Non-governmental organisation Equal Education, along with parents, teachers and pupils are expected to march to the Department of Education in Zwelitsha in the Eastern Cape on Tuesday.
Eastern Cape Equal Education Head, Lumkile Zani, said the march which was expected to get underway at 9am, formed part of a growing movement of school community members in the province who had become “outraged by the failure of the Department of Education to provide children with adequate basic education”.
“The education crisis includes, but is not limited to, crumbling school infrastructure, textbook shortages and delays, missing furniture, and vacant teacher and principal posts,” said Zani.
“We are demanding that MEC (Mandla) Makupula and Superintendent-General (Sizakele) Netshilaphala are held to account over the education crisis in the province and the impending violation of the norms and standards for school infrastructure.”
Zani said that the group was also calling upon Education Minister Angie Motshekga to account for the Department of Basic Education’s failure in its oversight of the Provincial Education Department.
“Since 2011’s Section 100 (1)(b) takeover of the Eastern Cape Department of Education, Minister Motshekga has been directly responsible for the provision of education in the province. However interventions have been limited throughout and near non-existent since late 2013. Meanwhile, learners in the province have suffered.”
Zani stressed that infrastructure at schools were a crisis situation.
“Through Equal Education’s schools visits and surveys of nearly 250 schools across the province, we have seen the conditions, sometimes fatal, that learners face daily in schools. Even in 2016, we continue to find schools without roofs, walls that have collapsed and killed learners, classes administered under trees, and learner-teacher ratios of eighty to one,” he said.
“We are in the final year of first time frame for implementation of the norms and standards for school infrastructure. The regulations state that by 29 November 2016 there must be no schools without water, electricity or sanitation, and that all schools must be built from appropriate structures. The Eastern Cape Department has openly acknowledged that it will not meet this deadline and will therefore stand in direct violation of the law.”
Zani said that the department claimed that there was no sufficient funds to fulfill the law’s requirement, however, he questioned how earlier this year R530 million of its Education Infrastructure Grant was returned to National Treasury due to “slow expenditure”.
According to government gazette documents signed by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan on March 3, the purpose of the grant was to help accelerate construction, maintenance, upgrading and rehabilitation of new and existing infrastructure in education. The money had now been reallocated to other provinces, namely R400 million to Gauteng, R80 million to Limpopo and R50 million to the Western Cape.
“The Department continues to point to school rationalisation to excuse and explain away their poor infrastructure delivery, but have neither shared these plans publicly nor properly consulted schools to be closed as the South African Schools Act mandates,” said Zani.
Equal Education in the Eastern Cape further listed several demands which included public engagement and transparency around the department’s plans to rationalise over 2000 schools.
-African News Agency (ANA)
