Peter Dickson
The Eastern Cape provincial government has announced plans to close 700 of the province’s farm schools just days after its education MEC promised the Human Rights Commission (HRC) he would bail out the schools with a R14-million subsidy.
Premier Makhenkesi Stofile told last Thursday’s opening of the provincial legislature that the farm schools, which accommodate between 20 000 and 30 000 pupils, will be shut down and the students transferred to hostels and overcrowded local schools.
Stofile told the legislature he had already instructed MEC for Education Stone Sizani to draw up a budget and legislation in light of the decision.
Six days earlier, Sizani told the HRC that his department had raised half of R13,9-million due to the schools.
Bisho’s move ends two decades of the state’s subsidisation of schools in the Eastern Cape’s most impoverished rural areas.
The HRC subpoenaed Sizani twice late last year to explain the government’s position on the schools, but Sizani failed to attend.
After receiving a third subpoena, the MEC appeared before the commission, explained the department’s dire financial position, and promised to pay the money.
Sizani told the commission that his department was saddled with budget overspending of at least R600-million this year despite a R200-million lifeline late last year from the central government.
But Sizani nevertheless promised that by the end of next month, the department would pay a large portion of its unpaid contractual obligations to farm schools dating back to 1997.
Sizani told the commission that plans to rationalise farm schools or relocate them to the nearest town were still under discussion, adding that the department had no specific farm school policy and no contractual obligations for the year 2000.
It had, however, set aside R10-million in the 2000/2001 budget for transport and boarding and was discussing the extending of transport sub-sidies for schools with the Department of Transport, Sizani said.
Meanwhile, Stofile told legislators last week that closing the schools down and farming their pupils out to local schools from centralised hostels was seen by the government as “the most empowering and reformed approach” to the crisis.
“Farm schools worry us,” Stofile said, “but our solution is not to allow segregated schools to work. Farm schools must and shall be abolished. Our children, like white children after World War II, must attend boarding schools in towns.”
Eastern Cape District School Association chair Emlitia Loock, whose farm school umbrella body has lodged three complaints of subsidy non-payment by Bisho since 1994 with the HRC, says the provincial government’s new plan is “financial suicide”.
Loock said the abolition plan required the building of new schools and hostels or the costly extension of existing school buildings when the department “cannot even decently maintain existing schools and hostels, let alone build and maintain new ones”.
With 700 farm schools scattered across the province, space would have to be found for up to 30E000 pupils, and the cash-strapped Department of Education’s boarding subsidy would have to increase fivefold, she said.
Department representative Paphama Mfenjana says the abolition process will begin with an audit, covering farm school pupils’ personal backgrounds and domestic circumstances; the distances between home and school; and teacher to pupil ratios at farm schools. This will get under way within the next two weeks. An “action plan” setting out the countdown to closure would be drawn up from the audit’s results and the process would be carried out with as little disruption to learning and teaching as possible.