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DA requests urgent meeting with Minister to have her support classification of teaching as an essential service
Millions of learners being deprived of education by teacher strike
Government should show its commitment to our learners and their future





I will be requesting an urgent meeting with the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, to request that she support the classification of teaching as an essential service to prevent the crisis that has befallen our learners today, where many classrooms across the country stand empty due to SADTU members striking, from happening again in the future. This would not mean that those teachers who deserved salary increases would not be able to receive them. The Democratic Alliance (DA) believe that many of our teachers do deserve to be rewarded for their hard efforts in the classroom but that those rewards should be pegged to their teaching performance. As such, I will further request in our meeting that the Minister establish such a review system so that deserving teachers will not be unfairly discriminated against by essential-service status.

Today, millions of learners are without teachers in their classrooms. SADTU members have seen fit to hold our learners' education to ransom in a calculated move intended to have maximum negative impact to demonstrate their power. Last week, the government openly acknowledged the fact that a strike would result in extremely detrimental consequences for our learners, especially the matriculants. After an unusually long holiday of five weeks during the World Cup, one day out of the classroom at this stage of the academic year, is one day too many. This is apart from the principle of the matter that under no circumstances should the education of our children ever be threatened as it violates their constitutional right to a basic education. It is the same constitution that says, according to Section 28 (2), that in every matter concerning a child, the child's interests are of paramount importance.

These constitutional principles should be the chief motivating factor in compelling the government to make teaching an essential service. Furthermore, the Minister should hold President Zuma to his commitment to making education the central priority of his government as he has repeatedly stated. However, if these reasons were not enough, the national government should need no other compulsion to act than SADTU's own intimations that today's strike could be nothing more than a curtain-raiser for far more extensive, crippling action.

During a recent presentation to the portfolio committee for basic education, a senior official of the department indicated that wage negotiations have reached a deadlock which could lead to an indefinite strike. In fact, her exact words were: the strike can last until next year. This weekend, the general-secretary of SADTU, Mr. Mugwena Maluleke, said: Tuesday will be a build-up to a full-blown strike.

It is time for the Minister to exercise her authority and display that she is truly in charge of our education system by supporting the classification of teaching as an essential service and thus exerting control over the department she heads. Performance-based salaries will also enable her to reward those teachers that deserve it and bring salary increases back under the national department's dominion where it is intended to be and not hostage to those who would jeopardize the education of our children.