I’ll never be voted in as president, and frankly, that’s a tragedy. I’m brimming with ideas to fix our faltering economy, mend our potholed infrastructure, and give South Africans a fighting chance. But I lack the thick skin of a rhino and the stomach for backroom politics. So instead, I hereby nominate myself for Fantasy President in a blog world where I can exist free of voters, scandals, and press briefings.

Let’s begin with the obvious: emptying the coffers of government officials. Ministers deserve salaries, but they should earn the average South African income. Watch how quickly the national salary will improve when this happens! Also, ministers and their families should be limited to using public services: schools, hospitals, transport. Oh, wait — what transport? Exactly. Suddenly, railway revitalisation won’t seem optional.

Appointments would shift from political favours to actual expertise. When power is wielded by those with real-world knowledge (and when their families are depending on functional systems) policies will start to serve the people.

Naturally, I’d begin my reign with education. It’s my profession, my passion, and quite frankly, our only real hope.

The system we have was designed for a world that no longer exists. A world where children returned from school to a parent (usually a mother) who had time to sit with them, read aloud, supervise homework, and build bonds over bedtime stories. That world has evaporated. In its place are working single parents, exhausted caregivers, child-headed homes, teenage mothers. We are living the legacy of apartheid-era educational deprivation. Many families today are simply not in a position to support homework, especially when it depends on literacy they have never had the chance to acquire

Giving homework to foundation phase pupils is no longer an effective tool. Expecting homework to be supported by caregivers is naïve at best, cruel at worst. It’s just another pressure falling on working mothers who are trying to keep up with household chores and elderly grannies caring for children while their mothers go to work.

So let’s rewrite the script.

Extend the school day. Shrink the class sizes. Hire teaching assistants to handle homework during school hours. Make daily reading time compulsory, not as a luxury, but as a non-negotiable lesson that happens every day. Ban phones from teachers’ hands during lessons and put books in them instead. Pupils mimic what they see.

Mathematics, too, needs rescuing. Introduce a daily 20-minute maths mastery block every day. With routine practice and consistent support, the nation’s numeracy could rise from its knees. Student teachers could fill the role of assistants, gaining experience and filling a desperate gap.

Right now, our universities are flooded with brilliant young people who cannot read fluently or write coherently, not because they are lazy or incapable, but because they have been pushed through an education system that refuses to acknowledge the real-world constraints of families. If we want degrees that mean something, we must stop dumbing down the content and start raising up our learners.

And none of this will be possible without a radical shift in how we regard and reward teachers.

We need to professionalise teaching, in the way we write policies, but also in in pay slips. We need the brightest minds to walk towards chalkboards, not just towards the scalpels and spreadsheets. Many people who enter the medical field do genuinely want to help people. But so do teachers. The difference is, nobody blinks when you say you’re becoming a doctor. Say you're becoming a teacher, and people raise their eyebrows like you’ve announced you're taking up interpretive dance in a small town with no stage.

It’s time to change the narrative. Teaching isn’t a last resort for those who couldn’t quite cut it elsewhere. It’s the foundation of every functioning society. And yet, too often, it’s treated like a calling you should quietly suffer through, rather than a career worth celebrating.

I’ve lost count of how many people have looked baffled by my career choice, as though becoming a teacher when I could have been something “better” is some tragic tale of wasted potential. But teaching is who I am and all I want to do.

We need to raise the bar for teaching degrees, not lower it to boost intake stats. We should be luring the brilliant, the imaginative, and the restless thinkers into our classrooms, and we should be paying them enough to stay.

This is just the opening stanza of my fantasy presidency; a few lines from what promises to be a very long poem. But if there’s one truth I’ll campaign on, it’s this: parents are no longer education’s primary partners — not by apathy, but by sheer exhaustion and economic necessity. So, the village must step in. And the village must be trained, respected, and paid.

Follow me for more world-fixing rants.
Applications for Deputy Fantasy Ministers are now open.
(Extra points if you bring snacks and a working photocopier).