AfriForum: Department’s inability creates crisis – not court case

15 December 2020

According to AfriForum, the only crisis in the educational sector is the Department of Basic Education’s inability and indolence to track down the guilty parties who leaked or used the exam papers in the 2020’s final exam to benefit illegally. The civil rights organisation is of the opinion that the Department now wants to hide behind the court ruling as an excuse for the fact that they have yet to launch a proper investigation into the leaked exam papers.

This follows AfriForum, the South African Democratic Teachers Union and a group of individual learners from Ermelo in Mpumalanga requesting the court in three different urgent applications to review and declare invalid Motshekga’s decision that the exam papers for Maths II and Science II had to be rewritten.

“The Department’s statements are far-fetched that the Court’s ruling – that the leaked exam papers did not have to be rewritten – casts doubt on the credibility, integrity, reliability and fairness of the 2020 final exam as a whole. Rather than to blame the court’s ruling, the Department should focus on launching a proper investigation in order to apprehend the guilty parties. The Department should also establish how the exam papers were leaked in the first place to prevent similar incidents in future,” says Natasha Venter, Advisor for Educational Rights at AfriForum.

According to Venter, the Department’s initial decision (that the papers had to be rewritten) and statements that they could not determine the extent of the leak are creating a very dangerous precedent, should exam papers leak out again in future. “Communication and social media platforms like WhatsApp are part and parcel of our lives. Will the Department require a rewriting of exams whenever papers leak out simply because it can apparently not determine who had access to the leaked paper?”

AfriForum also indicated that it is curious to see which aspects of Judge Norman Davis’s ruling the Department plans to appeal. “We will not hesitate to take further legal action if any honest matriculant is unfairly treated.”

Issued by Natasha Venter, Advisor: Educational Rights, AfriForum, 15 December 2020