Evidence wa ka Ngobeni
It’s Tuesday afternoon in Bochum, Northern Province. Inside a filthy classroom, also used as a staffroom, a teacher is typing a document on an old typewriter.
Goats roam the schoolyard, while pupils watch a passing cart through the broken windows of an overcrowded classroom.
This is Sekgoni High School in Diepsloot. Like most schools in the nearby villages of My Darling, Driekoppies, Dikline and Mafekereng, a first glance at Sekgoni suggests chaos: shattered windows, roof falling apart, reeking toilets and flattened fences. The school is eight years old.
In 1997, not one of the 50 pupils at Sekgoni who wrote matric examinations passed. Last year, after a brief visit by Northern Province Premier Ngoako Ramathlodi, the school achieved a 16% pass rate. They are not expected to improve this percentage greatly this year.
Sekgoni officials attribute the poor performance to a lack of facilities, which affects most schools in the province. Sekgoni has no electricity, phones, water or proper sanitation. Students are forced to travel more than 3km to the nearest water source.
The school’s situation is further aggravated by a severe shortage of textbooks, with a ratio of one textbook for five pupils. There are only two buildings with six classrooms for 271 pupils. One of the buildings has no windows.
“It is naturally very hard for pupils when there is wind or during winter because of the broken windows,” says school principal Samuel Motiya.
He says the school is often vandalised because the fence, which the community built to protect the school, is falling apart.
Of the six classrooms in the school, one is used as a mathematics class, staffroom, library and storeroom. Inside, textbooks and old equipment lie on broken shelves. The only “teaching equipment” is an artificial skeleton hanging on a broken shelf.
“There is nothing we can do. We have to do with the little resources we have,” says Motiya.
Most of the school’s blackboards are broken and there are not enough desks for the pupils.
According to a school needs survey in 1997, more than 60% of schools in the Northern Province do not have proper facilities or electricity, and 20% are without water and telephones. More than a third of the schools have a huge textbook shortfall.
Northern Province education department representative Rabule Matsane said the situation has been inherited from many years of deliberate apartheid policy, which “funded schools according to the colour of the skin”.
Matsane said the province needs R6,4- billion to address the apartheid legacy. He added that the R45-million budgeted for new infrastructure in the province is not enough, and damaged schools are not catered for.
“Repairing damaged windows at schools is not our priority. Our priority is to get schoolkids who are studying under trees to proper classrooms,” Matsane said.
He added that communities were vandalising their own schools and that “such people must bear the brunt”.
Motiya and his five teachers were reluctant to comment, saying the Department of Education instructed them not to talk to the media. A senior official at the Bochum education district office says the provincial government “gags us”.
Matsane confirmed that his department issued circulars to schools instructing them to refer media inquiries to his office. Matsane said teachers were making “wild comments thereby embarrassing the department”.
“It is not that we are gagging them. Most teachers do not understand policy issues of the department and we felt that journalists should be referred to us to respond to these issues.”
But a teacher at Sekgoni says the problem at the school is a lack of teaching material and facilities. “Even if you bring any teacher from a school that got 100% pass rate, he will fail here because there are no facilities.”