Parliament commits to making final decision on changing the Constitution to better protect learners’ rights, before the end of this year
12 November 2020
Yesterday, Parliament’s Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) committed to, by the end of this year, decide whether or not to support Equal Education (EE) and the Equal Education Law Centre’s (EELC) submission that Section 100 of the Constitution should be changed, to better protect learners’ rights. Section 100 of the Constitution allows national government to intervene in the running of a province if service delivery has broken down in the province.
In 2016, EE and the EELC made a joint written submission to the CRC, a committee responsible for making decisions about changes to the Constitution. Our submission aimed to solve a worrying trend - that national interventions in provincial departments were failing to correct poor service delivery.
The problems with national interventions were first brought to EE and the EELC’s attention in the Eastern Cape. In March 2011, the national government started an intervention in the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDOE) to fix long standing problems such as poor school infrastructure and a shortage of teachers. Five years later, when we made our 2016 submission, there had been little improvement.
There was also confusion about the intervention among government officials - ECDOE officials claimed that the intervention was relaxed in 2016, but Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga then publicly said that it was still in full force.