Dear residents of KwaZulu Natal 

I have no doubt that the eulogy to Outcomes Based Education, summed up in the document called the Education Roadmap which is to be considered by the highest echelon of the ANC and which has been promptly leaked to the media, is a - somewhat frantic - response to the criticisms leveled against OBE by the ANC breakaway group and the opposition parties, including the IFP, at the National Convention for Democracy held in Sandton two weeks ago. 

Key concerns raised by the Education Roadmap include:

• the dismal levels of numeracy and literacy of South African pupils who tend to score last in every international maths and literacy test;

• schools without the resources to ensure the success of teaching the complexities demanded by the curriculum; and

• teachers who are inadequately trained for the curriculum.

Well, it's time those responsible noticed that OBE, as former University of Cape Town vice-chancellor and World Bank Director Dr Mamphela Ramphele put it, "has failed our children".

We in the IFP warned from the outset that OBE failed demonstrably in other countries years before the ANC-led education department thought it was a workable concept for South Africa. Predictably, the ruling party's costly effort to re-invent the wheel has not paid off.

In no time, OBE will be hauled together with the Bantu Education as an elaborate excuse for South Africa's lack of competitiveness in the global environment. Never mind that there are plenty of emerging countries with social problems, often greater than ours, where the pupils perform far better than here and whose graduates move on to compete on a global stage.

The trick is, of course, that the education systems in those countries tend to be unburdened by a certain obsolete ideology, which the ruling party is, fourteen years into democracy, unable to shed once and for all.

Dr Lionel Mtshali
Leader of the Official Opposition

Contact: Dr Lionel Mtshali, 083 256 4902