The congested headache of public holidays

There are three working days this week, two if you’re lucky and none if you’re studying.

It’s an absolute boon if you prefer sitting at home or taking a break.

It is a production nightmare if you are a business owner.

Weekend public holidays fall on Mondays

South Africa has 12 public holidays, with the added bonus of a Monday off if the actual holiday fell that year on a Sunday – as happened with Freedom Day this weekend.

We’re not unique, Japan does Mondays for Sundays too, while New Zealand, Zambia, Jamaica and Australia do it on certain holidays – but not all of them.

To the chagrin of the doomsayers, South Africa doesn’t have the most public holidays, either, Nepal has 35, Iran has 26 and India has 21.

The number didn’t change on either side of 1994, our public holidays are just not as spread out as they were.

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Public holidays capitalisation

It takes a very strict human resource policy to stop the same set of chancers from putting in their annual leave forms in the first week of January each year to capitalise on the months, like April this year, where the public holidays are all conveniently grouped together.

Some companies try to preempt it by closing operations and putting the entire workforce on leave, like between Christmas and New Year.

It looks like the education department took that approach this year, realising that the level of absenteeism, especially on Friday last week, would render any practical teaching impossible.

It’s also fairer on parents who have kids at boarding school, saving them the expense in time and money getting them home, only to send them back and then get them home again.

Headache of public holidays for teachers

All of which begs the question why the timetable planners didn’t schedule the first holiday of the year to include the Easter/ Freedom Day/ Workers’ Day traffic jam, rather than fragmenting much of April?

For most children, it’s an absolute joy to get an entire week off, but it isn’t so great for those in their last year of school.

It’s a major headache for their teachers, too, trying to finish the syllabus in time.

We like to moan about unemployment and especially youth unemployment till we are blue in the face, but we are not exactly inculcating a culture of productivity, especially when it’s often the same WhatsApp group ensuring their leave forms hit their supervisors’ in trays before the rest of their colleagues.

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