The Democratic Alliance (DA) and ActionSA have called on the French Ambassador in South Africa, David Martinon to cancel the awarding of the prestigious Knight of the French Legion of Honour to Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga for her contribution to education.

The DA contends that the Minister and her department failed “dismally” to provide quality education for South Africa’s youth, and have condemned the youth to a lifetime of poverty, unemployment and hunger.

According to the Progress in International Reading Study, 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. 

“South African grade 4s and 8s compared poorly to other developing countries, as well as the rest of the international community, in the last Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study we participated in,” says DA MP Baxolile Nodada.

The party has decried the overall teaching standards in the country, attributing challenges to under-qualified teachers in classrooms and teachers with limited content knowledge coupled with scant performance accountability metrics. Further, the party expressed its concern regarding the issues of overcrowding and dropouts within schools.

“The dropout rate for the 2022 matric class was 31.8% (337 364 learners), which means that only 54.6% of learners who made it to matric passed,” Nodada adds.

“The fact that Minister Motshekga believes that her dismal performance deserves to be honoured shows how out of touch she is with the people she is meant to serve. Her failure led to 3.4-million young people (34.2% of the 15-24 age group) not being in employment, education or training, and 60.7% of South Africans in this age group not having jobs at all, likely because the Minister and her department failed to provide them with the skills to succeed,” Nodada says.

ActionSA says that the country’s education system continues to stagnate and worsen under Motshekga’s tenure. The party decried youth unemployment and the lowering of pass requirements for matric, alluding to a distortion of the real matric pass rate.

The party has called for the reform of the education system by mitigating the influence of teachers' unions on education departments and the reintroduction of technical schools.

“South Africa faces an impending teacher shortage crisis, children continue to die in pit toilets, and high rates of teenage pregnancies rob young girls of access to opportunity. In almost every objective standard, Minister Motshekga’s reign as Minister of Education has been an abject failure, robbing millions of young South Africans of a brighter future,” says ActionSA president Herman Mashaba.