After a mere thre years, the romantic notion of the ANC/SACP-ruled "New SA" as one of Africa’s outstanding success stories (and one of America’s greatest diplomatic triumphs) is now well and truly kaput. Although this must now be obvious to all, it has been left to the respected SA Institute of Race Relations to state unambiguously, that "wherever you look … the SA state is falling apart." Writing in its house journal. Frontiers of Freedom, the SAIRR’s Parliamentary Affairs Manager, Colin Douglas, lifts the lid on the State’s ongoing "crisis of collapse".

"Many government departemnts, says auditor -general Henry Kleuver don’t even have the capacity to produce basic financial reports. In the government’s estimation, it managed to repatriate less than 5% of the 2 to 4.5 million illegal immigrants in the country last year (and doubtless, many of the deportees are already back).

"A third of ll public prosecutors have resigned in the past two years, and the number of criminal convictions has reached its lowest level in 40 years - in spite of substantial growth in both population and crime rates. A collapse of learning and teaching is reported in state schools - and the number of private schools has grown by 500% in five years.

"State collapse has been in the making for a decade or more. It began in earnest when the grander requirements of apartheid - like forcibly removing millions of pass law offenders and policing thre Group Areas Act - became impossible to sustain.

"This was an excellent foundation for the ANC’s highly successful and unintentionally enduring - campaign to make parts of the country ungovernable. Since 1994 - perhaps surprisingly - state collapse seems to have progressed apace, thanks to a government which is generally more interested in grand plans and ‘transformation ‘ than in the dull practicalities of governing.

"state models like communism and apartheid had to fail spectacularly before their authors and supporters were prepared to revise their ideas fundamentally. The present government does not acknowledge it yet, but its social democratic state model is failing dramatically. Because this government will be in power for a while longer, it is going to have face up tho the crisis sooner or later, and change its thinking substantially."

COLIN DOUGLAS has said what most people would rather keep quiet. Yet, while the mainstream media (led by SATV, outdoing even the old Soviet State TV in its grovel-grovel to the throne) attempts to delude us that everything in SA gets endlessly better, even a mentally challenged half-wit knows that is simply not so, that South Africans have once again been betrayed, none more so than the Blacks, millions of whom have found nothing but misery at the end of the rainbow.

Not even the worst pessimist could have foreseen the fantastic deterioration in our fortunes in Mr Mandela’s botched-up "New SA." On all sides our much-vaunted "new democracy" is at best flawed, at worst totally non-existent, with our speed toward social chaos and behavioural degeneracy accelerating all the time. How and why has so much gone so awry so fast?

The ANC spin doctors have their own unfailing accusatory answer. No matter what goes sour, what new multi-billion cock-up* our grossly overpaid and under-performing politicians perpetrate, they faithfully trot out the same weary old excuse. It is all "the legacy of apartheid."

Parliament chalks up yet more ruinously expensive clangers? "The legacy of apartheid." Health services, education, law and order, the hospitals, the courts, justice, prisons, all implode and explode? "The legacy of apartheid." The gold price collapses and the jobs of perhaps 100 000 miners threatened? "The legacy of apartheid." The
vast and increasing number of criminals now in control? "The legacy of apartheid." The Boks lose a Test? "The legacy of apartheid."

What, one wonders, would the ANC do without "the legacy of apartheid" and Boer bashing? But just when are they going to get to grips with reality? While apartheid certainly left plenty of scar tissue, there’s a lot more to this story than that.

With SA’s destruction now plain for all to see, all euphoria having petered out, when are the comrades going to admit that the party’s over, the joy ride has come to an end, that SA as a country is in liquidation … and that this has far less to do with "the legacy of apartheid" as with the "legacy of revolution."

Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane. In 1984 the ANC was in a bind. Pretoria and Maputo had signed the Nkomati Accord, ANC cadres were unceremoniously shoved out of their bases in both Mozambique and Swaziland. What to do? In a strategy reportedly devised by the KGB in Moscow, Oliver Tambo retaliated with the promise of intensifying the armed struggle inside SA, of shifting away from the "military" option to internal insurrection and "mass action."

Writing in The World Marxist Review, Tambo said the ANC’s plan was "for the seizure of power in SA by the oppressed masses; to take over our country through the terrible but cleansing force of revolution." In other words, SA would be subjected to a pervasive destabilisation of the national society by all means possible, above all, by mindless and unfocussed violence.

Eight years earlier, the stage had been set for just such a scenario, this through the ANC’s lunatic call, "no education before liberation," an outstandingly self-defeating strategy destined to hit Blacks for generations to come. It very successfully destroyed the life-prospects of millions of Black children, many finding there was no education after liberation, either.

Instead of teaching young people the sanctity of law and the importance of education, they told them that not only should they indulge themselves in illegality, but the ANC required that of them. Soon all value restraints were lifted. In the townships teachers were locked out, headmasters and White teachers barbecued, the schools themselves, libraries, laboratories, computer rooms, torched or otherwise destroyed.

Instead of condemning primitive forces, all possible was done to expand them. All was acceptable in the name of "freedom." Brutalised by eight years of revolutionary conflict, by 1984 the so-called "young lions" provided ideal fodder for Tambo’s "make SA ungovernable" call."

As part of the ANC’s "cleansing" doctrine, in the townships howling mobs of savages, chanting "Violence is Golden," set about intimidating and murdering "the pig police," mayors, councillors, "informers" and anti-revolutionaries, often with their families, their cars, animals and all possessions burnt or otherwise destroyed in this tumult of criminal madness.

"The Terror" had come to the townships. It did not stop there. All liberal universities were in uproar. In the fields of education and research overseas academics and institutions were influenced not to assist the apartheid regime in any way whatsoever. Another self-defeating move, another nail in SA’s educational coffin.

Barbarity was both acceptable and relished. Use of the "necklace," publicly sanctioned by such as Winnie Mandela and present Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo, became routine, "street theatre." To defile the dead, buckets of excrement were dumped over the bodies. Flesh was eaten in the belief that the killers would inherit the "powers" of the dead. "Kentucky Fried Chicken" victims - as the "young lions" so sensitively put it - were often taken at random to fill the ANC quota of "a funeral a day."

Decline now runs right across the entire society. Group tensions are intensifying and are likely to increase now that the ANC can no longer buy off the losers with your tax money. Some Blacks at the top are doing well - SA gives every sign of becoming Africa’s latest kleptocracy - but huge numbers are going backwards and are no longer interested in "liberation."

"WE are in an inexorable slide in which the government no longer controls the situation. We have gangsters on one side and vigilantes on the other making war on the streets. Unless they wake up, they must sooner or later be bypassed as legitimate representatives of the people." - Democratic Party leader Tony Leon.

"In appointing Sydney Mufamadi as the Minister of Safety and Security, Mr Mandela managed to tap new and undreamt sources of ineffectiveness" - Labour consultant, Dr Duncan Innes

***

Pertinent comment in a letter to APN from a top Israeli commentator, now living in Quebec, Canada:

"South Africa’s woes, similar to Israel’s are self-inflicted. The most powerful, most advanced and the richest country in Africa chose voluntarily to surrender its hard-won assets to a backward, incompetent and potentially corrupt element. These days, the "Black Revolution" in SA resembles more and more the French Revolution. In their impotence to solve the nation’s problems, the French revolutionary leaders chose to treat the bewildered populace to a series of spectacular executions to sidetrack the public’s attention from the real culprits of the national disaster.

"Nor is there any relief in sight. As the plight of the underprivileged worsens in SA, the Black leadership will be more inclined to blame their self-inflicted wounds on the members of the country’s white minority. This will increase the exodus of both capital and talent, which in turn will exacerbate conditions. The worst is yet to come, especially with the departure of Mandela. He is one of the very few Blacks who know the score but is unwilling to publicly to disclose the truth to his people, and at this stage in his life"

***

"We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tackled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.’ -Hilaire Belloc.

"FOR the Blacks … apartheid will be a pearl without price. It will be the Great Excuse. White rule may have been nasty and brutish, but it disciplined the SA economy and made it rich. SA has for 20 years out-performed every ‘liberated’ state in Africa. Politically correct academics claim White rule held SA back by stifling Black education and advancement. I don’t believe it. Apartheid may have been crude and cruel, but it was no more than an elite entrenching its economic power. The ‘trickle-down’ worked.

"The incomes of Blacks were well above those elsewhere on the continent, which explained the heavy migration of Blacks into SA throughout the apartheid period. As Third World economies go, SA was a thundering success. The massive redistribution of wealth promised by the ANC threatens that success. So a reason for incipient failure must be found in advance. At a recent international conference, SA delegates were told to share their wealth with the rest of Africa, now that the rest of Africa had so generously lifted sanctions. The South Africans should have told the hypocrites of the ‘front-line states’ to get lost. Instead they explained politely that they had to concentrate on ‘remedying the ravages of apartheid.’ The Great Excuse had moved south across the Limpopo.

"President Clinton has promised to play his part in ‘helping the rebuilding of SA.’ The IMF talks of reconstruction. Neither explains what is being rebuilt or to what unrealised design. Britain’s Lady Chalker is dusting off the old Foreign Office line about ‘What Her Majesty’s Government wants to see in SA …" as if what HMG ‘wants’ mattered two hoots. SA needs to be left alone.

"Mr Mandela is human. He cannot admit that in African terms White rule was an economic success. He must behave like Lord Howe in 1979, and claim that he ‘never realised how awful things were’ until he had seen the books. If a school is ill-equipped, a housing estate without sewerage, a factory without orders, a mob unemployed, it will be ‘the legacy of apartheid.’ Every inequality of income, every injustice detected by trade unionist or investigative journalist will be put down to apartheid.

"No matter that White and Black incomes diverge in every country in the world. No matter that race is a fierce class-divider in Brazil and Singapore, in America and India, in Sydney and Brixton; if there is a division in SA, it will be due to apartheid. Mr Mandela, unlike leaders to his north, is not a complete fool. He is a realist. His supporters want the goods. He will need a scapegoat. What nobler scapegoat than apartheid? It jailed him for half his natural life. It oppressed his people and was damned by the whole world. Come on, Mr Clinton, think of apartheid and give us the cash.

"Apartheid was horrible. It acknowledged, albeit crudely, the racial distinctions ordinary people acknowledge. It made the implicit explicit. There was no pretence at a melting pot. Now the explicit must be suppressed, but the legacy of racial frankness will not disappear just because legal apartheid is dead. The new SA is not a raceless community, any more than Britain is a classless one. It will still be run mostly by Whites, and Blacks will still be at the bottom of the ladder. Democracy will give a new tilt to the conflict. But all South Africans will be glad to have in their knapsack the Great Excuse. Apartheid will be a marvellous friend in need." - British political commentator Simon Jenkins, writing in the London Spectator, 7.5.94.

THROUGHOUT history, a government’s first and most crucial task has been, and still is, to ensure the safety and security of its people. To quote Cicero, salu populi suprems est lax … the good of the people is the supreme law. When the alternatives in any society are the safety of the people, or the rights of the lawbreakers, every civilised country opts for the former. SA is the exception to that rule. Here the rights of the victims of crime are totally negated, while those of the perpetrators are repeatedly stressed at the expense of the taxpayer: who is, all too often, also the victim.

Nowhere are the ANC/SACP alliance’s own multi-faceted attacks on the social framework more grimly evidenced than in the breakdown in law and order; the erosion of the justice system and the chaos existing in the so-called "correctional" services. Yet, as our now chronically criminalised system buckles and bends under the onslaught, this same governing alliance has virtually decapitated the police service, outlawed capital and corporal punishment - and persists in the belief that people should be exempt from their actions. What is worse, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and other ministers seek to minimise the crime problem, refuse to accept that crime is indeed out of control.

Published crime statistics for the first three months of this year are hair-raising: 5 683 murders, averaging 65 a day, many so garish in their cruelty that one despairs of a society which can throw up such monsters; 121 bank robberies, or ten a week; 27 000 other robberies, or 300 a day; 3 809 car-jackings, or 42 a day; 23 654 vehicles thefts in addition to hijackings, an average of 262 a day.

Additionally, a rape is reported every 20 minutes, while crime syndicates steal cars to order. Supply a photograph of the make of car you want, and it will be provided in 24 hours. But, it should be emphasised, no one knows the exact crime numbers because many, if not most, crimes are no longer reported. Add the unreported crimes as well, and our difficulties are almost unimaginable in scope.

Attacks on farmers are reaching much the same level as those recorded in the Rhodesian terrorist war. In 1996 there were 468 attacks against farmers, with 109 people murdered. That basically is 936 violent attacks for every 100 000 of the farming population, as opposed to 545 per 100 000 in the cities: almost double. In the period January/March 1997 there was a 53,7% increase in attacks against farmers, the highest increase in KwaZulu/Natal.

Why do we suffer such a crime holocaust? It would be surprising if we did not. From the time of F W de Klerk on, every conceivable incentive has been deployed to encourage rather than thwart the criminal impulse. From the time he took over as Minister of Safety & Security in 1994 Mr Sidney Mufamadi, a former trade union official with, I understand, a Std 7 education, has given a persuasive performance as a man totally out of his depth.

He quickly set about radically restructuring the Police Service, merging many thousands of former MK and APLA "freedom fighters", together with the autonomous forces from the former homelands and independent territories, into a national force. He was also quick to apply affirmative action, in a very hamhanded way.

Among other moves, he closed down 15 police colleges to save money; has had to reopen them in a hurry to train urgently needed recruits to replace the tidal wave of officers departing the force, mostly highly experienced long service officers, with excellent qualifications. This is the area where the most critical loss has occurred. A majority of its best trained men have left the force, either taking early retirement packages or simply resigning in frustration and disillusionment.

Most of those who have gone were men with ten to 30 years experience in crime fighting, men who had passed all the necessary qualification exams … all keenly sought by the private sector. A very large percentage of the police who remain are not qualified to do the job: more worryingly, a huge percentage of the officer corps itself are hopelessly ineffective. Official estimates are that some 70% to 80% of the entire police service is completely ineffective.

Many of the former TBVC police officials, plus many if not most of the former MK and APLA personnel, are semi-literate, or cannot read or write at all, so are unable to make out a docket or fill in a charge sheet. A large percentage don’t have driving licences: a serious problem as some duty shifts are left with no one able to respond to a crime call.

Former MK personnel present particular problems. Most haven’t the faintest idea of policing. Knowing they can’t meet the required standards, they refuse to be trained, yet still demand that they be promoted without training. With so many recruits evidencing a completely wrong attitude towards policing, not dedicated to their work, not viewing crime fighting as part of their daily life, lack of discipline is an enormous problem.

Absenteeism is another crippling factor. Some days as many as 25% of the total staff are off, supposedly sick. At all levels there is a maddening tangle of corruption. Even the training that is given is theoretical and the standards deliberately lowered, so that recruits without even Standard 8 can qualify.

Ill-trained, ill-paid, riddled with corruption, outnumbered by better-equipped, better organised criminals, these represent some of the people now expected to outface immigrant gangs and syndicates from Russia, mainland China, Nigeria, many of them extremely violent: and who, with no fear of the SA legal system, such as it is, operate virtually without impediment.

It will take many years before we again have an effective police force. As a counter-balance, what is required is that communities should start pressuring their town councils to use a system of city police, supplemented by large numbers of volunteers to assist them. This would enable the SAPS to retrain and reorganise the service, and concentrate on serious crime.

APPALLING CONDITIONS

Taxpayer money now used to pay policemen who do everything but policing should rather be spent on modern technology, where advanced camera systems and other forms of electronic detection are used, together with building up an efficient crime intelligence system using modern computer equipment.

Very few people realise the appalling conditions under which those policemen dedicated to their task have to work. In SA last year an average of 70 of each 100 000 people were murdered. Of every 100 000 people, 169 policemen are murdered. In 1996 137 police officers committed suicide. It has become routine for hundreds to commit suicide each year. Many hundreds more become victims of alcohol and even assault their own families. Quite obviously, something is desperately wrong.

Unlike the Defence force, where rehabilitation centres have been set up with extremely well trained medical personnel and psycho-analysts, the police do very little to help rehabilitate those members of the service suffering stress-related illnesses, this though no other profession in the country is exposed to such stress, with the men the constant targets of gunmen, stone throwers, ambushes and shootouts.

Police vehicles are constantly ambushed in the townships, having been lured there by fake calls. In one week recently 11 officers died in ambushes and shoot-outs. Yet no one seems to care. The situation will not improve unless and until the average citizen can mobilise himself into effective organisations and pressure the government and local authorities into reform.

So critical is the collapse in the SA Police Services that Meyer Khan, chairman of SA Breweries and regarded as a managerial genius, has been brought in to sort out police management. That, as Business Day observed, brings some hope to a frightened country: "but makes a troubling statement about the level of management skills in our huge and expensive public service." It is most sincerely to be hoped that he will achieve the desired results.

But, equally, it is obvious that the SAPS cannot fight crime in isolation. Someone at the highest level of government must ensure that other departments, in particular Justice and Correctional Services, be forced to take responsibility for their own lack of efficiency. The whole crime situation is magnified out of all proportion by the failures of these two departments.

JAILS 200% FULL

In some cases, it takes 18 months to bring a case to court, and then it is extremely easy to obtain bail. In one case, a man was arrested seven times for armed robbery and given bail on each occasion: this before the defendant had even appeared on the first charge. The whole legislative system is clogged with political crimes, and bogged down with petty crimes. Yet the relevant department won’t even consider reforms like night courts: so facilities, stretched to breaking point, are still not utilised to the maximum.

Another huge problem here is the extraordinary leniency of the courts: new liberties for criminal defendants have been elaborated at every turn. It must be a rare criminal in SA these days who cannot calculate that, even if caught,,and no matter how heinous the crime,he can soon enough regain his freedom. The psychological result is to replace the idea of certain punishment with the contrary idea of certain escape.

"If you want to change things, campaign and protest and do not rest until your voice is heard. If you do nothing then you are just a silent part of the evil which is corrupting and destroying our world. What did you do in 1996 to fight cruelty and injustice? And, more important, what are you doing in 1997?" - Comment by famed author Dr Vernon Coleman, and quoted by premier financial consultant, Harry Schultz in his HSL Report, 13 Boulevard Princesse Charlotte, Le Victoria, Bloc B, MC 98000, Monaco.

It is claimed that until economic depression is alleviated, crime will continue. But it is a fact that during the greatest economic depression the West has ever known in the 1930s, there was hardly any crime. This has been attributed, in part, to the last phases of Victorian religious and moral values, but there was also corporal punishment and the cat o’nine tails for robbery with violence - the only form of punishment feared by the tough, violent criminal - as well as the death penalty.

APART from crime, one of the greatest areas of calamity under ANC social engineering is education. First disaster came with Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu’s over-hasty, ill-judged "rationalisation" campaign, resulting in some 12 000 teachers accepting voluntary retrenchment packages last year, cutting like a scythe through the ranks of experienced teachers.

Now he is busy implementing the highly contentious "do your own thing" US-style system known as "Outcomes-Based Education," widely blamed for the stunning failure of present-day American education. We now quote an article sent to us by a prominent Durban academic, Duncan du Bois, first published in The Natal Witness earlier this month:

A lack of capacity and resources is being cited as the reason why the implementation of Curriculum 2005, otherwise known as Outcomes-Based Education, could be delayed. But if the various documents supplied by Sibusiso Bengu’s education ministry on the subject are studied, it becomes apparent that there are far more serious reasons why the implementation of OBE should be postponed - indefinitely.

Subtitled "lifelong learning for the 21st century", Outcomes-Based Education will equip learners with "the knowledge, competencies and orientation needed for success after they leave school", states Minister Bengu in his introductory remarks. This, he claims, will shift from being content-bound to being outcomes-based. "It will also foster learning which encompasses a culture of human rights, multi-lingualism, multi-culturalism and sensitivity to the values of reconciliation and nation-building," he states. By doing these things he claims that SA will be able "to compete internationally."

Besides the fact that SA’s education system has been superior to most overseas systems, particularly that of the US, and that our graduates have more than held their own in this regard, the basic motivation for OBE is clearly political and not educational. The usual ANC terms - "old", "divided", "stereotyped", "privileged" - are bandied about. In his attempt to confront the incisive criticism levelled at OBE by Sunday Times columnist Stephen Mulholland, Bengu is not only evasive but has the gall to dismiss these criticisms as "an ideological assault on the new path for our country" (Sunday Times, June 15). He carried his diatribe further by branding opponents of OBE as "reactionaries" (Daily News, 30.6.97). While piously proclaiming democracy and democratic intentions, when it comes to constructive criticisms of their schemes Bengu and his comrades have difficulty in concealing their totalitarian breeding and background. "I am absolutely determined to follow through with the implementation of Curriculum 2005," he stated in the Times on June 15. In the Daily News he said he had "no sympathy" and did not take kindly to those who felt Curriculum 2005 was being rushed.

It is true that the existing education system was subject to ideological and political manipulation in the past. Thus in seeking to bring about improvements such motives and machinations should not be repeated. However, by his political fulminations Bengu has ensured that constructive criticisms of OBE are simply going to be brushed aside as "reactionary" or - the ANC’s favourite label - "racist". This is most unfortunate and exposes, once again, the hollowness of the much-vaunted democratic order of the "New SA". Nonetheless, while there is a free press it is vital that the tenets and premises of OBE be fully exposed so that Bengu and his fellow-travellers are engulfed by a groundswell of pedagogic resistance.

The fundamental shift which Bengu seeks to implement is highlighted in the Curriculum 2005 document by a table of 10 comparisons between the "old" and the OBE systems. In terms of OBE learners will become "active" rather than "passive". There will be no exams but rather "on-going assessments"; rote learning will be replaced by critical thinking; content-based syllabuses will be scrapped in favour of the "integration of knowledge" and "relevant real-life situations". Rigid syllabuses will be traded for flexible learner programmes.

But these will serve only as guidelines, the way being clear for teacher innovation and creativity. Teachers will become "facilitators" rather than "transmitters" of learning. Learners will take responsibility for learning while teachers ensure that no opportunity is lost to "affirm the worth" of the learners. Whereas previously teachers set the framework of what was to be achieved, OBE decrees that that is for the learner to determine - he is the arbiter of the "outcome". Rigid time frames imposed by the "old" system are to be replaced by flexible time frames where the learners work at their own pace. The final point of contrast declares that all and sundry should have input in determining the curriculum.

Further for the record, eight different learning areas are identified: communication and literacy; numeracy; human and social sciences; natural sciences; arts and culture; economic and management sciences; life orientation and technology. According to the National Qualifications Framework, all forms of learning, irrespective of settings - formal or informal - are to be recognised. Credits and qualifications may be freely transferred from one learning situation to another regardless of the age of learner or their level of education. In short, the new direction is to be "people-centred".

Besides criticisms of philosophy, the major categories of criticism concern implementation, assessment and the role of the teacher. The first thing that must be called into question is that of "standards". If there are to be no exams or uniformity in assessment, then it becomes impossible to quantify and to qualify levels of skills and expertise. If syllabuses are loose and flexible then skills in subjects like maths, science and computer studies which rely on cumulative progress will be flawed and retarded.

Moreover, such subjects have to be taught; pupils cannot simply "take responsibility for learning" as OBE proposes. It is self-deluding to think that there can be "equality of outcome" between learning processes that take place in settings as diverse as rural or township schools and established First World colleges. It is absurd to think that an education system which disdains time frames and regimen can prepare youngsters for a world which adheres unmercifully to deadlines, routines and deliveries.

Life places a premium on diligence, achievement and competition. Yet according to OBE, assessment does not mean passing or failing. It is "progress measured against outcomes rather than the learner’s own performance". Criteria called "range statements" provide "direction but allow for multiple learning strategies, flexibility in the choice and variety of assessment methods". Whatever the vagaries of all that might mean, OBE furthermore requires that assessment be "multi-dimensional" with emphasis on "a performance context - an actual demonstration." To cap it all, emphasis is on group assessment rather than the individual with even the peer group having a say in the progress. Quite obviously the value of such an "assessment" in terms of standards of any sort boils down to just one word - worthless. And it all dissolves into utter absurdity when one considers that in the real world the assessment of a job application is made per individual not per group.

The position of the teacher in the OBE system is best summed up by the designation to which he is relegated - that of a "facilitator". Whatever is going on, he or she must simply go with the flow, facilitate the process and, presumably, lend some kind of respectability to it. Amazingly at one point in the OBE documentation the compilers say that teachers should "not feel threatened". Yet they would be compelled to "re-assess" a learner’s rating if he was dissatisfied with it - at the learner’s own time and convenience, of course. Teachers would have to accept the input of the community as to syllabus guidelines and of the body of learners in drafting assessments. Under such circumstances personal professional qualifications and training become meaningless. Indeed teaching itself becomes debased.

Education is an onward transmission of norms, skills and values that have to be imparted and instilled if civilisation and technology are to be perpetuated. This cannot be left to chance or some kind of timeless, unstructured, haphazard process. It demands discipline and an adherence to deadlines. The very essence of concentration requires purpose, energy and urgency. The essence of failure is that it is part of the process of growth and achievement. This is the proven, cumulative experience of centuries which the proponents of OBE brazenly disregard.

The way to improve the system and quality of education lies in retaining that which is sound and proven in the existing system while simultaneously adapting and extending it to meet new challenges and circumstances. Thus, like socialism, Outcomes-Based Education needs to be consigned to the dustbin.

"THROUGHOUT history, rulers and court intellectuals have aspired to use the educational system to shape their nations. The model was set out by Plato in The Republic and was constructed most faithfully in Soviet Russia, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. One can see how irresistible a vehicle the schools would be to any social engineer. They represent a unique opportunity to mould future citizens early in life, to instil in them the proper reverence for the ruling culture and to be obedient and obeisant taxpayers and soldiers. Plato’s model for his own utopian Republic was ancient Sparta, where children were taken from their parents during infancy and moulded into soldiers for the militaristic Spartan society. The Platonic model was embraced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the intellectual architects of the French Revolution. Rousseau taught that the state was ‘the common mother of all her citizens,’ and maintained that ‘instead of saying that civil society is derived from parental authority, we ought rather to say that the latter derives from the former’ - in other words, that parents received a limited child-rearing mandate from the state. This totalitarian concept was embraced by the leaders of revolutionary France. Bertrand Barere, a member of the revolutionary Committee on Public Safety, instructed his colleagues that ‘children belong to the general family, to the Republic, before belonging to private families." - US academic Sheldon Richman, in his book Separating School and State.

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WHILE many in the ANC hierarchy have deliberately instituted policies - affirmative action high among them - to drive out job creators, they have at the same time shown a stubborn reluctance to crack down on illegal aliens. Under the ANC, SA today offers possibly the world’s most hospitable laws of asylum. Pretext for this failure to act is that the ANC owes "a moral debt" to its African and other "solidarity partners" who gave its cadres sanctuary during "the struggle."

That is a bogus argument. Illegal aliens play a vital role in this country’s fast-accelerating disaster. About half of all South Africans today have no formal job. The vast majority of those who have entered the country illegally are not political refugees, but work seekers, most of them unskilled, poorly if at all educated, possessing few if any marketable skills, providing very little that South Africans cannot do for themselves.

In the circumstances, the ANC owes a great moral debt to its own citizens, this by removing this imported competition for all-too-scarce jobs. Is it wise or fair to expose SA’s own unskilled or semi-skilled workers to such intensive wage pressure?

Just how many illegals are there in the country? If they are truthful, no one has the faintest idea. Any figures given are a thumbsuck. The very flakey census report recently published claims that reported numbers of illegals are "vastly exaggerated." The census does not give any estimate of illegals, but its experts "calculate" the number at between 250 000 and 400 000.

The Central Statistical Service puts the numbers much lower. Pali Lehola, chief director of demography, says their investigation before the census was taken "made it clear . . . immigrants were mainly transient." He estimates that no more than 100 000 illegals live in Gauteng, the favourite dumping ground. I suggest that such estimates are a deliberate attempt to disguise the problem, are downright fraudulent.

Home Affairs Minister, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, estimates that there are between 2,5- and 4,1 million illegals in the country. Ivan Lambinon, Deputy-Director General, Home Affairs, concurs but warns: "It’s not exactly a situation where people stand up to be counted." The SA Police estimate the numbers at between 4- to 8 million. The SA Defence Force places the figure at 8,5 million.

On my research, I believe these figures too to be misleading. What I have not seen spelt out anywhere in this debate is that we should first define what is legal and what is illegal. Here we must look at two sets of figures: those still recognised as aliens and the huge percentage who are already listed as SA citizens.

Vast numbers - perhaps millions - and I do not exaggerate - of Mozambican Shangaans gained SA citizenship through the old Gazankulu authorities. Equally hundreds of thousands of Ndebele from Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, obtained citizenship through the old Kwandebele regional authority. Great numbers of Basuto from Lesotho were registered as SA citizens at QwaQwa. There was a particular agenda here. QwaQwa in the old SA hoped to form a unified state with Lesotho but wanted to ensure it possessed a bigger population than Lesotho.

Much the same thinking obtained in Bophutha-
tswana, which encouraged citizens of Botswana to apply for SA citizenship under its authority in the hope of one day linking up and creating a Tswana state. Several million foreigners from neighbouring states became SA citizens in this way and are responsible for what is termed "chain migration," bringing in wives and children to settle with them.

There are, of course, also a good few hundred thousand Portuguese who fled to SA after the outbreak of terrorist war in Angola and Mozambique and even Portuguese terrorists in the Far East. Most have become good, productive SA citizens, but certain families retain Portuguese citizenship. They would be registered as legal aliens.

Throughout the last century or so there has been massive and free movement into SA from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, mostly for work on the mines or on SA farms. The current swamping has simply speeded up the process. Even today SA has the reputation of possessing great riches, of Egoli (Johannesburg) being a city paved in gold, of the country generally offering a far brighter future than anything they could possibly imagine in their own miserably poor, depressed states.

South Africans visiting other African states return with alarming reports. One such visitor says that wherever he went in Central Africa, his goodbye to new-found friends always met with the reply: "See you soon in SA . . . the impression you carry away is that they are all on their way down to SA." In the face of that, the ANC needs to ask itself some pragmatic questions:

*Has the presence of many of these illegals been a blessing or a curse?

*Do illegals commit a disproportionate amount of crime?

*Are high levels of such immigration, legal or illegal, of any economic or political value?

In answer, we have said it before and now say it again: unrestrained, unlimited immigration can destroy a country as surely as armed invasion. The untold millions of foreigners now resident in SA place an intolerable strain on education, health services, housing, and the criminal justice system. The huge squatter cities that now deface our landscape not only massively destroy the environment but, insanitary and overcrowded, represent a health powder keg.

Combined with the pervasive and chronic refusal of millions of South Africans to pay for any municipal services, their TV licences, even their train fares, this places enormous strains on tax- and ratepayers who do meet their commitments. Forcing taxpayers to bear the costs of educating, housing, hospitalisation, health services and all the rest for those with no right to be in the country is fast helping SA down the road to ruin.

There is no question that illegals are disproportionately responsible for many social problems. In particular, they bring a sizeable criminal contingent with them. They contribute immeasurably to drug running, prostitution, gun trafficking, hijacking and armed robbery. In 1944 12 403 illegals were arrested on charges of serious criminal offences, including rape, murder and weapons smuggling from Angola and Mozambique.

An estimated 75% of Nigerians in the country are involved in organised crime, credit card fraud, insurance fraud and drugs. According to information given to Parliament (Citizen, 4.3.97) more than 80% of suspects appearing in the Johannesburg courts on drug charges are Nigerians, with cocaine involved in more than 75% of the cases.

Crossing the SA borders is a kid’s game. Right along SA’s 7 000 km borders, the country is wide open. All airports, ports and border crossings are poorly manned, the land borders especially virtually unpoliced. Where there is defensive electrified fencing, the ANC will not allow it to be switched on to "lethal mode." Nothing short of that is likely to avert the onrushing disaster.

Mozambique is a classic example of a state transferring a large part of its population to SA. From the illegals point of view, that is understandable. Mozambique is listed as having the world’s lowest per capita GNP. The UN lists SA’s per capital income as US$2 900. It is not clear what year that is based on, but if it is anything like correct then on average SA citizens are 36 times richer than Mozambicans.

Last year 180 713 illegals were removed from SA. Tracing each illegal immigrant, detaining them for some weeks, providing them with food and necessities, eventually deporting them reportedly costs the SA taxpayer in the region of R30 000 per alien. Total costs then must run into billions of rand . . . and a goodly proportion of them are back in the country within 24 hours.

Not surprisingly, most SA Blacks are outraged by the flow of illegals and demand that it be stopped. It is time for ANC immigrant sympathisers to stop emoting and start thinking.

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EARLIER this year the ANC published a booklet, The Rise and Fall of Bantu Holomisa, researched and compiled by SACP member Jeremy Cronin. Widely distributed here and overseas, it was aimed at cutting the maverick politician axed by Nelson Mandela down to size, smearing him as an apartheid agent. It was not the ANC’s smartest move.

Predictably, the man whom even the pro-ANC Johannesburg Star admits has a solid reputation as a crusader against corruption and other excess in government has replied with his own accusatory publication, Comrades in Corruption. It does little to reinforce the reputation of the saintly Mandela, hitting hard at elitist ANC politics, corruption, sleaze, incompetence, suspicious freebies, kickbacks and cronyism. Points from the main body of his attack:

**A party "which is reportedly R41 million in the red and closing its regional offices because of dwindling membership and empty coffers can ill-afford to waste its financial resources printing this glossy booklet. Instead of embarking on this huge waste, would it not have been better to pay the salaries of those now being retrenched?"

**The booklet "has confirmed my suspicions that the ANC leadership is moving towards a one-party dictatorship. I am demonised . . . as a dissident, a populist, a demagogue, a villain, a demon, a fiend, a monster, a turncoat, a chameleon and even a treacherous serpent whose head must be crushed."

**The ANC is ". . . cogniscent that pre-election euphoria of a liberation movement ascending to power has virtually subsided and been supplanted by appalling voter apathy and disillusion. Voters throughout the country seriously question the integrity of ANC leaders who made elections promises that reverberated throughout SA."

**The "luxurious trappings and cosy seats of power have diverted ANC attention from preoccupation with apartheid imbalances and backlogs to the amassing of personal power and wealth. They endow themselves in every conceivable way with the abundant riches so easily available, to the utter disgust of the weak and poor. They flaunt their newly-acquired power in the shape of flashy executive cars and mansions in the best suburbs of our First World cities, while millions of our people wallow in seas of poverty and famine."

**There are "many contradictions within the ANC leadership. Personal grandeur and self-aggrandisement are the order of the day. They have only been in power since May 1994, but already some are multi-millionaires and have bonds worth millions of rand. Where do these leaders derive these vast sources of wealth?"

**It is "an open secret that from the 1994 ANC Conference until my expulsion from the organisation (July 1996) no financial statement has even been ready for tabling at conferences or meetings. The truth is that millions of rand cannot be accounted for, the books therefore cannot be balanced. My advice to the delegates to the ANC’s December conference is that they should demand every available financial statement of the ANC’s London account. Failing a satisfactory response, they should solicit the assistance of the Reserve Bank, in a position to make informed findings and trace recipients of funds from the London account."

**We read daily "of the boundless graft in the provincial and national government under ANC leadership. Billions of rand have gone down the drain and cannot be accounted for. A good example is the ± R2 billion spent on consultants, this while the administration deteriorates all the time. The question is: do these ANC leaders really engage consultants, or are there some bogus consultants to whom funds are paid and in turn channelled back to the coffers of the organisation or elsewhere?"

**The best civil servants "have been bribed to quit the government service in a crazy bid to pave the way for ANC unemployed loyalists and pals. Consequence of this ill-considered move is the visible lack of delivery and baffling levels of incompetence. This is the extremism of corruption: the deliberate appointment of pals to key, well-paying government jobs, people with no track record in administration or the necessary skills or experience."

**Commissions of Inquiry . . . "should immediately attend to the cesspool of corruption that has occurred under the ANC government since 1994."

**The massive retrenchment "of experienced civil servants has provided a fertile ground for the spread of corrupt practices . . . euphemistically alluded to as ‘affirmative action’ when they try to disguise the appointment of their friends and relatives. As far as I know there are no set standards or policies guiding the implementation of this so-called affirmative action."

**How incompetent appointees have drained state coffers "was well illustrated in the Audit Report of the North West Province, released 29.5.97. Premier Molefe’s office was unable to produce back-up documentation for R3,5 million spent. No indication of tender board approval was obtained for an R18 million RDP project. In one department, Transport and Civil Aviation, vouchers could not be produced for expenditure of R135 million, 60% of its total spending. Unauthorised spending in the whole administration totalled R367,3 million."

**In the Eastern Cape, a tender "was corruptly awarded to Balraz-Pensecure whose quote was R164 million more than that of other tenders. This had to be overturned by a court of law. At what cost?"

**In the Mpumalanga Province, "notorious for unbridled levels of graft, R185 million was awarded to Motheo Construction, an unregistered company headed by a pal of a national housing minister."

**The "ANC leadership should bow its head in shame. It is high time the nation became more vigilant regarding the role played by spouses, immediate family and friends of the ANC elite and its often dubious heads."

**If "this looting spree cannot be stopped I fear that by 1999 more billions will have gone down the drain. Remember the old German saying, ‘troughs have changed, but the pigs remain the same.’ If the SA electorate is deluded into voting the ANC into power again in 1999, the country will be placed firmly and irrevocably on the path to financial ruin and economic destruction. The warning signals are there for all to see."

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SOUTH Africans are having a very uneasy time, watching the US raise its war on gold to new levels. Latest round is advice, under the imprimatur of the US Federal Reserve, to governments holding gold reserves (calculated at 1,1 billion ounces at the end of last year, one-fifth of total stocks) to sell and use the capital for investment. Australia has already burnt its fingers doing just that.

The US, of course, traditionally wants no restraints on the value or its ability politically to manipulate its currency. Asian states are clearly not impressed with this latest advice. Speaking in New York recently, Japanese Prime Minister Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto created a panic in financial circles when he said that, as in the past when there had been disputes over trade or the level of the Yen to the $, Japan had been tempted to sell large volumes of US Treasury bonds (6.68% yield). He also said: "I hope the US will maintain exchange rates stability so that we will not succumb to selling Treasury bills and switch our foreign reserves to gold.." (APN italics).

The significance of this remark was not lost on US officials or the stock market which posted a 192 point drop, the second largest point drop in history. Japan holds $290 billion in US T-bonds, while China holds $52 billion of US debt, a very invidious position for Washington. Unless foreign nations, especially the Asian financial giants, continue to buy US debt, the federal government cannot continue to finance its deficit - a whopping $5 141 trillion as at 2 . 7.97.

US investment advisor, Franklin Sanders, publisher of The Moneychanger, gives a hint of what the Japanese may be threatening: "To upset the Rube Goldberg (inept) scheme of the international monetary system, perhaps replacing it with gold. If the Japanese, or anyone else, begin to shift reserves from US Treasuries to gold, overnight gold will head for the moon." Franklin observes that the oddest happening in the Hashimoto drama was that the Wall Street Journal materially altered his statement.

They quoted Hashimoto as saying: "We hope the US will engage in efforts to maintain foreign exchange stability, so we don’t have to sell off Treasury bills." That’s it. No little string of stops to indicate something omitted, no mention of his threat to buy gold. But Reuters reported "to sell off Treasury bills and switch our foreign reserves to gold." Franklin adds: "The WSJ’s extraordinary journalism didn’t stop there. The article heavily stressed the long term insignificance of Hashimoto’s remarks, and that ‘Japanese officials began backpeddling fiercely, arguing that Mr Hashimoto hadn’t meant to imply that any kind of sale of US securities was about to take place.’

"The rest of the article trod the same path, furiously down-playing the real significance of Hashimoto’s threat. Slanted journalism won’t change the facts. The US government and indirectly the US economy depend on the willingness of foreigners to keep on buying US government debt. When they stop, the US economy hits the wall, US interest rates shoot skyward and the $ and the stock market hit the dirt."

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AN extraordinary, deeply depressing, letter this week from a (now former!) Californian subscriber: "I simply do not understand your obsession with poverty-stricken Afrikaner children. Their plight leaves me cold. I don’t want to read any more about them. In any event, I no longer believe what you write. SA is a wealthy country. What you report about SA’s collapse is entirely contradicted by The New York Times. I prefer to believe their version. I will not be renewing my subscription."

That, as you may suppose, absolutely flattened me. Sure the NYT paints a rosy picture of the "New SA." SA was destroyed by the US/New World Order. The NYT is part of that set-up. It is not going to spell out to the world the resulting ruin. But, at my lowest point, Hennie Kok - who carries the main burden of the work of Mission Rescue, trying to feed and clothe all our little charges - arrived to take me to a small church in Vrededorp. Here we were to meet Hansie van Loggerenberg, Director of Ephesians Ministries, who runs a six-day a week food kitchen there.

This is a huge change in life style for Hansie. In earlier years he was a musician, a compeer of Al Debbo, touring the country, recording and broadcasting. But then he travelled the Damascus Road, realising that there was a lot of pain and suffering out there, that if he was to justify his life, he should try to do something about it. Now he devotes himself to trying to ease the heavy burdens inflicted on so many South Africans, more often than not through no fault of their own. As he points out, White poverty in Johannesburg is now reaching critical mass. Huge unemployment is compounded by the influx of thousands of people from the rural areas, drawn by the hope that they can find work here.