It took six years for a community in Warmbaths to build up their own technical school; it took the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen to close it down. Evidence wa ka Ngobeni reports
While the government constantly enjoins parents and communities to get involved in efforts to improve their children’s education, a Warmbaths community did, and has experienced six years of bureaucratic red tape, indecision, frustration – and finally rejection.
In 1993 three teachers at the Bela-Bela High School outside Warmbaths, alarmed at the poor matric results, drop-out rate, lack of skills and burgeoning unemployment in the poorest province in South Africa, conceived the idea of starting a technical high school in their area.
The community got behind the project and appointed a committee to spearhead it. They named the school Hlakanang (seSotho for “Let’s come together”) Technical High School.
Not surprisingly, the former apartheid regime turned down their idea. But when democracy dawned the following year the Bela-Bela community resurrected their project, believing the new people’s government would respond to their initiative.
Not so. Instead, five mind-blowing years of delays, stop-go decisions, investigations, missed meetings, obfuscation and a mountain of correspondence between the school committee and the Northern Province Department of Education followed with no permission to go ahead with the project.
In that time the school committee received an initial grant of R700 000 from the Flemish government in Belgium, with pledge of R5-million more if the project went ahead.
The Belgian ambassador and consul visited Bela-Bela and agreed that a technical school was badly needed in the area.
A leading Belgian technical institute offered to be Hlakanang’s patron, to help train its teachers in Belgium and send specialists to Bela-Bela. The Warmbaths municipal council granted the school 8ha of land.
Pretoria University’s architecture department designed the buildings free of charge. But construction couldn’t start and the enrolment of students was slow because parents hesitated as the education department, which had granted the school temporary registration in 1994, continued to drag its feet over the school committee’s application for permanent registration.
The committee had to return part of the R700 000 to the Flemish government because of the delays and the donors warned that its pledge of R5-million would be withdrawn if the project didn’t get under way during 1998.
At a meeting in December 1998, school committee members and their lawyers from the Legal Resources Centre in Pretoria discovered that the superintendent general of education in Northern Province, H Nengwekhulu, knew little about the project and nothing of the problems it had encountered.
Although the school was still waiting for the Northern Province education department to get its act together, the school committee leased a building in the industrial section of Warmbaths, while its planned site remains infested by weeds and trees, and opened its doors to more than 89 students – black and white – at the beginning of 1998.
The Flemish government is paying the rent of the temporary school. It has two sections, one used as a classroom and the other as a workshop equipped with motor engines and design equipment used to make furniture.
There are no partitions between the classrooms and students have to concentrate hard to keep their attention focused on their teachers.
On Tuesday, when the Mail & Guardian visited the school, students were hard at work learning crafts like fashion design and woodwork.
Electronics student Koos Mahlangu (18) said his parents encouraged him to attend the school after he dropped out of the Raeleng Higher Primary School in 1996.
Mahlangu said at Raeleng “there is no future. Here we all have a bright future. The teachers do not strike and everything is practical.”
Mahlangu’s dream is to become a computer or electrical technician. He has plans to further his studies at one of South Africa’s technikons when he has matriculated and start his own business after graduating.
But Northern Province education department representative Rapule Matsane said Hlakanang is a fly-by-night school “because they operated before they got registration. The students were taken for a ride by these people.”
He said his department did not approve Hlakanang’s registration as there are lots of technical schools in the province and the project will add to the unemployment rate.
But the school says its students will be able to create employment. Courses offered at the school include building, electronics, motor mechanics, fashion design and woodwork. The school has four teachers, one of them from Belgium. The Flemish government is paying the teacher’s salary, for equipment and operational costs and has offered two more teachers for next year.
The school committee believes the education department is deliberately denying the community project space to grow. Once opened, the school received old desks and stationery from the department, says the school’s principal Eva Molebatse. Hlakanang’s blackboards were donated by a nearby school.
However, since the school’s inception, says Molebatse, the Northern Province education department has not visited it or its new site.
In February Nengwekhulu wrote to the school committee that his department was making arrangements to visit the site where a complete plan of Hlakanang will be erected.
But meetings between the committee and education officials continually failed to materialise and the officials never offered explanations for their absences.
The school committee then approached the Legal Resources Centre for assistance. Their lawyers arranged a fact-finding meeting with Northern Province education officials in Pietersburg. But when they arrived for the meeting the officials were not there.
In July the centre laid a complaint with Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s office. In the letter sent to Asmal, the centre says its client, the school committee, “has been bogged down in red tape from 1993 to date”.
This step, the centre says, “has been brought about by lack of meaningful progress and, in our opinion, a lack of commitment by the Northern Province education department in finalising the registration process of the school and related issues, notwithstanding extensive and wide-ranging discussions and correspondence with the said department”.
The letter was also sent to the MEC for education in the Northern Province. Asmal has handed over the matter to his acting director general who is already investigating the case.
However, this month the school committee received a terse letter from Nengwekhulu saying their application for registration was not granted. Nengwekhulu said the application was not approved as the school “was an expansive, not viable and not sustainable project if considered as a public school”.
But Flemish government representative Yves Wantens said the technical school has great potential for development in Bela-Bela.
Asked why his government chose to fund the school, Wantens said it was alarmed by the lack of technical skills at Bela-Bela. “The advantage is that the school is aimed at the youth, who will get skills to empower themselves.”
Wantens added that his government has already offered to fund the technical school for the next three years. “Our view is that Warmbaths needs this kind of development initiative and we will continue to support that.”