JOHANNESBURG (AP) — An education bill that would give the South African government more control over white-minority schools poses a threat to the country’s new unity government, the second-largest political party, the Democratic Alliance, said Wednesday.
The bill aims to give the government the authority to determine language and admissions policies in schools. In the current system, school boards, which are mainly made up of parents and community leaders, determine these.
Critics say the bill is a threat to monolingual schools, particularly those that use Afrikaans as a language. Afrikaans is spoken by the country’s white, African minority and other population groups.
According to government figures, of the 23,719 public schools, at least 2,484 are Afrikaans-language schools.
Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen said he would meet President Cyril Ramaphosa before signing the bill on Friday. A 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 apartheid system in 1994.
The ANC believes the bill will prevent predominantly black students from being excluded from schools where Afrikaans is the only language of instruction.
Steenhuisen said that during the negotiations to form the government of national unity, the Democratic Alliance made it clear that the education law in its current form was unacceptable. He said it threatened the constitutional right of students to education in their mother tongue.
“If the president continues to ignore these concerns, he will jeopardize the future of the government of national unity and destroy the good faith on which it was based,” Steenhuisen said.
Ramaphosa could sign the bill or send it back to parliament for amendments if he believes it will not withstand constitutional scrutiny.
Civil society organisation Afriforum claimed the bill would wipe out Afrikaans schools, saying “the inevitable end of this process will be that schools will become single-language English institutions.”
