On 7 May 1996, the first graduating class of newly trained science and technology teachers gathered to receive their certificates. The occasion carried a promise far greater than the qualifications in their hands. South Africa was only two years into democracy. For each graduate, hundreds of learners might now gain access to knowledge, skills and opportunities that apartheid had deliberately placed beyond their reach.
Standing before them, Nelson Mandela described their work as an imaginative and far-reaching contribution to opening doors that had long been closed to most South Africans. Mandela named the doors he wanted opened, and set standards we could later be judged against.
Education was the first of them: the country, he said, faced a huge unemployment problem, and education could help tackle it by giving people the skills the economy needed. Teacher training in technology was the foundation stone, because each teacher would go on to train hundreds more. Behind those doors lay a growing economy, and he set the target plainly: six percent growth by the turn of the century. He called the graduates before him future builders of our nation’s wealth. And underpinning all of it was a partnership of educators, business and government.
Every year on 18 July, Mandela Day asks us to give 67 minutes to something larger than ourselves. This year, perhaps the most honest use of those minutes is to walk back to that graduation hall and ask a simple question. Thirty years on, which of those doors stand open, and which are shut?
Too many are closed
Take the door to a growing economy. Mandela asked for six percent. In 2025, South Africa’s economy grew by 1,1 percent, celebrated as the strongest performance in three years, which says as much about the weakness of the years before it as the strength of the recovery. The only sustained stretch of the democratic era in which growth topped five percent came between 2005 and 2007. It proved stronger growth was possible. It did not prove we could hold it. What we have normalised instead is a fraction of his ambition.
The door to work has narrowed to a crack
Unemployment now stands at 32,7 percent, with 8,1 million South Africans officially out of work. The weight falls hardest on the young, the very school leavers Mandela believed education would equip to enter industry, start businesses or study further. Roughly 3.9 million young people in the 15-to-24 age group are not in employment, education or training at all. Nearly four in ten are disconnected from every pathway Mandela described.
The foundation stone itself is cracked
He called teacher training the base on which everything else would be built, yet the most recent international reading study, PIRLS 2021, found that 81 percent of South Africa’s Grade 4 learners could not reach the lowest benchmark for reading comprehension, the lowest score among the participating countries.
Local assessments released since have confirmed the picture rather than softened it. A child who cannot read for meaning at ten will not walk through any of the doors that come later, not the coding class, not the workshop, not the lecture hall. Everything Mandela hoped skills education would unlock still waits on a promise made in the earliest grades, and still unkept.
And the door to an honest state, the one he trusted to invest in its people, has been quietly pulled off its hinges. Mandela said investment in human capital was among the government’s highest priorities, the way to unleash the potential that apartheid had squandered. Instead, too much public money and institutional capacity has since been lost to corruption and maladministration.
Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index scores South Africa at 41 out of 100, unchanged for three years and below the global average. That index is a measure of confidence in the integrity of the public sector, and every weakened institution is a classroom not built and a teacher not trained.
Growth. Work. Education. An honest state.
Measured against the doors Mandela asked us to open in 1996, too many have closed, and some were shut from the inside. And yet the same speech tells us how doors get opened, because Mandela did not hand the task to the state alone. The initiative he praised was built on partnership between educators, business and government, and he was explicit that this was the change model. Then he turned to the graduates and told them the success or failure of the project rested on their shoulders.
That is the part of the speech that should give us hope, because that partnership never stopped. Across South Africa, non-profit organisations, businesses, schools and government departments are training teachers in maths, science and coding, supporting township enterprises, mentoring young people into first jobs and building the digital skills a changing economy demands. Even the government concedes it cannot do this alone: responding to the latest unemployment figures, the Minister of Employment and Labour called directly on the private sector to help open pathways into work and enterprise.
So, this Mandela Day, be honest about how many doors have closed. But remember that Mandela never expected the state to open them alone. He prescribed partnership, education and shared responsibility, and then he told a room full of new teachers that the rest was up to them. Give your 67 minutes this year to the method he actually named: partner, teach, mentor, hire, build.
The doors he asked us to open are still standing. So are the hands to open them.
Ariellah Rosenberg is the CEO of ORT SA, a non-profit education, skills-development and entrepreneurship organisation celebrating its 90th anniversary in 2026. Nelson Mandela addressed the first graduation ceremony of the ORT-STEP Institute, part of ORT SA’s history, on 7 May 1996.
