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DA calls for debate on what government should provide for education in Parliament
South Africa's learners have been neglected by lack of clarity on government's obligations
Mud schools in the Eastern Cape may force establishment of legal criteria


The Democratic Alliance (DA) shall be proposing a debate be held in Parliament on what exactly constitutes basic education and what the government should be obliged to provide our learners. Since our Constitution was adopted in 1996, the right to an education has been one of the cornerstones of our democracy and an ideal which government should attempt to aspire to ensure that all of our children are able to reach their full potential.

Yet, the realization of this right has been sorely lacking. The case before the High Court in Bisho, where 7 mud schools are taking the provincial department of education to court to provide basic infrastructure, is a watershed case for South Africa. It shall probably reach the Constitutional Court, which may have to determine a set of basic criteria that government should provide in fulfilling this right.

However, that process will take some time. We have waited too long for a proper definition of what government should provide; what constitutes a good education. We cannot afford to let ourselves, and more importantly, our learners, be hampered any further. We have seen the consequences of that approach in the Eastern Cape.

A debate with a view to a final agreement on what government should provide in terms of education needs would allow us to address the dual preoccupations in education: infrastructure and what our children are taught and how, thus the actual quality of their schooling. I shall be proposing a motion in this regard. For the best facilities in the world will not suffice in preparing children for the future if the basics of teaching and learning are not catered for.

The Department of Basic Education is asking Treasury for R40.5 billion to remedy once and for all the infrastructure - building, water, electricity and sanitation - backlogs and shortcomings of our schools across the country. It is a lot of money to ask for and some should indeed be granted: but how much and to address which problem?

In their submission to Parliament's Standing Committee on Appropriation it is clear that Basic Education has not, sixteen long years into our democracy, completed an audit of school shortcomings and therefore has no reliable database on which to base planning and budgeting. In this the information age, having GPS as a technological aid, this Ministry budgets in the dark.

The Ministry has since 2007 been working on a programme called ASIDI. While quite a lot of time, energy and money has been spent, figures indicate that nobody has been flooring the gas pedal to have a genuine acceleration in delivery, as the explosion of the mud-school issue illustrates: there are still 402 mud schools in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal alone.

The most astounding thing is, sixteen years into democracy, we still do not have the skilled engineers, technicians and managers to start and complete large scale projects on scale and on time. We have not invested in training and retaining people with properly calibrated incentives. The South African psyche is to put money into things rather than people.

The proposed education debate would seek to resolve these issues by determining what government should provide and how it should provide it, both by the kind of classrooms it builds and what goes on within those classrooms. The speedy resolution of these issues is the very least we owe to our children