Today President Zuma is Commemorating Human Rights Abuses in the Eastern Cape
21 March 2017
We cannot commemorate Human Rights Day with President Zuma during his Eastern Cape visit, when our schools are sites of daily human rights abuses. Collapsing roofs and walls which have resulted in the deaths of learners, filthy toilets, unelectrified classrooms, and the absence of water in schools violate learners’ basic human rights and dignity.
On this day, 21 March 2017, before President Zuma’s Human Rights Day address, members of Equal Education in King William’s Town gathered for a silent picket to protest the government’s inadequate and slow realisation of their Constitutional right to basic education. Education is a fundamental human right, and one that cannot be attained when the State fails to meet its legally binding mandate to provide schools with basic infrastructure in terms of the Regulations Relating to the Minimum Norms and Standards for School Infrastructure, or “Norms and Standards”.
The nationally binding regulations stipulated that by 29 November 2016, all public schools had to be provided with running water, electricity, adequate sanitation and be made of appropriate structures (not mud, wood, zinc, or asbestos). Yet the Eastern Cape continues to suffer from severe and unsafe infrastructure backlogs –the worst backlogs in the country. The education crisis in the Eastern Cape is occurring within the context of poverty, slow employment growth, and low pay in the province. The State must prove itself both capable and willing to put the needs of poor learners at the apex, rather than the needs of politicians and their families.
Human Rights Day commemorates the sacrifices made by ordinary citizens and Struggle heroes on the path toward a free, democratic South Africa. This year President Zuma addressed the nation from Ginsberg, King William’s Town, where he also officially handed over the memorial grave site of Steve Biko to the Biko family. [1] Steve Biko can only be honoured by building schools that are centres of excellence with buildings that resemble the dignity with which our people in the Eastern Cape and South Africa deserve. He would not have wanted monies spent on him and his memory while hundreds of thousands of learners in the Eastern Cape are short changed by the Eastern Cape government, which is unable to build a capable State.