Lizeka Mda
The Department of Education in the Eastern Cape is in such a chaotic state that branches of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) have called for its scrapping and for the national Department of Education to run education there.
And the Cape African Teachers Union recently called upon the Eastern Cape government to sell the department in a “public auction”.
This would allow private companies and individuals committed to the provision of quality education to make offers before the department went down the drain, said representative Livingstone Mpahlana, who insisted this was no joke.
It certainly is no joke that education in the province has stumbled from one crisis to another for the past 12 months.
The new outcomes-based curriculum which was scheduled to start with grade one this year suffered setbacks at the end of last year in some regions as scheduled training sessions for teachers were postponed owing to the non-availability of training material.
When the schools opened, the provincial department announced that it would not provide new textbooks, but would “just top up”. There was no money for stationery and free supplies for grades 10 to 12 would be stopped from next year.
The government owed members of the Eastern Cape Booksellers and Stationers Association an estimated R34-million. The largest supplier, Nasou-Via Afrika (Eastern Cape), which was owed R24-million, started negotiating retrenchment packages with some of its permanent workers.
Teacher training colleges were instructed to limit places for new students. Colleges that used to register in excess of 200 new students each year were limited to 100 and under, for specific subjects. Eventually only two colleges are going to train teachers in the province, and the government has not shared its plans for the hundreds of staff who are going to lose their jobs.
Dozens of schools from Umtata to Uitenhage had their electricity cut after the education department had failed to pay its bills.
Then in March, Premier Makhenkesi Stofile fired the education minister Nosimo Balindlela and replaced her with Professor Shepherd Mayatula.
The leader of the Democratic Party in the province, Eddie Trent said: “I am very concerned that Professor Mayatula has been put in [Balindlela’s] place because you need a very strong MEC in that portfolio who is going to do some hard work and take some hard decisions, and his performance in the finance portfolio has been abysmal.”
Even with a R6,3-billion budget, which amounted to a 17% increase and 40% of the province’s total budget, the education department warned that essential programmes like the school building programme, Curriculum 2005, the culture of learning, teaching and service, were likely to receive minimal funding or no funding at all.
Other programmes to be adversely affected would include special promotion of mathematics and sciences, teacher training, technical colleges, adult basic education and training, and early learning education.
On the other hand, most of the province’s school expenditure goes to salaries of educators.
Last week the Eastern Cape Department of Education was evicted from the offices it rented in Idutywa. At Willowvale, where the department rents a crumbling old house for R15 000 a month, rent has not been paid, and they are expecting to be evicted. The department expects to be evicted from offices throughout the province this year because it has no money to pay rent. The department spends R27,2-million on year on rentals.
Sadtu claims that the department has been paying R85 000 rental monthly on an unused hotel in Queenstown since November last year with the intention of using it as a teachers’ centre, but the project has never got off the ground.