South Africa's leader defends unity government after dispute over new law

By Nellie Peyton

PRETORIA (Reuters) -South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa defended the durability of his unity government on Friday, after a row over a contentious education bill exposed tensions between his ANC and its main coalition partner.

Ramaphosa was addressing the media hours after enacting the bill, which has angered the African National Congress' (ANC) partner the Democratic Alliance (DA), amid a debate centering on the integration of schools that teach in Afrikaans.

"We come from different histories ... and are driven by different ideological outlooks but ... the government of national unity is durable," Ramaphosa said, dismissing concerns it could collapse over disagreements.

"I have confidence in the durability of the GNU because anything else is just too ghastly to contemplate," he said.

Part of the controversial education bill gives the relevant department the power to approve school boards' language policies, which aim to prevent discrimination.

The ANC says that students are being excluded from some schools because of the language they speak, which it says has been used as a proxy for racial exclusion - a veiled reference to Afrikaans, the tongue of South Africa's first white settlers, which was promoted by its white minority rulers under apartheid.

The DA says the bill violates what they say is South Africans' right to teach and learn in their mother tongue. The party has struggled to shake off the image of a party of the white minority, many of whom speak Afrikaans as their first language.

Earlier Ramaphosa said the bill would "resolve longstanding challenges in our education system," but the DA promised to fight it in court. Earlier this week it said the bill went against the principle of consensus-building of the government of national unity and threatened the coalition.

"Primarily it's about the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, which is seen as an attempt to exclude people that are not able to speak Afrikaans," Andre Duvenhage, a politics professor at North-West University, told Reuters. 

"In a way the ... legislation is an attempt at opening up these schools for all people," he told Reuters.

The Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill also makes one year of pre-primary school mandatory, reinforces a ban on corporal punishment in schools and regulates home-schooling.

Ramaphosa said he would allow for three months of consultation on the most controversial sections of the bill and if a solution was not reached then implementation would go ahead. 

(Reporting by Nellie Peyton; Additional Reporting by Tannur Anders; Editing by Tim Cocks and Hugh Lawson)