A supervisory order would commit the Constitutional Court to overseeing accountability and basic education rights for all children.
The children who receive textbooks seven months into the school year, have no teacher and sit for classes under trees or in a mud school should not have to wait umpteen more years for quality education. What if it was your child, Mr President?
The Constitution makes it clear that the right to basic education is not subject to “progressive realisation”. Rights are not privileges and poor citizens are not beggars.
The Bill of Rights applies to every one of us, rich and poor alike. Not being subject to progressive realisation means now, for everyone. It meant 1994, not 2012 – and not in another 20 years’ time, either.
Who can dispute that the education system in this country is in dire crisis? The comprehensive reportage in last week’s Mail & Guardian on Limpopo’s textbook crisis provides an explanation of the reason for so much discontent about what is taking place in education.
Despite avowed commitments by the post-apartheid government to tackle head-on the deeply unequal and unjust education system it inherited, it remains painfully divided and unequal.
The Public Participation in Education Network and its supporters are preparing to litigate in the Constitutional Court on the right to quality basic education being in the national public interest.
Constructive spirit
In essence, we seek, in a constructive spirit, to bring about a better dispensation that is able to deliver more effectively and efficiently what the Bill of Rights promises: basic education for all. We see our public initiative as complementary to other similar efforts in the courts – the simultaneous and collective mobilisation of the community for quality public education.
In legal terms, we aim to gain a supervisory order from the Constitutional Court, which would commit it to play an active supervisory role to ensure accountability and quality basic education for all children. Its role would continue until the matter has been addressed at the highest levels. The matter is urgent – the lives of children are affected.
The network’s members who have initiated the litigation are Neville Alexander, Ivor Baatjes, Heidi-Jane Esakov, Enver Motala, Esther Ramani, Michael Joseph, Brian Ramadiro, John Samuel, Salim Vally and Allan Zinn.
This is everyone’s struggle. Every attempt to ensure accountability from the basic education department is urgent, laudable and necessary. All the current litigation and community and student actions are part of the same struggle for equality and human justice and should complement and reinforce one another.
The following are some of the basic priorities that we will argue are both achievable and necessary to realise our children’s constitutional rights and our educational system has failed to deliver:
Proper nutrition and decent early childhood development programmes to prepare children properly to enter the formal education system on the front foot;
School infrastructure that is fit for purpose;
The use of mother tongue-based, bilingual education in at least the foundation and intermediate phases (at least six years) of schooling;
The professional development and promotion of skilled teachers and the development of accountability and support structures at school level;
The provision of appropriate education support materials, such as textbooks, in the classrooms on time; and
Restructuring the school funding models to achieve quality education for all.
There is a crisis
All the litigation and many community protests over basic education rights are proof that there is a crisis. Our approach to the Constitutional Court is intended to prevent a disastrous system from sliding into even further decline and ensure that the basic right to quality education for all is promoted, respected and protected. At the very least, it is about honouring our constitutional obligation.
What will it take to get the government, not Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga alone, to do their day-to-day jobs? We mean Parliament, all the political parties, the parliamentary portfolio committee on education, the national ministers, MECs and the bureaucracy that make up the education departments in every province – all public servants, in other words.
How South Africa fails the most vulnerable is laid bare in last year’s report by the United Nations Children’s Fund and the South African Human Rights Commission. Nearly 12-million of the country’s 18.6-million children live in poverty, according to the report, which drew on Statistics South Africa’s “General Household Survey”.
Four out of 10 children live in households in which none of the adults works, and African children are 18 times more likely to grow up in poverty and 12 times more likely to experience hunger than white children, the report states.
The worst-hit areas of “multiple deprivation” are still provinces with former homelands, such as the Eastern Cape and Limpopo. Poor children are failed primarily by the health and education systems. By the age of eight, schoolchildren from the most affluent 20% of South Africa’s population are already significantly outperforming children from poorer backgrounds and poorly equipped, dysfunctional schools.
Low-quality education
The ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation. Low-quality education perpetuates exclusion and marginalisation and reproduces the racist, class, geographical and other social divisions that characterised apartheid.
The new government has had almost 20 years to get its house in order, but it is still reacting to one crisis after another. These are not only about infrastructure, a lack of classrooms or textbooks, sanitation and electricity. They are about all the elements that constitute a well-planned and optimally functioning, good-quality public education system – literate parents, proper preschools and nutrition, effective curriculums, the medium of instruction, motivated and competent teachers, an efficient support system, a safe environment and an involved and caring community.
We are tired of excuses and blaming. We need the support of the Constitutional Court to advance quality public education for all and hold the state accountable to fulfil its fundamental role in achieving it.
Jean Pease is a member of the Public Participation in Education Network