In this episode of Checkpoint, host Nkepile Mabuse revisits a problem that refuses to move: South Africa’s school dropout pipeline. In the lead-up to the show’s anniversary, the conversation looks back at issues the country has lived with for years, and asks why some of them feel worse, not better.
Dr Pali Lehohla frames dropout not as a single moment, but as the outcome of social, economic, and systemic pressure that makes school feel negotiable. When school becomes “optional,” the consequences are not private. They show up later in employment, in inequality, and in the widening distance between communities that should share the same future.
A major thread in this episode is measurement. Dr Lehohla challenges the obsession with the matric headline and argues for analysis that tracks the learner journey through the system. The question is not only how many passed. It is how many never made it to the finish line, and why the system seems designed to look away from that missing group.
The episode also surfaces the moral cost of stigma. When dropping out becomes shame, society can treat the learner as an inconvenience to be hidden rather than a responsibility to be reclaimed.
