The government is failing to protect the interests of thousands of children who attend farm schools — one of the most vulnerable sectors of the public schooling system — according to legal and human rights experts.
They were commenting on a case brought against Limpopo farmer Johannes Coetzee by Mareletsane school, which is located on his land. Represented by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), the chairperson of the school governing body, Raphuti Mocheko, initiated the case earlier this year.
Mocheko’s founding affidavit says that Coetzee threatened to close the school because he wanted to turn his farm into a game park. His application also says Coetzee erected a 2m-high game fence that blocked the gate used by the children to access the school and that he threatened to “shoot the children should he find them attempting to get through the fence”.
Mareletsane caters for 80 children between grades one and seven. The fence increased their walking distance to the school from 8km to 20km.
About 17% of all schools in the country are located on commercial farms, accounting for about 5% of all South Africans attending school in the public sector.
The matter was settled out of court last week. The LRC settled the dispute on condition that Coetzee install a gate to replace the one that had been blocked, fence “a corridor” from the gate to the school, build a fence around the school, and “undertake not to … intimidate, harass or threaten the learners”. The Limpopo Department of Education — one of the respondents in the application, along with the national and provincial education ministers — agreed to pay R9 000 towards the fencing.
Experts say that the settlement means the case’s potential as a landmark in testing the state’s obligations to protect the security of tenure of farm schools was wasted. Even so, it has inadvertently raised crucial questions about the parameters of the role of the state in managing farm schools.
“We had hoped that this case would address the historical relations between farm schools and farm owners by the court, giving an indication of the Department of Education’s powers and obligations in terms of the South African Schools Act and Section 29 of the Bill of Rights,” said Faranaaz Veriava of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals) at Wits University. Cals acted as amicus curiae (a friend of the court) in the matter.
“While there is a short-term solution in this case, what are the long-term consequences for this particular school? Also, what are the systemic concerns around the insecurity of farm schools?”
According to Nobuntu Mbelle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, “The Mareletsane example is just one of many, which means that this is not something unusual. There is a problem of the Department of Education neglecting [the farm schools] and I don’t get a sense that they have made a commitment to them.”
The South African Schools Act says: “The state has an obligation to facilitate security of tenure for learners and educators at farm schools on private land.”
The Act replaced the apartheid Bantu Education Act, which put farmers in control of farm schools, entitling them to “draw children from school to work on farms, thus denying them access to an education”, said Veriava.
It also enables the government to remove the schools from farmers’ control and place them under state control. This is supposed to be implemented through compulsory lease agreements signed between the provincial education departments and the owners of the private property.
But 2001 Department of Education figures on the lease agreements show that only 30% of all the agreements have been signed. The department was unable to provide updated figures this week.
“The potential of the Mareletsane case if it went ahead was that if the court found that the learners’ rights were violated it could have ordered the Department of Education to take steps to protect their rights by either signing a lease agreement or through expropriation of the land on which the farm exists,” Veriava said. “In the absence of a court decision vis-Ã -vis farm schools the Department of Education can continue failing to fulfil its obligations in terms of the schools Act.”
Firoz Patel, acting deputy director general in the national Department of Education, said: “Provincial education departments are dealing with farm schools on an individual basis to ensure that the lease agreements are signed and the national Department of Education is monitoring this situation, especially in the light of the human rights issues. The first prize for the Department of Education is to ensure that the [lease] agreements are in place because expropriation is a costly, drawn-out and painful process. Clearly, if there are no other options then expropriation is the obvious route to take, but the costs are considerably higher than dealing with lease agreements.”