KZN education MEC warns about overspending on salaries

KwaZulu-Natal education MEC Sipho Hlomuka has ruled out spending any of its recent budget allocation by the National Treasury on staff salaries, saying the department is already overspending on compensation, which limits its ability to fund other services.

This comes after finance minister Enoch Godongwana allocated R19.2bn to the education and health departments during his revised budget speech this month.

Speaking during a media briefing in Durban on Thursday, Hlomuka said his department would be able to give proper details on its budget only once the provincial government broke down the allocation. However, he did highlight the impact that spending a huge chunk of the current budget on staff remuneration had on funding other school services.

“We cannot continue to overspend on compensation which impacts negatively on other priority areas of the department which then includes the delay of payments of some of the service providers that are not under conditional grants,” said Hlomuka.

“There are services — not nutrition programmes though, because we do have a budget for that — where payments are sometimes delayed because of budget challenges; we do pay them but sometimes at delayed dates.”

The province has the most state schools in the country, with just over 6,000.

Hlomuka said a budget breakdown of the province shows that it spends a large majority on its 86,905 school-based educators, 919 office-based educators and 178 therapists employed under the Employment of Educators Act.

A further 11,240 employees, mostly officials from head office, districts and circuits who are dealing with administration matters, are employed in terms of the Public Service Act.

Remuneration of all this personnel equates to about 82% (R51bn) of the R62bn budget allocated to the department in the current financial year.

That leaves just 18% of the budget to fund other critical projects, services and infrastructure projects.

“R2.2bn (4%) is transferred to schools which leaves the department with R4.3bn (7%) for operations. The rest is related to conditional grants: R2.2bn is for the nutrition programme and R2.3bn for infrastructure and other small programmes that we have, which are also part of that conditional grant,” he said.

Hlomuka added that 52 schools across the province were affected by storms and flooding from November 2024 to date. He said the province provided temporary intervention in many of those schools in the form of mobile classrooms or fixing those schools.

“We have identified 55 mobile classrooms which have been allocated to those schools but there are still other schools that are still waiting for mobile classrooms. We’ve requested our district offices to deal with that. We are busy with procurement processes [and] as soon as finance is finalised we will get service providers to fix those schools.”

Hlomuka raised concerns about the rise in crime in and around schools in the province. He said the department had held a number of engagements in some of the affected communities to urge society to work with them to protect schools and their infrastructure.

“This is an unfortunate situation because it distracts our schools which then affects teaching and learning. Tomorrow we will be saying there is no conducive environment in our schools.”

He welcomed the support of provincial government in this regard, including the commitments taken during the provincial crime summit around school safety.

He further addressed the issue of violence in schools that has plagued the province recently, including reports of corporal punishment and violence among pupils, as has been the case in Centenary Secondary and Mdingi High School.

“We will assist and empower schools to identify and resolve issues at the local level but if they fail it will be escalated to the district and then to the province because we want to ensure that we deal with all these challenges together.”

He added that the department was working with other departments like social development, justice and other law enforcement on a number of programmes that deal with bullying.

“There are many factors that contribute to bullying, some of which are issues that are outside the school but we sometimes find ourselves dealing with those challenges, hence we need to also work with traditional leadership.”

He said the investigation into the incident at Centenary High school, widely reported to be as a result of racial tensions in the school, was yet to be finalised.

“Remember the investigation process needs to be in depth to understand the real cause and also what are the contributing factors so that we don’t deal with just one incident but we deal with it comprehensively. That investigation can also assist us to deal with other schools that might be affected by the same incident that took place in Centenary.”

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