DAVID MACFARLANE, Johannesburg | Friday
HUGE amounts of money available for improving the plight of the country’s most disadvantaged schoolgoers remained unspent by the end of last year. At the same time spending on adult basic education continued to shrivel – and will decrease further in the next few years.
Spending trends in the national Department of Education and the provincial education departments are the focus of recent budget analyses by Russell Wildeman, education researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). The trends suggest that, whether because of underspending or lack of budgetary provision, South Africa’s neediest and most vulnerable citizens continue to be short-changed.
Among the education priorities worst hit by underspending was the Thuba Makote Rural School Building Project: only R1,5-million of R48-million allocated last year was spent. The project is intended to develop 27 rural schools that will also cater for community needs and development. Over three years R146-million is budgeted for the project.
The financing for Thuba Makote falls into a budget category known as “conditional grants” – moneys made available by the Treasury for specific projects over a defined period of time. “Underspending on conditional grants has been a perennial problem” with the national and provincial education departments, Wildeman says.
Only 40% of available conditional grants was spent by the end of the year – that is, R160-million of the R393-million on offer from the Treasury. Areas the government has repeatedly said are high priorities to redress years of apartheid inequities were affected. The worst was early childhood development, which saw an underspend of 83%. Life skills and HIV/Aids was underspent by 69%; and financial management and quality enhancement in school education by 54%.
Department of Education Director General Thami Mseleku concedes that “expenditure on conditional grants was very low in some previous years as departments were not geared to act to these responsibilities. Problems were also encountered with the flow of funds as provinces were expected to execute the initiatives from their running budgets and to then reclaim the expenditure. For the past two years the procedures have been streamlined … although there is still room for improvement.”
Figures Mseleku supplied to the Mail&Guardian this week suggest that spending on conditional grants accelerated markedly between January and March. But it is “undesirable” to spend so fast in the last three months of a financial year, Wildeman argues. “It raises the question of injudicious spending and creates the impression that spending has not been well timed or laid out according to business plans.”
Wildeman also spotlights a disturbing trend in funding for adult basic education and training (Abet), another major priority for redress. There are between eight million and 15-million illiterate adult South Africans, but current Abet provision reaches only about 6% of these.
Yet Wildeman’s analyses show that budgeting for Abet “continues its downslide and … there are serious questions about the feasibility of rolling out large-scale Abet programmes provincially … The planned provincial extension of Abet and literacy programmes is definitely put on the back burner.”
Mseleku disputes this analysis. “Abet is one of the department’s main priorities and programmes,” he says. Allocations for this and the next financial year are R40-million and R50-million respectively, and “substantial donor funding has also been directed to this priority … Abet and literacy programmes remain an extremely high priority in education and have definitely not been put on the ‘back burner’.”
But Salim Vally, a researcher in Wits University’s Education Policy Unit, argues that the budgetary and spending trends the Idasa study highlights demonstrate that “the government is shirking its constitutional obligations concerning the right to basic education, including adult basic education”. The Idasa analyses focus on service delivery to historically and currently the most vulnerable groups, Vally says: “The underspending concerns precisely the people – such as rural schoolchildren and illiterate adults – who should be benefiting the most. It has a hugely negative impact on education policy implementation.”
Underspending on the capital budgets – which allocate funds for constructing school buildings, for example – causes as much concern as the poor performance on conditional grants, says Wildeman. By the end of December provinces had managed to spend only 27% of their capital budgets. “Large additional allocations presuppose that such allocations can be spent in the first place. If provincial education departments do not improve this spending record, then the argument for reduced allocations that stand a better chance of being spent gains weight.”
Wildeman suggests that the main political pressure on provinces has been to spend on textbooks, but that capital spending on buildings and other factors that determine the environments in which children learn is critically important to deal with the inequities of the past.
Backlogs in infrastructure amount to about R12-billion, Mseleku says, “while the funds that are available for this purpose in the normal budgets of provinces are extremely limited … In the president’s state of the nation address this year, he clearly indicated that the present situation is un- acceptable … He directed that no children should be attending school under trees three years from now … Negotiations are at present taking place to address this serious problem. The role players include all education departments, treasuries, public works, water affairs and forestry, NGOs and donors.”
Yet repeated underspending on conditional grants, Wildeman argues, “reflects on the ability of the national department and the provinces to put together business plans that take account of factors that may make spending irregular”. In many cases, the quality of these business plans is “shocking”, he says. “In addition, once funding has been committed and is not spent, other programmes or priorities in need of funding are disadvantaged.”
The education department claims that business plans have “received much attention for the past two years … It can therefore be reported that the quality of business plans has improved tremendously,” Mseleku says. “Proof thereof is that the business plans for 2002/3 were submitted by the provinces and provisionally approved already in December last year. Only some were referred back for minor refinement.
The capacity of the national education department to fulfil its legal obligations is also under the spotlight. “The provinces implement policies – for example on HIV/Aids in schools; the national department has a legal responsibility to monitor and coordinate,” Wildeman says. “But the national department is not properly staffed for this role.”
This must be “regarded as speculative”, Mseleku says, “as no investigation has been conducted in this respect … A number of additional posts have been created and are in the process of being filled … In practice the [national] department has become increasingly involved in executive functions [for which provincial departments are responsible], especially concerning the implementation of new policy initiatives. This situation has forced the department to increase its capacity.”
The Idasa figures suggest an “extremely disturbing trend”, Vally says: the projections “mean that historical inequalities will worsen … How can there be underspending when 27% of our schools have no running water, 43% no electricity and 80% no libraries? If the state doesn’t provide a safe space in the public sphere for the development of our children, then what’s happening to them?”
The figures also show that it is not that South Africa lacks the resources to combat these inequalities, rather that “how they’re handled and distributed” is the problem, Vally says.