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We are letting our country and kids down

I HAVE been following the reports about the poor matric results with a keen interest.

I HAVE been following the reports about the poor matric results with a keen interest.

I must borrow from a bosom friend who has a serious challenge with understanding statistics.

If figures dictate that nine out 10 young people are having unprotected sex, he is more than likely to ask, "then what is wrong with the other one".

I am pleased to announce that I am not as misguided as my friend is because I fully understand the implications of our pupils' failure to accomplish the desired pass rate when they sit for their exams.

However, indulge me as I pursue a different angle to this eminent calamity.

One of the biggest challenges that our country is faced with is this glaring lack of a national identity from which a national plan can follow.

Our priorities, inclinations, beliefs, class, race, religion and politics are impeding the healthy development of this nation from its grassroots level.

South Africa is a promised land in which it can be aptly termed as being "man for himself and God for us all".

Whatever issue is raised, from HIV and Aids to the very subject of education, it is predictably dissected in racial, cultural, religious and other inconsequential and self-defeatist terms.

Needless to say, this is the biggest drawback that ensures and continues to perpetuate the belief that our country is one of two nations.

Therefore, I believe that the leadership must endeavour to initiate a national plan that will inform and propagate our standing as a united society.

You can call it a secondary constitution if you wish, but one that will ensure that allegiance to the country supersedes all the factors I have alluded to.

This beautiful country has people who are unambiguously committed to it. With all its shams, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still our country.

It sickens me to hear people throwing unbalanced comparisons when we have not agreed on a single, identical benchmark.

This is often done with vexing racial undertones.

This country, yours and mine, has a great potential to surpass most successes recorded in history but we are letting it and its children down.

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