Teaching an essential service - DA
2010-10-11 12:26
Cape Town - The Democratic Alliance on Monday renewed its call for teaching to be declared an essential service and urged teachers belonging to the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) to resign from the union.
They should terminate their union membership en masse, thereby ending the financial lifeline that kept this "anti-education organisation, which is hostile to the interests of learners, alive", DA spokesperson Wilmot James said.
"We reiterate that teaching should be declared an essential service. We propose again that unions should be held accountable for the unlawful behaviour of their members during strikes," he said.
Anarchistic rhetoric
Any doubt that Sadtu had "turned into a reckless monster" was dispelled by the statement on SABC2 by its president Thobile Ntola that the union would make the country "ungovernable".
The escalation of anarchistic rhetoric came on the heels of Sunday's statement that Sadtu had declared "war on government".
Sadtu would not sign the wage agreement, but would not take "industrial action", at least not for now.
"Mindful of the fact that revolutions are made by the unmet expectations of a rising lower middle class rather than the efforts of the organised working class, it is now crystal clear that Sadtu seeks to style itself as the politico-military arm of Cosatu (Congress of SA Trade Unions)," James said.
Ntola's "endless tirade" at Sadtu's recent congress in Boksburg, amounted to nothing more than a call for a North Korean-style "revolutionary" state.
Education crisis
As the leader of the largest teachers union, he said absolutely nothing of importance about the education crisis.
"He did not even seem to understand it, nor care about its consequences."
As millions of students languished at home when they should have been in school preparing for exams, Ntola imagined the strike "was supported by close to 100% of our population, except by government and big business and few inhuman individuals and institutions of doom".
Those "inhuman" individuals to whom he referred were angry parents and the institutions "of doom" were universities and colleges that would have loved to continue educating those students, James said.
- SAPA
