Basic education director-general Mathanzima Mweli on Tuesday appealed to South African lawmakers to strengthen legislation to deal with people who target schools during protest action.

Briefing Parliament’s portfolio committee on basic education, Mweli and a delegation from the Limpopo education department, indicated to MPs that teaching and learning was yet to get back to normal in the Vuwani district where 24 schools were destroyed and several others vandalised following community protests over a Municipal Demarcation Board decision to include Vuwani in the Malamulele municipality.

“I think the time has come that a very strong message must go out. We are busy reviewing the South African Schools Act…I think some provision must find expression in that legislation to say that you come near to our schools, you will meet the full might of the law and even the justice system must be merciless to people who destroy State property,” said Mweli.

“It never happened in the history of this country that close to 30 schools were damaged in one week and I’m pleading with you, I’m making a special appeal because you are lawmakers that we need to strengthen our legislation and our justice system must be merciless to people who touch our future.”

Mweli said it was unacceptable that parents were allowed to use their children to fight their battles.

“Some parents they use their children to fight their cause. Let’s restrain them, let’s teach them they cannot do that,” he said.

Speaking on the sidelines of the briefing to journalists, acting head of the basic education department in Limpopo, Beauty Mutheiwana, said learning and teaching had not resumed this week as expected, despite the delivery of mobile classrooms to the area.

“Unfortunately it is not happening as we had anticipated. As we speak, there are still areas where we are still experiencing challenges. However, there are still other areas where education has resumed,” said Mutheiwana.

“Given the current situation, our wish was to say if we had failed to have everyone coming back to school on the 16th, by the 23rd everything would have taken place but we still hopeful by the end of this week we would see improvement in terms of the number of learners who would be coming back.”

She said mid-term examinations, due to start on Friday, would also be affected by the situation.

“Unfortunately, the area that is affected would not be in a position to start…but as part of our catch-up programme as the examination progresses, we will then see what would have happened on the ground and be able to say when do they come in and join the others who are writing but if all fails we’ll have to re-look at the plan in terms of when do they write their mid-term examinations.”

The cost of recovery in terms of destroyed school infrastructure in Vuwani stood at R174.8 million, in terms of early estimates by the Limpopo basic education department. In addition, the cost of deploying 76 mobile classrooms would cost in the region of R27.2 million. The cost of deploying armed and unarmed security guards over a three month period to protect the 27 affected schools was around R3.1 million.

Another R18.9 million would be needed to replace learner and teacher support material.