Izinyoka-nyoka: One illegal electricity cable connects Lufhereng to a neighbour. Matshepo Masedi says she felt sorry for the children who
A number of schools in the south of Johannesburg have been operating without electricity or running water for years. A Mail & Guardian investigation has revealed a trail of misplaced or absent paperwork, officials unable to locate schools and the desperate measures employed by teachers and residents to deliver education to the poor.
A 45m electrical cable runs through the principal’s office door, across the schoolyard, over a street, down a side alley and through a window, finally connecting to a plug in the tiny kitchen of a four-roomed RDP house.
This cable is the only source of electricity for Lufhereng Secondary School in Soweto. The house belongs to an elderly couple. Matshepo Masedi was the only one willing to allow the school to draw electricity from her house.
“I don’t know what to say. I felt sorry for the school,” she says.
This method of getting electricity is called izinyoka-nyoka in township slang. It is dangerous and illegal. But this is the only way for Lufhereng. The school has been without electricity, water and sanitation for five years. It buys electricity for R300 every month and loads it on to the prepaid meter at Masedi’s house. But the electricity is only for the staffroom and the administration block.
The classrooms – mobile containers – are cold. The mobile toilets the pupils must use are drained only once a week but are kept spotless – through the hard work of cleaner Sophie Mabe.
About 10km away is Protea Glen Primary School in Protea Glen Extension 28. The school also does not have electricity and has also resorted to getting it illegally from a nearby house.
The schools are two on a list – originally of 11 but now of six – of schools in Gauteng that do not have running water or electricity. This contradicts the provincial education department’s claim in its 2015-2016 annual report that there were no schools in Gauteng that did not have electricity and water.
According to the department of basic education’s 2013 norms and standards for public school infrastructure, all schools must have some form of power and sufficient water that complies with all relevant laws.
The affected schools are in informal settlements or poorer sections of their townships.
The houses around them are connected to the grid, but the schools – some of which were built more than three years ago – have never been connected to an electricity or water supply.
“People started moving here in 2010 and they had water and electricity, but the school does not. What is the meaning of that?” says Lufhereng governing body chairperson Sarah Bloom.
“The most important place in this community is without basic services. It means we are being taken for fools because we are poor. Even schools in rural areas are better than this school. It’s painful.”
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi blames the City of Johannesburg, saying he has raised the matter several times with officials but to no avail.
He told the Gauteng legislature last month that he first wrote to former mayor Parks Tau in 2015, alerting him to the problem.
In December, after the city’s new political administration came in, he and the Democratic Alliance’s education MEC, Khume Ramulifho, met Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba and brought the issue to his attention. He also wrote a letter to Mashaba.
“The continued lack of municipal services connectivity compromises the national mandate of providing quality education for all,” Lesufi said when he read his letter to the legislature. In the letter, he listed 11 schools that did not have electricity, water and sanitation.
Johannesburg’s executive director of environment and infrastructure services, Tiaan Ehlers, says Mashaba met Lesufi and other department officials on January 31. There have been two follow-up meetings in February and March.
Ehlers says five of the schools on the list have subsequently been connected to services as a result of the meetings.
But the likes of Lufhereng and Kibler Park secondary schools and the primary schools of Glenvista and Goza (in Freedom Park, Soweto) remain unconnected.
The fault lies with the provincial education department, which has failed to make applications to City Power or Johannesburg Water for the schools in question to be connected, he says.
The department claims it has submitted an application for water connection for Kibler Park Secondary School, but Johannesburg Water says it has not received any application, which is the reason the school is still without water. The department has not applied for electricity through City Power either, according to the city.
Glenvista Primary School, which opened its doors in January, does not have electricity. The city says that City Power has not received any application for connection from the provincial education department.
Two of the schools on the list can’t be located; the stand can’t be found, nor can the “correct property description”, which includes zoning and ownership, be found, says the city. These are Tshepo Ya Rona Secondary School in Lawley Extension 3 and Kanana Primary School in Kanana Park Extension 3 near Walkerville, both south of Johannesburg.
The city says the department needs to identify the correct location of the schools and apply for connections for water and electricity.
Gauteng education department spokesperson Oupa Bodibe says the department had submitted applications for the schools to be connected.The Mail & Guardian asked the department to provide proof of the applications, but it has not.
Bodibe says a contractor has been appointed to lay cables at Glenvista Primary School. He says the owner of the property on which Kibler Park Secondary stands owes municipal rates and taxes, and the landlord has been asked to settle up so that the school can get connected.
He adds that the department had to build the Tshepo Ya Rona and Kanana schools because of the influx of pupils from the Vlakfontein and Kanana settlements. Because of the urgent need, the schools were built before the areas were proclaimed.
A township may be approved but not proclaimed, with proclamation only happening after all the city’s conditions have been met, including the installation of services, according to Ehlers.