Chairperson, Ministers, Deputy Ministers and hon members, the UDM supports Budget Vote No 15. [Applause.]
Let me state from the outset that the South African basic education system is in crisis. In the recently released World Economic Global Information Technology Report, South Africa's mathematics and science education ranks second last in the world, only ahead of Yemen. The same report ranks the quality of our education system at 140 out of 144 countries. I think this has been said by the hon Mr Mpontshane.
With high enrolment rates every year, our basic education system churns out matriculants who do not possess basic numeracy and literacy skills. Increasingly, the severity of the problem is that the majority of our matriculants do not meet the minimum requirements for university entrance. In addition, a large number of the pupils who go into the system never reach matric.
In many public schools, teachers are poorly trained and lack adequate resources - and a lack of resources is very important here. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that the fundamental mission of schools is the education of all children, regardless of race, home background, sex or colour. Yet, it is apparent that either schools fail to educate significant numbers of learners or significant numbers of learners fail to profit sufficiently from our education.
Now, the double-edged meaning of this statement is intentional, because, obviously, we are dealing with a two-sided or many-sided, problem - we are all aware that many black children are not in school. Many who are in school fail to acquire basic skills in reading, mathematics, spelling and self-expression through writing. To many primary school learners, the world is full of empty words, because they cannot read. These are the children who will find it very difficult to get into the labour market when jobs are available.
Recently, we witnessed disgraceful scenes when the SA Democratic Teachers Union, Sadtu, encouraged learners to participate in its march to Parliament, demanding the resignation of the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga. While some of the reasons for Sadtu's march were legitimate, encouraging pupils to participate in it portrayed it as an organisation that has no regard for the interests of black children, especially when considering the fact that the majority of the pupils who participated in the march were from township schools. This meant that our children, whose schooling is already poor, were even worse off. There were many opportunities for Sadtu to genuinely march and mobilise society against the poor state of our education system in the past - that is, the Limpopo textbook debacle - but it did not. Now that the state of dysfunction in the education department affects its pockets, it deems it fit to use our children as pawns in the ruling alliance's internal power battles.