Calls grow to set education standards for public office bearers: 'No country can progress under uneducated leaders'

There should be a law requiring all councillors and public representatives in South Africa to hold at least a university degree, maintains independent political analyst, Prince Mashele.

He said that a recent report claims that over 300 councillors in KwaZulu-Natal are functionally illiterate, highlighting a national crisis in local government competence.

He added that the issue stems from South Africa’s post-apartheid political framework, which was designed to include liberation fighters who were denied formal education under apartheid.

Mashele dismissed claims that such a requirement would disenfranchise communities, saying education was as essential to leadership as it is to medicine or teaching.

"Those who designed our governance framework, both at a national and local government level, took into consideration the fact that the liberation fighters, some of whom were not educated, had played a role in the liberation struggle. So, the political thinking at the time was that it would be unjustifiable to fashion a governance framework that would exclude former liberation fighters on the basis that they had not gone to school, because some of them had no opportunity to go to school, they were underground, under conditions where they couldn't go to school. So, the thinking was, you cannot set the bar so high in such a way that we'll exclude those people.

"As they were doing so, they did not stretch their imagination far enough to envision what would happen 20 years, 30 years later, because you cannot be stuck in history and have a permanent framework that accommodates liberation fighters and punishes future generations in the form of poor quality of governance. So, there was no balance between the two.

"I think now, having seen and having suffered the bad consequences of bad governance, I think now it is time for us to have a conversation and say, 'Going forward, what standards do we need to have the best outcomes at the local government level?' My argument is, you cannot have an uneducated leader at the local government level, all the way to the national government. We must set a minimum standard in government. Governance is complex, and it's important. We cannot leave it in the hands of people who have no idea what they are doing.

"Let us ask the question: 'What do we need as a society? What does our country need? What do our municipalities need in order for them to be better governed, deliver a better quality of life, as well as facilitate development? What should be the forecast?' So, let us forget about what the ANC thinks, let us forget about the MK party, EFF and all of that and say, what do we need as a country? I think we need educated leaders across the board, and we must not apologise for that.

"There are people who are educated and incompetent. I mean, that phenomenon you find all over the world. So, what do you do with such people? It is the role of voters to evaluate the decisions made by their leaders at all levels. So, if voters evaluate and find that their leaders, educated as they are, have not performed according to voters' expectations, that's why you have periodic elections. You simply vote them out, simple and straightforward."

To listen to Mashele in conversation with 702 and CapeTalk's Aubrey Masango, use the audio player below: