Siviwe Gwarube is that rare thing in South Africa, a minister in a hurry.
“I have the millennial curse of wanting to do everything as soon as possible,” says the minister of basic education. “We can’t wait for much longer. South Africans are demanding quality, they’re demanding proper schools, they’re demanding what has always previously been withheld from them.”
One of six DA ministers appointed to the cabinet two years ago, she says she didn’t have a clue what she was letting herself in for when she took on the basic education portfolio.
“Absolutely not. If you become national minister of education, you’ll never understand how much of a huge undertaking it is. But you can’t say: ‘I’ve just arrived’. You’ve got to take on the responsibility and move quickly.
“You can’t tell a mother in a rural area that the system is broken and she must wait. She’s not interested in my problems. She just wants to know that ‘my child is going to be safe, my child is not going to drown in a pit toilet, my child is going to be in a classroom that doesn’t have 70 kids and that she will be able to read’.”
Gwarube talks about the support she’s been getting from education specialists around the country, but from her own department, not so much. “Obviously you’re coming in with your own priorities. You’re bringing in change and that will shock the system.”
Her priority was early learning, which she has turned from a half-hearted afterthought into a central pillar of a reformed system with 1.2-million children enrolled in 13,300 early-childhood development centres registered this year alone.
She hasn’t been shy to learn from international best practice, collaborating with a minister of “early years” in the UK and counterparts in India and Brazil.
“For too long we obsessed about one single percentage at the end of the academic year and didn’t think to ask ourselves, ‘can children read for meaning and count confidently when they’re six’. We only looked at an exit indicator, which is a matric pass rate.”
Her sights are set on achieving a “culture around excellence”, she says. “The number of children taking higher-grade maths, science, technology and accounting in our high schools is way too low.”
One of Gwarube’s biggest challenges is to professionalise teachers. “You’re looking at half a million teachers. They’re bogged down with a far too heavy administrative burden, which limits the amount of time they can spend teaching.”
Reporting requirements are arduous and still very much paper-based in rural areas. There’s too much duplication in the system. “We need to streamline it so we can bring teachers back into the classroom as opposed to being bogged down by administration.”
Making teaching a more attractive career option is essential but challenging. Almost 31,000 teachers resigned between 2020 and 2024. “It’s less about the money and conditions; it’s about the fact that they have become administrators as opposed to educators.”
The national education and training council has done the research into where the duplications are and where they can be cut. “By the end of this year we will have cleared all that duplication across the system.”
She realises that for this to happen, strong connectivity in schools is a must for learners and teachers in urban and rural schools. There should be no illusions about what a game changer bridging the digital divide would be, she says.
“In a fiscally constrained environment like ours, if we could have schools in one village connecting to an online class, we could improve access to these critical subjects where qualified teachers are a luxury most rural schools cannot afford. Connectivity will change the trajectory of a rural family’s life.”
She’s appalled by the opposition from the ANC to the efforts of her fellow DA minister Solly Malatsi to bring Starlink to South Africa because they find its owner Elon Musk ideologically unacceptable. Starlink offers low-earth orbit technology that could reach rural areas inaccessible to mobile network operators.
“This needs to be less ideological and more about being pro poor people. Sometimes I find the conversation is just limited to people who’ve got the options, who’ve got access to cheaper internet. It cannot be that only learners who live in an urban area can have access to coding and robotics. This is not about Starlink, it’s about marginalised South Africans finding ways to look for jobs and get a good education.”
Speaking as first deputy federal chair of the DA, Gwarube says the party is doing as much as it can to back Malatsi.
“The difficulty with being in a coalition partnership with the ANC is that you’re dealing with an organisation that is still going through the five stages of grief in having lost an election. They’re alternating between acceptance that they lost power ,and denial. We consistently have to push back to say: ‘We’re your coalition partner; we’re not here just to fill in the numbers for you.’ We’re going to use the portfolios we’ve been given to effect change. It is on that basis that we are going to go to South Africans and say: ‘Give us a bigger mandate.’”
To what extent are her attempts to improve education at the mercy of provincial education departments? Education in South Africa has always been a provincial competency.
“It is often difficult to onboard your colleagues. I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m less interested in the politics of the day and more interested in them delivering what they need to do.”
Her biggest frustration is the lack of financial management. “In some provinces you find 93% of their budget is spent on compensating employees, leaving next to nothing for learning materials, school nutrition and infrastructure maintenance.” She has established a multidisciplinary technical support team “to save them from financial ruin”.
“You could say ‘I’m not the MEC for KwaZulu-Natal’, but the truth of the matter is that KZN has 2-million learners, which means a huge chunk of our 13.7-million learners are going to be in big trouble.”
Even before she was appointed, the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) — which called the shots under previous minister Angie Motshekga — was “very vocal about its disapproval” of education going to a DA minister.
In her first meeting with the union, she made it clear that unlike her predecessor, she was “not politically tethered to SADTU in any way” and would go ahead with reforms she considered essential whether it approved or not. Apart from demanding her resignation for boycotting the signing of the Basic Education Laws Amendment bill into law, there’s been no pushback, she says.
“We’ve got to inject quality into the system. We’ve got to make sure that teachers are consistently professionalised” — which includes ensuring that they’re fit to work with children.
She’s been working with the ANC’s justice minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi, to ensure the sexual offenders register and child protection register are updated and that employers in the provinces have access to them. She’s “frustrated” that “for some reason” the sexual offenders register has still not been made public.
“We need to clean up our schools. It is absolutely shocking that we are seeing 10- and 11-year-olds being raped and molested. We need a culture change.”
Equally shocking is that when a teacher is suspected of rape or molestation and the principal reports the matter to the police, “there are teachers who then go to the parents and ask them to drop the case”. Judging by the stats, that happens a lot. “As long as cases are dropped, you’ll have sex pests at our schools. We’re dealing with a sickness in society, quite frankly.”
Bringing in the Special Investigating Unit to conduct lifestyle audits for officials in her department, from the director-general down, met with pushback but has gone ahead anyway. “People are resistant to change in many ways. Unfortunately, this is what the new sheriff in town needs to do.”
She recently underwent an audit herself through the presidency.
Gwarube, who is from the Eastern Cape and matriculated at Kingsridge High School for Girls in King William’s Town, has been involved in the DA since the age of 19, including as chief whip, national spokesperson and now first deputy federal chair.
To increase its appeal to black voters, the DA has to learn from its errors, she says. “Navel-gazing and being too internally focused on conflicts within the organisation is a turnoff for voters.”