SACP Western Cape statement on the resignation of Debbie Schafer and Alan Winde's new cabinet
25 April 2022
The South African Communist Party (SACP) welcomes the long overdue resignation of Debbie Schafer as the MEC for Education. She leaves a very low bar for her successor, David Maynier, to clear.
As she lurched from scandal to scandal of her own making, she neglected the most important function of her department – to increase access to quality education for all in the Western Cape, with a particular focus on the poor. In fact, every matric of her performance in her portfolio decreased to such an extent that it is entirely appropriate for her to own the moniker "Debbie Downer".
Debbie has closed schools in working-class areas, restricted access to education for the mainly poor by leaving thousands of learners unplaced. Not only has this access to quality education decreased under her leadership, but the matric results of several years also shows that the matric results of the Western Cape, a province with the advantages of the legacy of colonial educational infrastructure, has plummeted from number one to number three in the country.
The only category that has shown an increase under her tenure is that of financial mismanagement. Debbie's Western Cape Education Department has been found to have irregularly awarded contracts for PPE to the value of R54 million – enough money to open several world class schools in Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, or in the much neglected rural communities in the province. Even worse, rather than spending the remainder of her annual budget (R350 million) on building schools or instituting programmes to support teachers and school communities, her department returned that vast sum of money to the government. Whenever the WCED and Debbie said that there was no money, those were words spoken with a forked tongue.