An education plaster costing R115 million
12 April 2023
In the little Klein Karoo town of Calitzdorp lies a high school which caters for some of the poorest learners of our province.
A large number of the intake of the school are children of farmworkers who toil on the farms in the surrounding areas.
Yet despite the dire situation which Calitzdorp High School and its learners face, educators at this school often go beyond the call of duty.
When members of the Provincial Legislature visited the school in February of this year, we heard that in some classes up to seventy-eight learners have to be accommodated in a classroom.
The department of basic education’s ideal educator to learner ratio is 1:35. In other words, Calitzdorp High School is double the ideal.
The story of Calitzdorp High School and the dire need for more classrooms and educators is the story of many schools across the Western Cape including Zimasa Primary School and Langa High. Yet these schools are often in our locations and in our townships.
Education, which is supposed to be the key to freedom and which should be our children’s path out of poverty, remains sub-standard. A colleague recently commented to me: we do not have schools in the townships, we only have classrooms clamped together.
She is right. Schools in townships do not have well-resourced libraries as their suburban counterparts do. They do not have the sports fields or the science labs which those schools in the shadow of Table Mountain have.
One can hear the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) blaming communities for vandalism and neglect but even their efforts, as a department, are substandard.
Take for example the latest additional appropriation made by the national ANC government to the Western Cape to improve school infrastructure. Last month, the National treasury provided an additional R115 million to the WCED for infrastructure.
The DA attempted to suggest that the ANC in the Western Cape Legislature did not welcome these additional allocations for this sorely needed investment. Only fools coming from our townships and knowing the reality faced by our learners would reject such intervention.
The objection came in how the money was to be spent.
We cannot spend R115 million on a plaster. We need to go to the root cause of the challenges which is to build classrooms at our schools of bricks and mortar.
When delving deeper into the department’s school infrastructure delivery program, we discovered that of the additional 842 classrooms envisaged by the department only 46 will be in the three schools built from brick and mortar.
The department will build five mobile schools and seven rapid school build projects which will provide 101 additional classrooms.
Yet these classrooms, totaling 94 percent of the new classrooms built in the school infrastructure delivery program, will be temporary structures.
Furthermore, more than 200 of these new temporary structures will be supplied by a company called Moladi which, according to their website, “combines a reusable, patented, recyclable, lightweight plastic injection moulded [sic] formwork system with a SABS approved lightweight aerated mortar mix which produces a cast in situ, [sic] steel reinforced monolithic structure.”
Those of us who regularly visit township schools know that these structures are ill-advised in communities where learners have to dodge bullets and where degradation takes place rapidly.
What we need is for funds identified for infrastructure in our schools not only to build classrooms of bricks and mortar but to ensure our learners are educated in a safe and conducive building.
The DA led WCED has been putting on plasters on our educational system. In freedom month, it therefore makes little sense how our children are to then use education as their gateway to freedom.
Sayed is the ANC’s spokesperson for education in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature.
