First, where was project management? We now have witch-hunts to determine the "person responsible". Surely, this organisational fact should be known from the beginning? The actual question is: who was put in charge? Or did the government simply take over, get rid of the provincial structures and assume everything would run smoothly?

Second, in any complex process, someone steps in to make sure everything happens correctly. This can even be clerks who see a situation as threatening the performance of their tasks.

Where were the voices of protest from the various officials in the schools and district offices? Or have concerned citizens been pushed out and replaced by those without a care?

We know that service delivery is in decline. Education has end-of-year deadlines and lifelong effects on people's lives, making the government's mismanagement glaringly obvious. The problem is far deeper than can be dealt with by isolated, ad hoc inquiries into one province's textbook delivery.

What's the bet the curriculum gets blamed? Do we need a class legal action by the millions of people affected to force the government to govern? - Dr Louise Holman, industrial psychologist, by e-mail

IN YOUR front-page article yesterday, you reported that "a Limpopo clerk was arrested for dumping hundreds of textbooks ." What I do not understand is why he did this.

Did someone higher up order him to dump the books? Were they unusable for some reason? Was he just too lazy to distribute them?

Or perhaps he did not know how to distribute them?

It smacks of the ANC's habit of giving jobs to party hacks/family/friends regardless of their ability to do the job.