South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) Gauteng Central is defying calls by education minister Naledi Pandor and ANC to refrain from holding political meetings during school hours.
Sadtu deputy-secretary Ronald Nyathi said the union has organised another meeting for next Thursday in Soweto and this would involved more teachers from across the province.
Last week schooling was brought to a halt when Nyathi addressed scores of teachers from Diepsloot, Lanseria, Cosmos City and Broederstroom areas. At the meeting he reportedly implored Sadtu members to work hard and ensure ANC sweeps the boards in the coming elections and that Jacob Zuma becomes the president of the country.
Gauteng Central region of Sadtu is notorious for its militancy and clashes with the education authorities. Early last year the union threatened to physically disrupt departmental meetings and workshops because they were held “beyond the normal working hours”.
“We are in a state of perpetual readiness to disrupt meetings and declared war on anyone who is arrogant to disregard this call”, a letter of Sadtu to members stated at the time.
Speaking to Mail&Guardian this week, Nyathi was unrepentant and said he does not see anything wrong with holding meetings during teaching time. He said such actions are legal. “The Personnel Administration Measures [part of the Employment of Educators Act of 1998] stipulates that registered trade unions are allocated a certain number of hours in one calendar year. And we decided to use this by having meetings,” said Nyathi.
Department of education spokesperson Lunga Ngqengelele said in principle there is such a “concession” but these meetings should only be held when it was totally unavoidable. Even then, Ngqengelele said, issues under discussion should relate to education and that the head of department must be informed in time so that contingency measures can be put in place. He said the department is opposed to unions holding meetings that are clearly political and have absolutely no bearing on education.
A recent meeting of Council of Education ministers expressed concern about the same issue and instructed principals to bar political parties from using schools as a platform to canvass support.
Shrugging off the criticism levelled against his union, Nyathi said this comes mainly from opposition political parties, which “are bitter because we do not canvass for them”.
“The other thing is we are not apologetic and are always upfront about the nature of issues [political] we discuss,” said Nyathi.
Nyathi denied his union was undermining the newly launched “Quality Teaching and Learning Campaign”, to which it is a signatory. The campaign, which was launched late last year by Pandor, calls on all individuals and organisations to assume responsibility for improving the quality of education. He said Sadtu is “passionate about the campaign” and has mobilised other “small unions” to become part of it. “We have also decided to scale down the number of meetings we were supposed to hold as part of our 2006 resolution,” he said.
Nyathi dismissed Pandor’s call that teachers should stop meeting during school time. “The minister is not the minister of Sadtu. This is not about how the minister feels. She is right to say what she said but we are not a sub-committee of her department. We are dictated to by our own constitution and policies and respond to what obtains on the ground,” he said.
ANC’s spokesperson, Jessie Duarte, said “we discourage teachers to have meetings and canvass for support [for ANC] during school hours. We would like to see any of these taking place after school hours.”