The reasoning of the Statistician-General, Dr Pali Lehohla as to why the success rate of black students at university level is now worse than in the 1980s beggars belief (Daily News, January 24).
Lehohla stated that in the 1980s for every successful black tertiary student, there were 1,2 successful white students. But instead of that ratio improving after 22 years of ANC rule, Lehohla has found that the black tertiary pass rate has declined statistically to one successful black student for every six successful white students.
In accounting for this dismal state of affairs, Lehohla blames apartheid and the Bantu Education Act introduced by Dr Verwoerd in 1959. For an official who otherwise is quite competent as a statistician, such reasoning is laughable. For if the education blacks received under apartheid was so inferior, how does he explain that their university pass rate was way better under apartheid than it is now since liberation?
The poor tertiary success rate of students of all races is the result of the ANC government’s meddling in education curricula. In place of the system they inherited in 1994, they substituted multiple failed versions of Outcomes-Based Education (OBE), packaged off good teachers, closed teachers’ training colleges and amalgamated certain university campuses.
That is the legacy which is now bearing spoiled fruit. Apartheid has nothing to do with it.
Besides, the majority of students at university now were born since 1994.
Published in The Daily News
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