the new foe is just as ferocious.

It is numbing to keep up with Covid-19 infections. By Friday, the country posted 8 020 new cases over a 24-hour cycle, tallying a seven-day average of 6 295 new infections.

This is as deadly as the apartheid bullets that the likes of Tsietsi Mashinini, Kgotso Seatlholo, Sibongile Mkhabela, et al, had to run from under the past racist regime.

What compounds the problem even more is Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga, who is callously bold enough to admit that her department “does not have any plans at the moment to close schools”.

Perhaps the Honourable Minister should go the whole hog and confess that her department has no plans at all regarding how to run schools properly and that our pupils, similar to those who came before them, should take matters into their own hands.

In 1976, young people led from the front. They did not wait for a bureaucracy at sixes and sevens apropos their education and fate. Nothing stops the Class of 2021 from doing the same.

The minister said on a site visit to schools in Limpopo, this past week, that it was only the parents who could decide whether or not their children went to school.

You do not have to be very familiar with the school yard activism of 1976 to know that the parents then also wanted their children inside the classroom to learn in a colonial language imposed on them.

The children stood their ground and said “No”; a reverberating “No!” that touched all parts of the country.

One need not heed the populist politicking of Julius Malema to ascertain that the clueless Motshekga wants to offer the children as the proverbial sacrificial lambs.

The coronavirus is a raging inferno that swallows any human detritus it is fed.

The boast by Minister Motshekga that the classes will be at full capacity is folly, flying in the face of all scientific convention.

Wake up, Angie!