In South Africa, there is a widespread perception that the
national, provincial and local levels of government are not
held accountable for how they use public resources. As
democratically elected representatives of the people, each of
these levels has a constitutional mandate to use tax revenues
and other state resources to provide certain public services
to South Africans. Often, however, for reasons that range from
poor administration to corruption, these resources are not
converted into public services. Furthermore, given that there
are few (if any) tangible consequences for non-performance,
there now exists a cycle of poor service delivery, weak
accountability and low expectations. This lack of accountability
and service delivery is especially acute in the basic education
sector in South Africa. One of the ten ‘critical actions’ outlined
in the National Development Plan (NDP) of the National Planning
Commission (NPC) is the creation of an ‘education accountability
chain’, because ‘education outcomes cannot improve
unless accountability is reinforced throughout the system, from
learner results to the delivery of textbooks’ (NPC 2012: 55).
The aim of the present analysis is to discuss the notion
of accountability with respect to education in South Africa.
Starting with an overview of the international literature on
accountability, the article then turns to the South African
context and focuses on one particular capacity constraint as
an illustrative example – low mathematics teacher content
knowledge. After explaining two important problems identified
in the literature – accountability without capacity and
capacity without accountability – the focus becomes what
needs to be done in South Africa to improve accountability