Bread
Heidi Clark
Staff at a school for 250 former juvenile delinquents and street children in the Eastern Cape won a court interdict last week, preventing an attempt by the project’s trust to close it down.
The children were facing eviction at the end of September from the institution which has been both their home and school.
Edward Batty, self-appointed chief executive of the strife-torn Daily Bread Charitable Trust which cares for the children, and fellow trustee Edward Gates were charged in January by the Heath special investigating unit with misappropriating R4,4- million.
A new board of trustees has been nominated, but is not yet registered with the master of the supreme court. Batty is still at the helm of the organisation.
Most of the children in Batty’s care were placed at the school by courts after they were found guilty of committing petty crimes. The Eastern Cape Department of Welfare paid for the children’s accommodation, while the Department of Education paid teacher salaries at Deerfield Farm School and the Gatesway School run by the trust.
But, despite obvious evidence of malpractice over the past three years, the departments were either unaware of, or chose to ignore, complaints lodged by Daily Bread staff.
Some staff members have blamed the Eastern Cape departments of welfare and education for failing to speed up the legal processes required to remove Batty from the trust.
A Deerfield Farm teacher employed by the trust for five years said a health department official had issued a certificate to the trust every year, despite the fact that no inspection had ever been done of its buildings. He alleged that Batty had “even offered the official a job”.
The children have received no schooling since the beginning of the term. Teachers were called in on their first day back from holiday and informed by Batty’s “interim management committee” that the schools were no longer in operation and that the trust would close within 90 days.
According to the master of the supreme court, Surendra Moodley, the reason for the delay in replacing the trustees is that the Eastern Cape has just one state attorney. “He services all state departments. As a result, we have a bottleneck situation because of their shortage of manpower. They can’t give these matters priority and our hands are bound as we are compelled to hand matters over to them.”
Moodley added that his office had done “its level best” to deal with the Daily Bread situation, but the matter was “a complex one”. He said the process had been further frustrated by members of the Eastern Cape government being overseas or “otherwise unavailable”.
“There is a problem in this country – it’s one thing to have a Bill of Rights, but I’d sooner have a legal system that works,” Moodley said.
Batty said he was a businessman and became involved in the project in 1990 after he and Gates tendered for a nutrition contract with the departments of welfare and education.
The Mail & Guardian reported last month that Batty complained to the East London police that boys at Deerfield Farm had firearms hidden in their dormitories. In a pre-dawn raid on June 20 police herded all the children into the dining hall while they searched the dormitories. They found nothing.
After they left a group of African National Congress “marshals” who had been appointed by Batty’s “interim management committee” told the children the trust had closed down and that they were to be taken home. The children were then forced on to buses and dumped at various taxi ranks around Mdantsane, Duncan Village and even as far away as Umtata.
Children who refused to co- operate were allegedly beaten with sjamboks.
Batty denied that the children were forced to leave. He said he had given each child a package of food to take home with them and arranged for their parents to collect them at predetermined points.