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The Democratic Alliance (DA) will lead a protest for the right to quality education in the streets of Polokwane this coming Monday, 2 July.

We will march to the Provincial Education Department offices in Biccard Street, where a list of demands will be read.

The demands will be based on the principle that the Department must provide every child in Limpopo with the books they need, on time, every year.

This is a march in solidarity with the children of Limpopo who have had no textbooks to read or study with for the last seven months. We will protest against the provincial Department of Education’s failure to get the basics right, their inability to deliver quality education, and for jeopardising the futures of so many young South Africans.

Children in Limpopo have spent 104 school days without textbooks so far this year and have just 62 days left before the exams begin.

Without books, these children are being deprived of their constitutional right to learn, read and acquire knowledge.

Contrary to their claims, the Department of Education did not meet their own deadline for textbook deliveries by this Wednesday. The DA’s activists on the ground have identified more than 129 schools in Limpopo that either did not receive any books, received the wrong books or didn’t receive enough books by last night. This is only from the limited sample of schools we were able to visit yesterday. The chaos is likely to affect hundreds of others as well.

The list of schools we have visited can be found here <https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_-slGu8-FTxdmExbi1GRXJocHc/edit> .

But the real deadline was seven months ago, not yesterday.

The issue here is that for thousands of Limpopo’s children, books just never came this year. And no catch-up plan can make up for a seven-month hole in the school year.

What we witnessed in Limpopo this week was one of the most graphic displays of the neglect of the education of our children since 1994.

We witnessed the mountains of books in warehouses that should have been in the hands of schoolchildren seven months ago.

We also witnessed the careless burning and shredding of books, paid for by government.

One of the history books we salvaged from the scrapheap has a picture of Nelson Mandela on the cover and is entitled “Madiba – The folk hero”. There were also poetry books, collections of Sepedi stories, and books that teach children to count.

A society that is not willing to stand up for the rights of its children fails to take ownership of the future.

We extend an invitation to Section27, Equal Education and all other NGOs that care about education to join us in the streets of Polokwane on Monday.

When and if the right books are ever delivered to Limpopo schools in the right quantity this year, it will not be the end of this saga.

It will be the beginning of the struggle to ensure that Limpopo children are afforded the opportunity to determine their own destinies through access to knowledge. We must fight to own the future!