Over 800 students share five roofed classrooms, while for 600 others school is out if it rains. Craig Bishop reports
Patrick Masakala (18) walks six kilometres to school each day. When he arrives for the first lesson of the day he shares his teacher with 100 other students, and his classroom with another class.
Masakala is president of the students’ representative council at Mhlontlo Senior School in Upper Tsitsana, Mount Fletcher district, deep in rural Transkei. He is lucky – his lessons are in a covered classroom. For the 600 more junior students, outdoor teaching is the norm, and the slightest hint of rain means school is out for the day.
He might be forgiven for thinking that he is SRC president of the worst school in the country: his sentiments are shared by Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu who recently named his school as the most overcrowded in the country.
Mhlontlo is at the heart of the education crisis in the Eastern Cape. There is no electricity, no phones, no water.
Students are forced to travel over four kilometres to the nearest water source, a brackish stream at the foot of a steep hill and polluted by the livestock that graze nearby.
Mhlontlo’s situation is further aggravated by a severe shortage of textbooks, with a ratio of one textbook to seven students.
There are just five roofed classrooms for over 800 students. The province has a total shortage of 15 538 classrooms.
According to a “needs survey” of 27 864 schools nationwide, presented last month by the national Department of Education, the nationwide crisis is nowhere worse than in the Eastern Cape.
Described by Department of Education spokesperson, Lincoln Mali, as “more damning than the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, the survey covered 5 958 schools in the province catering for 2,2- million pupils.
Over 80% (4 505) are without electricity, 823 are “falling to pieces”, 2 578 need repairs, and 19% lack telephones.
Over a third of schools in the province have no water. The provincial ratio of pupils to teachers is, at 51 to one, the worst in the country.
Mali says the situation has been inherited from 40 years of deliberate apartheid policy which “wiped out an entire generation.
“While most people only see the physical human rights abuses of the apartheid era, the systematic underdeveloping of a whole country has condemned an entire generation to illiteracy.”
But, Mhlontlo’s principal, Tsepho Mare, who is earning three quarters of the average national wage for a principal, says that under the new democracy education is getting “worse and worse”.
“It is the politicians who are not fulfilling any of their election promises. So all the parents’ hopes for their children are being thrown on the scrap heap.”
Out of 195 matriculants at Mhlontlo last year, just 15 passed. Last year’s student strike in protest against the dismal standard of education played a part – the majority of textbooks were burnt along with half the school.
Mali sympathises, but he says the community must persevere. “This has nothing to do with politicians. Things won’t happen overnight. We are trying our best with limited resources.”
The provincial education budget is R5,4- billion, over R3-billion short of the requested R8,5-billion, and the Eastern Cape’s school construction programme has been halted.
While national and provincial governments attempt to clear up the rubble left by apartheid, teachers at Mhlontlo take each day as it comes – and hope that it doesn’t rain tomorrow. – DMA