Thousands of Western Cape pupils are the victims of the on-again off-again crisis in the Education Department, reports Justin Pearce
SOME 6 000 Western Cape pupils remained without school accommodation this week as relations between the Western Cape Education Department and the National Education Co- ordinating Committee (NECC) broke down again in the aftermath of last week’s Ruyterwacht school crisis.
The escalating crisis has forced Western Cape Premier Hernus Kriel to take over the post of his embattled Education MEC, Martha Olckers, who faces repeated calls for her resignation.
The NECC, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) and the Congress of South African Students have all called this week for Olckers’ resignation, accusing her of incompetence in her handling of the education situation in the province, and in particular criticising her unilateral closing of the Ruyterwacht school in the heat of last week’s crisis.
Olckers said at the time she closed the school because it was a health hazard. In the most recent fiasco, a plan brokered by the department and the NECC to accommodate the pupils in existing schools collapsed when the school principals announced that they did not have places to spare. The news came as a shock both to the department and to the NECC, who had devised the scheme in a rare outbreak of co-operation.
The NECC accused the department of being deliberately deceptive by agreeing to the plan when it knew all along that there were no places in the schools. Education Department representative Orland Firmani said the department was still to meet the principals, and had been under the impression that places were available based on the fact that the schools’ classroom capacity exceeded this year’s enrolment figures.
Kriel was forced to intervene after last week’s battle between white residents and black pupils in Ruyterwacht, heading up the negotiations around the placing of the pupils.
However, Olckers survived this week’s provincial cabinet reshuffle which could have provided Kriel with the opportunity to move her to a less sensitive post. There have been no indications that she will heed the calls for resignation, and she said this week that with the benefit of hindsight she would not have handled the crisis any differently.
“I wouldn’t have done anything differently given the financial constraints in which we were operating,” she said. “I couldn’t have done anything apart from filling existing schools. I wish I had the powers that the premier has” — to open new schools and create new teaching posts.
At the heart of the conflict is the radically different organisational culture of the National Party ministry and the non-governmental organisations. While the NP has electoral support in the province, the Western Cape has a long history of mobilisation in the education sector — almost invariably by United Democratic Front or ANC- aligned organisations which confronted the apartheid education departments head-on. With the NP still controlling education in the province, the battle lines have scarcely shifted, and attempts at co-operation between the department and the NECC have invariably proved short-lived.
Lynne Brown, the ANC’s shadow MEC for education, said the Western Cape department had failed to do what other provinces such as Gauteng had done in consulting organisations right from the start: “They should take cognisance of what people are asking for and make that part of their planning.”
Basil Snayer of Sadtu said that while Sadtu and other organisations were able to make an input through their participation in the department’s strategic management teams, Olckers “was not implementing the very recommendations she boasts of”.