(IRIN) – Ethembeni Enrichment Centre, a school in a run-down part of Port Elizabeth, the largest city in Eastern Cape, South Africa’s poorest province, has achieved a remarkable 100 percent pass rate for a dozen years. But officials from the education department, sent on a fact-finding mission to learn from the school’s success, are running more than two hours late. Irritation is discernible in the voice of school principal Elbe Malherbe – punctuality is one of the few rules that must be abided by teachers and pupils alike. “When … [it's time to] start, you start,” Malherbe told IRIN in clipped replies during a telephone interview. Then, in a sudden change of tone, she said: “I wish you could see through the phone what I am seeing.” It is the first day of applications for the 2011 school year and a woman in traditional Xhosa attire is filling out a form for her child. Ethembeni only accepts pupils whose mother tongue is Xhosa, which generally translates into poor and black. The annual school fees are R3,800 (US$506), excluding stationery. Many poor parents make sacrifices to keep their children in school, but Malherbe believes in affordable – not free – education, because it is an “investment by pupils, parents and teachers [that] everyone must buy into”. The language of instruction is English. Apart from not brooking tardiness, the school’s other non-negotiables are that class attendance is compulsory, home work must be completed, pupils must clean the classrooms and grounds every day, and parents must be involved in their child’s education. “The classrooms were barely furnished. The driveway to the school was a rocky, narrow passage … The school hall was packed with a few hundred eager faces, the children virtually sitting on top of one another on the floor … I saw struggle, hunger and poverty etched into each child’s countenance,” educationist and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, Jonathan Jansen, recounted after a recent visit. “For any child to pass under these difficult circumstances, it would take a miracle,” he wrote. Yet nearly two-thirds of the 70 pupils in Ethembeni’s 2009 matric, or final year, class achieved a university-entrance pass, while other financially comparable schools hung on at the bottom of the academic achievement ladder. We’re not Einsteins here – we teach. It’s nice to be part of a winning team. With nothing, you can still be successful if the heart is right and the spirit is right The school has no library, no science laboratory, although there is a computer that gives the 400 pupils internet access. The government pays for 11 of the 17 teachers; the salary shortfall of the six other teachers has to come out of the school fees. The compactness of the school is part of its success. “In schools of a thousand [students], how can you know all the parents? If I have a problem with a child, or they have not done their homework, I phone their parents and they are here in five minutes,” Malherbe said. “We’re not Einsteins here – we teach. It’s nice to be part of a winning team. With nothing, you can still be successful if the heart is right and the spirit is right.” Ethembeni, which means “place of hope”, swims against the prevailing national current in education, where standards have been steadily declining – in contrast to school fees. More money, less education The government’s answer to the malaise is to throw more money into the education system; in the 2010/11 financial year it budgeted R165 billion (US$8.6 billion) for the sector, a 17 percent above inflation increase from the previous year. The matric, or final high school exam, is used as a benchmark for the state of education in South Africa. Of the 550,227 pupils who wrote their final examinations in 2009, 61 percent passed, and 19.9 percent of those achieved the required marks to qualify for tertiary education. Marius Roodt, an education analyst at the South African Institute of Race Relations, a policy and research organization, told IRIN the current teaching standard was akin to Bantu education – the system imposed by apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who said blacks should only be educated to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. In 2004 the pass rate was 71 percent, and it has been on a steady downward trend since then “It is very unlikely that there will be an increase in matric pass rates. In 2004 the pass rate was 71 percent, and it has been on a steady downward trend since then, with each year reflecting a decrease. This is a trend that is likely to continue into the future, at least in terms of the quality of the qualification,” Roodt said. He attributed the decline to the political influence of the 240,000-member South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), the country’s largest teacher union and an affiliate of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which is an alliance partner of the ruling African National Congress. “An example was when the union encouraged members to campaign for President Jacob Zuma prior to last year’s general election, instead of teaching,” he said. “Although teachers should be allowed to be unionized – like any profession in any democracy – the influence of SADTU is malignant and not benign. It is possible that SADTU has the interest of only its members at heart, and not that of the pupils in South Africa’s schools,” Roodt commented. “The reintroduction of the ’school inspectors’ system, which would greatly improve the quality of the country’s teaching, has been resisted by SADTU for some time. The union has also opposed systems to monitor teacher performance,” he said. School inspectors Zuma announced in his 2010 State of the Nation address that a system of oversight would be instituted to monitor schools and ensure that teachers were in class to teach. SADTU spokesperson Nomusa Cembi told IRIN that the union objected to the reintroduction of school inspectors, and did “not know where the president got the information that teachers are only in class for three hours, or so, a day.” Photo: IRIN Pupils at a Cape Town primary school Zuma first made the claim in a speech to school principals in KwaZulu-Natal Province, who gathered at the Durban International Convention Centre in August 2009. “We need to confront certain realities. For example, teachers in former whites-only schools teach in class for an average of 6.5 hours a day, while teachers in schools in disadvantaged communities teach for around 3.5 hours a day. The result is that the outcomes are unequal.” A recent survey published by Tokiso, an independent labour dispute resolution body, found that the teachers’ union was responsible for 42 percent of all work days lost through industrial action between 1995 and 2009. Cembi said this gave the impression that SADTU members “strike at the drop of a hat”. Tanya Venter, CEO of Tokiso, told a local newspaper, Business Day, that SADTU’s participation in the 2007 public sector strike was the main reason for the union recording such a high rate of absenteeism. A recent World Bank working paper: No More Cutting Class? Reducing Teacher Absence and Providing Incentives for Performance, found “each additional 5 percent increase in teacher absence reduces learning by 4 to 8 percent of a year’s learning for the typical student.” Cembi said responsibility for the deterioration of education should be shared among learners, teachers, the education department and the government. She was unable to provide any data on whether or not a SADTU teacher had ever been dismissed for poor performance. Zimbabwe’s loss, South Africa’s gain Government has been widely blamed for creating a critical shortage of teachers trained in science and mathematics after it closed teacher training colleges in 2000 and put the onus on universities to produce educators. The government is now considering re-opening the teacher training colleges. We are eager to recruit more foreign teachers because of the shortages One solution has been to recruit teachers from Zimbabwe. Dickson Masemola, head of education in Limpopo Province, which borders Zimbabwe, said his department had hired 600 Zimbabwean educators to teach maths, science and commercial subjects, resulting in a turnaround in academic performance. Mbali Thusi, a spokesman for the education department of KwaZulu-Natal, said a number of foreign teachers, especially in maths and science, were working in the province, and more would be hired because of the shortage of qualified teachers in these fields. “The problem is more severe in rural schools – most maths and science teachers prefer to work in urban areas,” Thusi said. “But we are eager to recruit more foreign teachers because of the shortages … We have sent requesting documents to the national department to give us a go-ahead. We want to recruit hundreds of these teachers to plug the holes in our system.” The head of the KwaZulu-Natal School Governing Bodies Association, Reginald Cheliza, told IRIN: “We would like our children to succeed in school, but it is clear that this is not happening. Some of the problems start at school level, others at provincial or even national level.”

IRIN – South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal ordered the Department of Home Affairs on 24 February 2010 to immediately release an Ethiopian asylum seeker from “unlawful” detention after he had languished in repatriation centres for over nine months.

Costs were also awarded against the Minister of Home Affairs and the Director-General of the Department in an order that Gina Snyman, of the Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) Refugee and Migrant Rights Project, termed a “scathing rebuke”.

LHR requested that the identity of the man not be disclosed for fear of retribution should he be deported to Ethiopia. He is a political activist of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a separatist organization “established in 1973 by Oromo nationalists to lead the national liberation struggle of the Oromo people against the Abyssinian colonial rule,” according to its website.

The man was first arrested in Port Elizabeth, on the south coast of the country, for being an “illegal foreigner” and then “detained at the Lindela Repatriation Centre for more than 275 days”, the LHR said in a statement.

The Lindela centre is in Gauteng Province in the north of the country, about 40km from Johannesburg, and is the main departure point for deporting and repatriating undocumented foreign nationals from South Africa.

“The court found that home affairs had no basis to detain the asylum seeker. Highlighting the clear illegality of the detention, the court suggested that the department either did not understand the law, or had chosen to ignore it,” LHR said.

Read more – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88250

The Guardian – South Africa is to investigate allegations that hotels have raised prices to unreasonable levels in a bid to exploit visiting fans during the 2010 World Cup.

The investigation comes a month after it was announced that domestic airlines will face similar scrutiny for alleged price-fixing.

Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the South African tourism minister, said: “In recent weeks we have noted allegations that accommodation establishments in the tourism industry are not responsible, and are inflating prices excessively.

“Until now, our impression has been that this is not the case, but we believe it should be investigated and the results of the investigation made public.”

An internet search found that a room at a midrange hotel near Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport that would cost R1,145 (£95) on a typical weeknight will be at least a third more expensive during the Word Cup. The investigation follows an inquiry into airlines for alleged price collusion.

Read more – http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/feb/24/south-africa-hotels-world-cup

(NEWZIMBABWE) SOUTH African President Jacob Zuma will tell Britain to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe when he arrives in London for a state visit next week, he said in an interview published Thursday.

Zuma suggested European Union sanctions, largely instigated by former colonial power Britain, were now being used by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party to “maintain tension” in the lead up to a new election.

The United States has also imposed its own set of sanctions on Zimbabwe, and the South African leader told the Financial Times these measures have made it more difficult to establish a viable coalition government in Zimbabwe.

“What have sanctions done to help the situation?” Zuma said. “Zanu PF says [it is] in a cabinet of this unity government. But part of the cabinet can go anywhere in the world for their work and part [the Zanu PF members] can’t go out of the country. This unity government is being suffocated. It is not being allowed to do its job by the big countries.”

Read more – http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news-1902-Lift+Zim+sanctions,+Zuma+to+tell+UK/news.aspx

PlusNews – New national treatment guidelines are set to make the world’s largest antiretroviral (ARV) programme even bigger as South Africa extends treatment to more HIV-positive infants, pregnant women and people battling HIV-tuberculosis (TB) co-infection.

Dr Nono Simelela, CEO of the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), confirmed that the revised guidelines were in the final stages of editing and would go to print in a few days; implementation is scheduled to begin on 1 April 2010.

Major changes to the guidelines include providing ARVs to all HIV-positive infants less than one year old regardless of their CD4 count, which measures immune system strength.

Read more – http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88207

IRIN – The cause of a measles outbreak sweeping South Africa has not as yet been determined, but initial suspicions point to religious objections and unfounded fears that immunizations against the disease increase the risk of autism in children.

The National Institute of Communicable Disease (NICD) said last week that the Western Cape had recorded the highest number of new measles cases, 82, bringing the total in the province to 447, although Gauteng Province remained worst affected, with 4,359 cases since the outbreak began almost a year ago. In other provinces KwaZulu-Natal recorded 631 cases, North West 563, and Eastern Cape 314.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) describes measles as a highly contagious viral disease affecting mostly children, and that it can be effectively prevented by immunization.

Read more – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88090

IRIN – A study finding that foreigners are about half as likely to fail antiretroviral (ARV) treatment as South African citizens attending the same Johannesburg clinic has challenged widely held assumptions about migrants’ ability to adhere to HIV/AIDS drug regimens.

South Africa hosts large numbers of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants from the rest of the continent, but HIV treatment requires almost 100 percent adherence to avoid the development of drug resistance, and it was thought that their high levels of mobility made these population groups poor candidates for treatment.

Read more – http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=87734

AfDB – The African Development Bank (AfDB) has approved €1.86 billion (UA 1.70 billion) loan for South Africa’s energy utility company, Eskom Holdings Limited, to finance a power project that will significantly boost the energy capacity of South Africa and the southern African region.

AfDB President Donald Kaberuka commenting on the conclusion of this operation said: “South Africa’s energy problem has been a major impediment to Africa’s leading economy. The Bank is pleased to be associated with this project. We look forward to working with South Africa towards achieving energy security. This operation should be seen in the context of the Bank ongoing efforts to help Africa bridge the infrastructure gap.”

Read more – http://www.afdb.org/en/news-events/article/approves-eur1-86-billion-loan-for-medupi-power-project-5421/

AfDB – The African Development Bank (AfDB) has been awarded “Sponsor of the Year” Award by Africa Investor magazine, in South Africa.

Read more – http://www.afdb.org/en/news-events/article/afdb-receives-africa-investor-award-as-sponsor-of-the-year-5229/

DURBAN] South African scientists have engineered plants with resistance to a local cassava virus, potentially safeguarding one of the region’s staple crops.

The South African cassava mosaic virus is one of seven such viruses affecting different cassava-growing areas of the world.

It results in yellow and green patches on the leaves of plants which impede photosynthesis and stunt the growth of the edible tuber.

Read more – http://www.scidev.net/en/news/cassava-virus-dealt-a-blow-in-southern-africa.html