The department of basic education has not allocated any money towards addressing backlogs for libraries, laboratories, computer centres and nutrition centres at schools. The backlogs for these facilities are projected to add up to R32.6bn.
This emerged during a detailed progress report on school infrastructure that was presented by senior officials of the department to parliament on Tuesday.
According to the presentation, the total cost of the infrastructure backlog is R129bn, which includes R8.6bn for schools requiring libraries, R9.8bn for laboratories, R8.1bn for computer centres and R6.1bn for nutrition centres.
Over and above the R129bn, schools need a further R98.4bn for maintenance.
David van der Westhuijzen, the department’s head of infrastructure, said: “What we have to put on the table is that if we try to quantify the investment required, it’s a huge number. We don’t have that number to spend in any year. We don’t have that type of funding for infrastructure.”
Said Van der Westhuijzen: “What we then said in terms of scenario planning, if we spread this over seven years, then we need to invest R18bn per year. Even the R18bn per year we don’t have.”
He said the magnitude of the challenge needed to be understood, adding: “If we work on a seven-year planning horizon, we need to invest R18bn per year towards infrastructure and R23bn on maintenance, which is significantly higher than the grant that we got — which takes us to R42bn. This is the challenge as we we don’t have R42bn.
He said R13.8bn was allocated to provincial education departments as part of the education infrastructure grant (EIG) in the past financial year, but the departments had to supplement this allocation with their own money, which is referred to as the equitable share.
The Eastern Cape education department was allocated R1.8bn from the EIG but did not contribute a single cent from its own coffers towards school infrastructure.
The only provincial education department that injected a substantial amount of funding from its own budget to school infrastructure was Western Cape, which contributed R1.6bn.
Van der Westhuijzen said they discovered that the moment they implemented a programme known as the Accelerated School Infrastructure Delivery Initiative (Asidi) to address poor sanitation in schools, “some provinces stopped all their sanitation projects”.
“That was never the plan. Asidi was there to assist provincial education departments to enhance their delivery of sanitation projects, but they stopped allocating money to sanitation completely. So that’s a major challenge.”
He said a total of 332 mud schools or schools with inappropriate structures were identified as part of the Asidi programme in 2011 for replacement and 330 had been replaced.
The remaining two are expected to be completed by July.
A total of 1,306 schools had no water supply in 2011, but this number has now been reduced to 1,292.
The remaining 14 schools were expected to be provided with water by the end of the year.
He said another programme, implemented in 2018, targeted 3,395 schools that were reliant on pit toilets and that these had been replaced at 2,728 of these schools.
According to Van der Westhuijzen, the replacement of pit toilets at the remaining 667 schools was expected to be completed by March next year.
But he stressed that the completion of these projects did not imply that all schools now had proper structures and toilets.
“Are there other schools out there with inappropriate buildings? We believe there’s thousands, many of them with asbestos roofs, some of them even with asbestos or other inappropriate walls or even floors.”
He said they had “most probably addressed the core of schools that had no toilets”.
“There’s a huge requirement still for additional appropriate toilets and that is the sanitation programme that must be driven by provinces.”
DA MP Baxolile Nodada said according to the presentation, 0% in funding was allocated for the building of libraries despite the recent results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) indicating that eight in 10 grade four pupils can’t read for meaning.
“This is part of our biggest crisis because ultimately if a child can’t read they are doomed even before they begin. Don’t you think you need to revisit the strategy in terms of what you believe should be allocated so that we are able to prioritise?” he asked.
Responding to Nodada, Van der Westhuijzen said: “If you look at the Pirls and the reading issue, I am not an education specialist, but maybe part of the solution is libraries.
“Whether libraries are still a separate room full of books or whether a library these days is a computer with all e-reading, I don’t know. The people must guide us.”
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