AFRIKAANS AND ATTEMPTS TO KILL IT

The University of Pretoria's EFF Student Command has demanded that Afrikaans be scrapped with English as the sole medium of instruction.

The EFF, according to its Gauteng spokesman, Ntobeng  Ntobeng,  "cannot allow the continued bias towards the Afrikaans language at the expense of mother-tongue languages that are not only indigenous but also official languages in South Africa".

South Africa's official languages are called equal languages, but some are more equal than others, namely, English and Afrikaans.  In spite of the ethereal principles set forth in the Constitution, the use of indigenous African languages as mediums of instruction at the tertiary level are a non-sequitur for reasons related to insufficient vocabulary development for wider academic domains.

The EFF well knows that the university gives equal dignity to English and Afrikaans as mediums of instruction. Afrikaans is not thrust down the throats of those students who lack fluency in the language.  However, there are thousands of students who prefer instruction in Afrikaans.  It is their constitutional right, and the asinine antics of the EFF merely accentuates their indefensible stupidity to  scrap Afrikaans.

Perhaps the EFF Student Command should concentrate on indigenous mother-tongue development to facilitate instruction therein.  They should use the privilege of tertiary education to this end, instead of inflaming already existing powder keg racial tensions to further their self-serving agenda.

A wise man once said "there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behaviour fill the vacuum left by ignorance".  Wise words for the EFF Student Command to embrace.