A communication breakdown was one of the causes of the Limpopo textbook crisis, the Congress of the People said on Wednesday.

"We are discovering the department does not know what the administrator does as he reports nationally, and he in turn does not know what the MEC is doing," Cope education spokeswoman Mokgadi Raganya said.

"But the two continue to co-exist. This is because there is no legislative framework to regulate the relationship."

Raganya said people in the province were uninformed about the functions of most of the provincial government's departments, especially those that were now under administration.

"While we had hope[d] that the administration will resolve the challenges in the province, now we are losing confidence in the administration as well."

In December 2011, the government placed five Limpopo departments under administration due to them being in financial crisis.

Some schools in the province had been without textbooks since the start of the school year.