Our Long Walk

Articles

Meet your new teacher

1 week ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

Anyone who occasionally opens a South African newspaper will be familiar with the fact that most of our public schools are failing. But for those who have grown numb to these stories, a few numbers should still jolt you awake. Four out of five Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language.One in four learners will repeat Grade 10. One in five teachers is absent on Mondays and Fridays, and one in three is absent at the end of the month. These are not new problems.
And the prize goes to...

2 weeks ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

Congratulations to Adam Gear, a 22-year old South African student, who is the first winner of the Our Long Walk Essay Competition. As this was a first attempt at providing a platform for new ideas from across the continent, this was a steep learning curve. I was disappointed by the response rate. Despite an enormous (and costly) social media drive, we ultimately received only 30 entries that met the criteria (Africans below the age of 25).
The ruinous growth of sports betting in South Africa

2 weeks ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

I’m happy to bet you’re not going to believe the staggering amount that South Africans now spend on sports betting. Take a long, hard look at the figure below. In green, you’ll see the turnover of casinos in South Africa, year by year. In red, you’ll see the turnover from betting – almost all of it sports betting – tracked over the same period. Just. Look. At. That. Explosive. Growth. Now let your eyes drift to the y-axis. Yes, you are reading that correctly.
Blueprint for a new university

3 weeks ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

This is the third post in a three-part series on the future of the university. Consider a paid subscription to read all three posts in full. I love my job, but I wonder, as one does at the beginning of a midlife crisis, whether there is not a better one. If I could save this moment and reload it whenever things don’t play out as I’d hoped, I know exactly what I’d do: I’d quit and start a new university.
Idea merchants

3 weeks ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

On the 6th of June 1906, Pieter de Vos presented a petition to the Cape parliament. The petition was for an ‘inquiry into the position occupied by the Dutch language in schools, at public examinations, in the Civil Service, Courts of Justice and elsewhere’. It was a carefully worded appeal, but its intent was clear: to push back against the slow erosion of the language spoken by the majority of the colony’s white population.
AI ate my homework

4 weeks ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

This is the second post in a three-part series on the future of the university. Consider a paid subscription to read all three posts in full. I’m happy to bet anyone that I can write a PhD in a week. Maybe not yet a PhD in applied maths or engineering, but almost certainly a PhD in the social sciences. Yes – and I know this will irk many of my colleagues – I’m pretty confident I could produce a dissertation that would pass an Economics examination in less than a week. And it’s not just me.
How Africa must rethink foreign aid

1 month ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

In 2009, Lesotho experienced a sharp, if largely unnoticed, fiscal shock. The global financial crisis had begun to ripple through the world, and South Africa’s economy – like many others – was not immune. That mattered more than most people realised. As a member of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), Lesotho relies on customs revenue collected by South Africa and shared among its smaller neighbours. That year, SACU transfers collapsed.
Everything is social impact

1 month ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

This is the first post in a three-part series on the future of the university. Consider a paid subscription to read all three posts in full. Almost every university appointment in South Africa now includes a question about the candidate’s social impact. Promotion guidelines list it alongside research and teaching. Universities have social impact committees, social impact registers, and vice-deans and vice-rectors for social impact who all produce social impact reports.
Government in your pocket

1 month ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

Imagine you’ve accepted an invitation to give a keynote at an international conference. The organiser asks for your passport details to book the flight. You dig out the document, only to discover – trigger warning – it expires the month before you leave. Your stomach drops. You know what this means: queues at Home Affairs, hours of idle waiting, a lingering fear that you’ll reach the front desk only to hear it’s too late in the day or – trigger warning – that loadshedding has shut down all systems.
Who Built the Pyramids?

1 month ago | ourlongwalk.com | Johan Fourie

The second edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom was published in January. It is available on Kindle or in any good South African bookshop.Over the last few months, paid subscribers have received early versions of seven chapters. Find them here: Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 11, Chapter 16, Chapter 20, Chapter 27, Chapter 33 and Chapter 36. Consider a paid subscription to read them– and this one – in full.