David Macfarlane
The Eastern Cape Department of Education has spent more than R1-million of taxpayers’ money on a fruitless 18-month campaign to transfer nine teachers against their will to other schools.
The Labour Court has now found in favour of the teachers and ordered the MEC for education and the department’s superintendent general to pay costs.
The department’s “‘shotgun’ approach … in removing the entire staff of [Ebenezer Majombozi High School] from their posts on the basis of untested allegations” was “inherently unfair, irrational, disproportionate and contrary to the interests of education in the province, and unconstitutional,” Labour Court Judge AJ Francis’s judgement says.
Minister of Education Kader Asmal has diagnosed a serious lack of leadership in the department. It has had five heads in five years, he notes in his latest report to the president on the provinces.
The department’s “bloody-minded” solution to the malfunctioning Ebenezer High, says a legal source, was simply “to remove all the teachers” as of January last year. Accusing the teachers of professional misconduct, the department set about trying to transfer them, and in the process displayed a “complete failure to follow [disciplinary and transfer] procedures laid down in the Employment of Educators Act”.
Some of the teachers agreed to their transfers, but nine mounted a legal challenge.
Asmal’s report says there are 86 disciplinary cases pending in the province, but there is “a lack of commitment on the part of officials to implement the prescribed procedures on time”.
This would not be the first time the department has incurred “fruitless expenditure on legal fees”, says Colm Allan, director of the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM), based at Rhodes University. The PSAM covered a 1997 case in which a school’s bookkeeper resigned after admitting to defrauding the school of R43 000.
“Incomprehensibly, the Department of Education in Bisho then sent the school a written instruction to reappoint the official, forcing the school to take the department to court in 1998 to have the decision reversed,” says Allan. “Predictably, the department was forced to pay the school’s legal costs.”
In the Ebenezer case, Allan says, if negligence and wasteful expenditure are established, then the money should be recovered from the departmental officials concerned or a criminal prosecution should be initiated, in accordance with the Public Finance Management Act.
For 18 months the nine teachers have been receiving their salaries but not teaching. And the saga looks set to drag on and on expensively: the department says it will appeal against the Labour Court’s judgement.
MEC for Education Stone Sizani did not respond to the Mail & Guardian’s faxed questions.