MATHATHA TSEDU

I recently had reason to spend time at home in Tshavhalovhedzi village, in the hinterlands of Limpopo.

It is a fairly well-developed village, near a tarred main road that connects the N1 to Thohoyandou. It has a primary school, established in the 1960s, and a secondary school. You can easily walk to Siloam Hospital, less than a kilometre away, depending on where you live in the village.

Residents have built big, strong brick and mortar houses, each one electrified, and I would hazard a guess that about 30% have infrastructure for running water and sewage in the house.

The infrastructure for this supply of water was laid during the old Venda Bantustan regime. Most times these days there is no water in the communal taps in the streets, which have been vandalised by those hunting for scrap metal to sell.

So Tshavhalovhedzi is a rural area, but not rural-rural, if you get my drift. Once the local Sendedza Primary School was established, all kids went there, except for the higher grades that were not provided for then. For those classes kids either went to Nzhelele Primary or Siloam. And everyone walked to school.

You don’t wake up in this sort of crisis; it is not an event, it is a process that is allowed to develop over time until it explodes, as it also did in Gauteng, where TV cameras brought the full import to our living rooms

So this is where I was just over a week ago, and it was midweek. I was struck by kids playing in the streets and stopped to ask why they were not at school. It turned out they were told by their teachers not to come because there was no scholar transport available that week. This was because the transport providers had not been paid for several months.

There are two problems with this. First, why weren’t they paid? Aren’t there state officials whose job it is to process invoices and ensure the finance section pays on time, just as their own salaries are paid on time?

You don’t wake up in this sort of crisis; it is not an event, it is a process that is allowed to develop over time until it explodes, as it also did in Gauteng, where TV cameras brought the full import to our living rooms.

The kids played in the dusty streets, and later that evening President Matamela Ramaphosa spoke to the nation from parliament, admonishing officials who precipitated the water crisis in Joburg in particular and promising to have city managers criminally charged.

Will this clampdown extend to the officials who fail to pay scholar transport owners on time? Or other suppliers to the health department who also go for months with unpaid invoices?

Second, to go back to the children in my street, these days every village or community has a primary school within walking distance. Why are the kids shunted around in unsafe vans and half trucks to faraway schools when there are primary schools within walking distance?

Should government encourage this or enforce rules about local schooling? Except where there are reasons for the long-distance travelling, such as special schooling or specialised subjects.

If Limpopo education MEC Mavhungu Ramakhanya and her counterpart Matome Chiloane in Gauteng were to take a leaf from Jackson’s illustrious life and lessons, they would ensure that their officials did what they were paid to do without precipitating a crisis where kids cannot get to school. But even more importantly, they would minimise the need for unsafe travel by schoolchildren that makes for horror headlines each week

The late African American civil rights leader who passed away this week, Rev Jesse Jackson, spoke of the triple E’s that he said should guide black people’s development in his country. These were Ethnic, Ethical and Excellence.

He called for pride in ethnic identity through being proudly black. This, he said back in the 1970s, manifested itself through Afro hairstyles and other black dress. He called for ethical behaviour among people and leaders at all times and said they should show compassion to each other and those they led.

He also said it was only excellence in whatever one did that would bring pride and joy and respect, even from those who hated you. He gave the example of boxer Muhammad Ali and said when Ali embraced Islam and ditched the slave name, Cassius Clay, and refused to be drafted into the army to fight in Vietnam, he was stripped of all his titles and even the licence to box.

Ali did not crumble under that weight; he stood stoically and ethically and fought until he got his licence back and excelled in the ring again. That brought him respect, Jackson said.

Jackson’s lesson is still relevant to us today. If Limpopo education MEC Mavhungu Ramakhanya and her counterpart Matome Chiloane in Gauteng were to take a leaf from Jackson’s illustrious life and lessons, they would ensure that their officials did what they were paid to do without precipitating a crisis where kids cannot get to school.

But even more importantly, they would minimise the need for unsafe travel by schoolchildren that makes for horror headlines each week.

• Tsedu is a former editor of the Sunday Times