Lesufi slams Afrikaners who came to ‘hang’ him

Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi was unimpressed at a small protest at his offices in Pretoria on Wednesday when two disgruntled men, presumably parents, arrived to “hang” him for allegedly being anti-Afrikaans.

They created an effigy of him and then staged a mock hanging from a tree. The MEC has subsequently claimed he’s received other death threats.

The stunt elicited much criticism as historically insensitive and racist. The ANC in Gauteng slammed the two white men who hung the life-size doll, which was dressed in an ANC T-shirt bearing the face of Lesufi, on a tree outside the education department’s offices in Pretoria. They also draped it in a placard accusing him of “raping Afrikaans”.

The backgrounds to the stunt has been long in the making.

Afrikaans as a language of instruction in Gauteng came under more pressure this month following a government decision to exclude a choice of language from the new school online application system.

The deputy chief executive of the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools (Fedsas), Jaco Deacon, said Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi was “pouring petrol on a flammable situation” and contributing to creating chaos among schools in the province.

Figures released last month by the Gauteng department of education showed that it had converted 119 schools that were either Afrikaans-medium or dual-medium to English-medium. Many of these schools were in coloured areas around the province, where Afrikaans is a dominant language and culture.

Earlier this year, the department lost a court challenge after it attempted to force an Afrikaans-medium school – Hoërskool Overvaal in Vereeniging – to accept 55 English-speaking pupils even though the school said it did not have the facilities to accommodate them.

Deacon said Lesufi was a politician and his mandate was to change every single school into an English-medium one.

The operational discussion of schools should be done by the head of the department, Edward Mosuwe, “because politicians will come and go and we need consistency in the department”.

“I think if Lesufi gets his way, we are aiming at changing the language policy of all schools next year. If an Afrikaans-medium school fills up with English speaking pupils, he will change the school to English.

“This will mean that Afrikaans pupils will ultimately be forced to learn in English. The argument is, what about the English child staying next to the Afrikaans school? But what we say is what about the Afrikaans child staying next to the English school?

“The Afrikaans community has limited options, as 89% of the schools are already English. Only 138 schools in the province are Afrikaans single-medium schools. That is 6% of the total number of schools in the province,” Deacon said.

He said if there was really a drive from the GDE of forcing integration, then they would have to relook funding models for dual and parallel-medium schools. But currently it is only about transformation and social cohesion without dealing with the funding side.

The department has in the past said it does not have a vendetta against Afrikaans, but it’s about changing demographics.

“It is not the intention of the department to displace any pupils in the application of this policy, but rather to accommodate all pupils. This is premised on the fact that all public schools are in essence community schools.

“The conversion of schools from single to parallel-medium has taken place progressively over the last 23 years based on changes in demographic patterns and not only during MEC Lesufi’s term,” Mabona said.

He said that since 1994 there had been a substantial change in the racial and linguistic demographics of communities across a large number of suburbs that had been historically occupied by whites or white Afrikaners.

“In a large number of suburbs, white families put their houses up for sale as a result of demand from emerging black middle-class Africans, coloureds and Indians, who ended up buying properties in these suburbs.

“As a result, the number of Afrikaans-speaking families in these areas declined as they either relocated to townhouse complexes or to other areas where there was work, or emigrated.

“The demand for schooling in a language other than Afrikaans in these areas grew rapidly while enrolment in the historically Afrikaans schools was drastically reduced. Reduced revenue [due to fewer pupils] meant that fees went up.

“So Afrikaans parents moved their children to other Afrikaans-medium schools that were now more affordable or that had a sustainable quality of education.”