BONGINKOSI SHONGWE | Malaika misses point in Steenhuisen v Ndlozi debate

Malaika Mahlatsi, one of the gifted scholars of the democratic dispensation, writes on SowetanLIVE that “education without ethics is a catastrophe waiting to happen”.

She engages in this intellectual remuneration in response to a recent debate in parliament between the minister of agriculture John Steenhuisen and EFF MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, on the subject of public representatives who are at the helm of strategic government departments possessing post-matric qualifications.

Fundamentally, Malaika argues that the response provided by Steenhuisen that education does not signal moral uprightness as those who looted VBS Mutual Bank have doctorates and master’s degrees, is correct and even “profound”.

To demonstrate her case, she refers to the fact that the VBS Mutual Bank, which had monies of poor working-class people of Limpopo, was looted by people who are well educated. She cites the qualifications of the board chairperson Tshifhiwa Matodzi and the CFO, Philip Truter, who are a chartered accountant and an accountant, respectively.

To further demonstrate her case, she cites the qualifications of EFF leaders, particularly the deputy president, Floyd Shivambu. She does this in the context of the recent affidavit by Matodzi, implicating the EFF, particularly the party's president and deputy president.

One then wonders, why does she not mention the SA Communist Party and its leaders, who are also implicated in Matodzi's affidavit?

The main point I want to argue and demonstrate is that Mahlatsi completely misses the crux of the debate and fails to locate it in its proper context. The crux of the debate is about whiteness, as constituting what is rational, thoughtful, qualified, and scientific and blackness constituting all that is irrational, underqualified, non-scientific, barbaric.

That, for a black person to make any contribution in the arts, in philosophy, in the sciences, in medicine, in engineering, in economics, in politics, they must have undergone thorough training and rigorous testing of the knowledge they claim to possess. If they fail to pass this threshold of having undergone thorough training and rigorous testing, they are therefore not qualified to register their views.

Whiteness on the other hand, is inherently thoughtful, scientific, and qualified, such that a white person, by being white, is qualified to have views on politics, economics, philosophy, science, the arts and sports. In fact, in most instances, such white people are even touted as “experts” by mainstream media.

Furthermore, the debate seeks to expose the racist nature of SA society in the so-called democratic dispensation and the continued trauma of black people in the perpetual struggle for recognition. As a black person in SA, you are inherently faulty, when you have not undergone thorough training and rigorous testing;; you cannot speak on the economy and the arts, but even when you have undergone thorough training and rigorous testing, it is still not enough for you to have a view on medicine and the development project of the country. Doomed if you do, doomed if you do not.

This is the crux of the matter and proper context in which the debate must be located, which Malaika, brilliant as she is, completely misses.

And perhaps to even assist her grapple with the debate holistically, one of the campaign messages of the DA was that the public sector must be professionalised, and to do this, people who possess qualifications in relevant fields must be employed over those who only possess political connections.

Thus, it is correct to question it when it fields candidates who do not possess any post-matric qualifications in strategic government portfolios.

Malaika, through her failure to grasp the crux of the debate and locate it in its proper context, unwittingly insulates whiteness from accountability on standards set by itself.

• Shongwe is final-year development studies student at Nelson Mandela University.