Our friend Richard Wilkinson has written a very important essay on this excellent, and equally important, website about the proposed new history curriculum put forward by the Minister of Basic Education, and recently elected Democratic Alliance (DA) deputy federal chairperson, Siviwe Gwarube.

A critical extract from that essay is this, “[The problem with the proposed curriculum is] not so much what is taught but rather how it is taught… the ideological framing of the revised content… [the curriculum] interprets knowledge through the lenses of power, oppression and resistance, often drawing on post-colonial and Marxist traditions… By the senior grades, this framing becomes more explicit. Learners are introduced to competing ‘theoretical perspectives’, including Marxist interpretations, and are asked to engage with concepts such as racial capitalism and the ‘National Question’.”

The practical implications for a child exposed to this stuff can be understood in this question drawn from the curriculum, “Do you agree that South Africa has attained political freedom but that economic inequalities have remained unchanged and the struggle continues for economic freedom?”

As Wilkinson correctly says, “This reads like something out of the [Economic Freedom Fighter’s] election manifesto. This is not simply the presentation of competing viewpoints. No mention is made of whether contemporary policies might be the cause of the poverty and inequality which afflicts South Africa. Instead, what we see is the embedding of a particular intellectual and political framework within the syllabus itself.”

The DA has embarrassed itself trying to explain that their minister had no choice but to publish the curriculum given the costs involved in creating it. Nonsense. But even if that were true, why has the minister not said that, while stating her firm opposition to such ideological indoctrination of children? What is the point of having the DA in the government if its objectives are to administer policies crafted by the African National Congress (ANC), irrespective of whether these are good for the country or not?

Under pressure, the minister has further sought to suggest that her intent was to stimulate an interesting debate. Okay… we will bite. If that is true, where is the DA’s proposed alternative history curriculum? Does it have one? If not, what is the debate it refers to about? And, beyond that, if it does not have a curriculum proposal of its own, but is implementing one regardless, why is it trying to run the education department at all – other than for the optics of being in the government?

The debate excuse was only trotted out after the nature of the content was exposed, and until that point, the minister seemed more than happy to go along with the Economic Freedom Fighters’ election manifesto being piped directly into the minds of children.

That saga, so well exposed by Wilkinson, is as troubling a harbinger of what lies ahead as the DA agriculture minister continuing to bleat about the progress made by “the state” to vaccinate something he calls “the national herd”. In the latest media commentary, it was proudly announced which provinces had been allocated what (inadequate) number of vaccines. The Soviet Union thought in similar terms, and it is utterly wrongheaded. The DA in government should be enabling private actors in agriculture to vaccinate in defence of their businesses.

And don’t let the DA try and tell you excuses from bio-weapons to regulations – this newspaper knows that stuff better than they do, and will blow those arguments out of the water.

Why is this allowed to continue?

The DA rightly says a lot about the ANC being unfit to govern the country, ANC ministers failing on this and that and needing to be removed, but put the shoe on the other foot, literally back at the ranch as it were, and the equivalent poor standards of governance are indulged. An albatross reports that the view in the DA is to give its two ministers another chance to see if maybe they start to get out of the messes they’ve created and perhaps start to come right.

Hardly the stuff to turn out the vote.

It shouldn’t be tolerated.

Perhaps, to some extent, it is tolerated because there is so much national relief that the DA, and not uMkhonto weSizwe, is in the government, and that this is at least holding the country together, and that that alone is something to be grateful for and that it would be wrong therefore to wish for more, let alone to demand high standards from the DA in the Cabinet. But that does not really hold together, and demanding higher standards is exactly what is required to prevent the collapse the Government of National Unity (GNU) has headed off to date.

[This newspaper is a champion of the GNU and believes that John Steenhuisen and his ANC counterparts saved the country when they struck that deal.]

These education and agriculture sagas intersect with a third factor.

This is that the new DA leader has made his party’s ministers answerable to a party manager who will report to him while he continues to run Cape Town. Whilst there might be some merit to that arrangement, what it implies, especially when read against the ambivalence around cabinet-level failure, is that Cape Town is the priority, and the national government, and the country, come second – a subcommittee of sorts.

Where these three points converge is on the question that headlines this editorial, “Is the DA really (deeply, truly) interested in fixing SA?” And related to that, as things stand, does it have the ability to govern the country better than the ANC? That is not clear.

Its administration of towns and cities is better than that of the ANC. And it is honest. But whilst that might work at a local government level where the issues are potholes, roads, water, and sanitation, it is not enough to succeed at a national level, let alone in the terrain of international economic, trade, and security affairs. Success there requires bold ideas that inform bold new policies that will raise competitiveness, together with a ruthless intolerance of failure.

And beyond that, for the DA’s own sake, regime change (in the nicest sense of the term) is a two-step process, but in South Africa’s case only one of those steps has been largely completed.

Step one is for the people to believe that the old regime can no longer protect and advance their interests. Polls show that that has largely played out in how people view the ANC. But step two must also be completed, which is for people to believe (not, hope, or dream or wonder – but believe) that the new regime will defend and advance those interests.

Until that second step happens, society is trapped in a no-man’s-land of current polling data where the DA seems stable at just above 25% of the vote, and the ANC at just below 40% – a kind of “the past is dying but the future has yet to emerge” status-quo.

Geordin Hill-Lewis, whose service to his country this newspaper has already acknowledged with humble thanks, has said that he aspires for the DA to one day beat the ANC, and run South Africa. That requires completing step two, but no one who has seen the DA’s efforts in the agriculture ministry or the education department emerges from that experience with the belief that his party will do a better job than the ANC.