Critics say a South African education bill on language in schools threatens new unity government

An education bill that would give South Africa’s government more control over white minority language schools is a threat to the country’s new government of national unity, the second largest political party said Wednesday.

The bill seeks to give the government the power to determine language and admission policies in schools. In the current arrangement, school governing bodies consisting mostly of parents and community leaders determine these.

Critics describe the bill as a threat to single-language schools, particularly those in the Afrikaans language that is spoken by the country’s white, minority Afrikaner population and others.

South Africa has 12 official languages. While most schools use English as a medium of instruction from a certain age, some use Afrikaans, the language that developed among Dutch and other European colonial settlers in the 17th century.

Out of 23,719 public schools, at least 2,484 are Afrikaans-language schools, according to government figures.

Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen said he would meet President Cyril Ramaphosa before he signs the bill into law on Friday. One civil society group has said it would take legal action to oppose the bill once Ramaphosa signs it.

The Democratic Alliance joined the unity government led by the African National Congress in June after the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of the racist governing system of apartheid in 1994.

The ANC believes the bill would avoid the exclusion of majority Black learners from schools where the only language of instruction is Afrikaans.

Steenhuisen said that during negotiations to form the government of national unity, the Democratic Alliance made it clear the education bill was unacceptable in its current form. He said it threatened the constitutional right to education in students’ mother tongue.

“If the president continues to ride roughshod over these objections, he is endangering the future of the government of national unity and destroying the good faith on which it was based,” Steenhuisen said.

Ramaphosa could sign the bill into law or send it back to Parliament for amendments if he believes it won’t stand up to constitutional scrutiny.

Civil society group Afriforum asserted that the bill would wipe out Afrikaans schools, saying that “the inevitable end of this process will be that the schools will become single-medium English institutions.”