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South Africa’s failure to recognise and develop ability is wasting talent, weakening institutions and keeping the country stuck at a crossroads.
“Thirteen-fifty.” The woman had put a twenty on the counter for three fat cakes, a cabbage and five hundred grams of flour, and I had said it before her hand left the note. Six-fifty for the goods, thirteen-fifty back. I was fifteen. Behind me, the queue already stretched to the door.
Mandla (not his real name) did not look at me. He looked at the twenty. Then he reached, as he reached every time, for the big cashier’s calculator with the paper roll, and pressed the keys one at a time: one fifty, plus two, plus three. Six-fifty. Twenty minus six-fifty.
The machine chewed and spat out its strip. Thirteen-fifty. He counted the change into her palm without a word, and the small muscle in his jaw tightened the way it did every time I was right.
This was my brother Bongumusa’s shop at Zinqamu, in Elandskop, where the M70 meets the road that runs down to Sevontein Prison. The old people did not call it Zinqamu. They called it eziphambanweni, the place at the crossroads, because the footpaths from the villages met there.
KwaNkabini, where I grew up, was one of those villages, and on school holidays I walked those paths in the dark to open the shop with him at five in the morning.
I was a teenager, so I was not allowed near the till. The till belonged to Mandla, a man in his late twenties, which in that shop made him an elder. My job was to fetch what the customer pointed at, carry it with her money to the counter, and wait.
The trouble was that I could count, and the shop could not use it. Every transaction happened twice: once in my head and once on his machine. The queue lengthened. The women who had walked in from kwaNkabini and the other villages stood longer than they needed to.
We served fewer people an hour than the shop could have. And the reason was not that Mandla was foolish. It was that his job was to be the man who could count, and a boy in front of him had shown, in real time, before witnesses, that the job could be done faster by someone with no title and no age.
I have thought about that shop for 25 years, because I have since watched the whole country do what Mandla did.
South Africa is a nation standing eziphambanweni, at the crossroads, holding a calculator it does not need, recomputing what its ablest people have already worked out, and calling the delay procedure.
By ability I mean not an IQ score, but the demonstrated capacity to learn, solve, build and perform beyond what a person’s position or circumstances would predict.
We waste it in the Home Affairs queue, in the municipality that cannot pass a clean audit, in the state-owned enterprise that hires for loyalty and then contracts out thinking to consultants. We waste it in the classroom. And everyone in the queue pays for it, most of all the people the system claims to serve.
In June this year the Auditor-General tabled the local government audit outcomes for 2024/25. Only 15% of municipalities achieved a clean audit, and those administered just 8% of municipal expenditure. Not one of the eight metros managed it. In the same year municipalities paid R1.6-billion to consultants to prepare the financial statements their own finance staff are employed to prepare.
I spent part of my career auditing municipalities, and I know what that line item is: the cost of putting the wrong hands at the till, and then hiring someone from outside the building to operate the calculator.
This is not new. An earlier Auditor-General, the late Kimi Makwetu, gave the problem its name in the title of his 2018/19 report: Not much to go around, yet not the right hands at the till. He could have been describing Zinqamu.
Human potential
Let me be careful here, because this argument has a bad history in this country. I am not saying some people are born clever and others are not. What I am saying is smaller and, I think, undeniable.
Human potential varies, and no child earns the aptitude with which she begins. It differs from one person to the next, but it appears in every community: in every village, every township and every suburb in the land. Whether it is discovered and developed, however, is not a matter of birth. It is a social choice.
That is precisely why rewarding ability and correcting historical injustice are not opposites. Redress is about who gets to the door. What I am describing is what happens once they are inside.
A country can be wholly committed to opening the door to those it once locked out, and still refuse to notice, stretch or reward the excellence that walks through it. That is not redress.
That is Mandla with the calculator, and its heaviest cost falls on black children, because they are the ones the current system never finds.
Consider how we treat ability when we do find it. A learner may earn a National Senior Certificate with marks of 30% in three of her subjects, and each January the country treats the aggregate pass rate as its principal measure of educational success.
The Department of Basic Education has itself recorded that participation in Mathematical Literacy keeps rising, and that some provinces advise learners away from Mathematics to improve their provincial results, which is to say the system will trade a subject that opens the country’s most demanding intellectual and professional pathways for a number that flatters it.
The scale of the failure shows up earlier, in the international tests: in the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, only 2% of South African Grade 9 learners reached the advanced benchmark in mathematics. The top of our achievement distribution is nearly empty.
That does not mean the ability is absent. It means the system is not converting whatever ability exists into advanced performance.
There is almost no organised way for the state to identify a gifted child in a rural primary school, let alone accelerate her, so the result should not surprise us; that happens, when it happens, in former Model C and private schools, which is to say the system finds ability mainly where privilege has already made it visible.
Teachers are paid by years served, not by whether their learners progress. And Section 195 of the Constitution already requires that public appointments rest on ability, objectivity and fairness, alongside redress; the law is not missing, it is simply defeated in practice by political loyalty, so that a talented 22-year-old learns from her own government that advancement depends less on what she knows than on whom she knows.
Every one of those is a choice. None of them is required by the Constitution, by the memory of apartheid, or by any serious theory of justice. The remedy needs one governing principle: find ability early, develop it wherever it is found, and remove the status-based barriers to its advancement.
In practice, that means looking for aptitude in public primary schools from Grade 4, rather than leaving the search to Olympiads that reach only the suburbs. It means enrichment and accelerated pathways designed to reach township and rural schools, rather than to drain them.
It means recognising exceptional teaching by more than years accumulated. And it means enforcing the Constitution’s existing requirement on public appointments, instead of allowing loyalty to defeat it.
None of this is new. Institutions such as Lovedale and Fort Hare show what can happen when African ability, denied opportunity almost everywhere else, is gathered and cultivated. Somebody found those young men and women and pushed them. We have simply stopped looking.
I know the objections, and some of them are fair. Merit is a fiction when the starting lines are unequal. Tests measure the culture of the tester. Selective programmes cream the best from the schools that need them. And every time a country starts talking about rewarding the able, someone uses it as cover for abandoning the rest.
I concede all of it, but none of it justifies wasting ability. Unequal starting lines are an argument for finding ability earlier, not for pretending it does not exist. A biased test is an argument for a better test, not for none.
What I am asking for is a system that is generous at the entrance and demanding after it. What we have is the reverse: a system that argues endlessly about the door and then wastes whoever comes through.
There is one more thing that shop taught me, and it is what I most want my own children to understand. Everyone in that queue believed, without ever saying it, that the older man was the smarter man, because he was older and because he had the till.
It took a boy saying thirteen-fifty to show them it was not so. Age is not ability. Position is not ability. A calculator is not ability. And a country that confuses the three will stand at the crossroads for a very long time, with the queue growing behind it, watching the ones who can count walk down the other road.
The old people were right to name the place for the roads. SA is still eziphambanweni. The question is only which way we walk. DM
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