Minister Motshekga has made it clear that she does not have the political will to deal with the SADTU ‘Jobs for Cash’ scandal.

Yesterday, Minister Motshekga blamed district officials for the selling of teachers’ posts and exonerated SADTU. This flies in the face of the findings contained in her Ministerial Task Team report that sets out, in no uncertain terms, SADTU’s central role in the racket.

The Task Team found that SADTU bosses have captured 6 out 9 provincial education departments, and is using its power to inappropriately influence the appointment of teachers. This is set out most explicitly on page 119 of the Task Team report (emphasis added):

5.2 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE DEPARTMENT OF BASIC EDUCATION AND TEACHER UNIONS

The Department of Basic Education has retained semblances of managerial and administrative control in three of South Africa’s nine Provinces. These are the Free State, the Western Cape and the Northern Cape. In all other Provinces, SADTU is in de facto control. According to the data given to and gathered by the Task Team, this domination by a Union has been achieved by using combinations of the following ways and means:

• through its history as a sector of the liberation movement;

• by being an industrial and adversarial trade union;

• by means of its incorporation of office-based educators as members;
• its use of a repertoire of strategies to coerce teachers, principals, officials and others to accede to its demands;

• by using teacher militancy to pressurise its members to be unionists first and professionals second;

• by practising cadre deployment to ensure that high percentages of managers, decision-makers and others with power and influence in education are placed in well-paid positions where they can prioritise the Union’s interests;

• by using of undue influence at different stages of the appointments process to ensure that its candidates are appointed;

• by holding out the possibility for its prominent members to receive opportunity to achieve high office in the Department, Parliament and the Cabinet;
• by blocking Departmental activities and programmes; and
• using its membership of COSATU to influence the members of the Tripartite Alliance.

Minister Motshekga’s exoneration of SADTU is purely political. It indicates that she is more interested in securing SADTU’s support for Cyril Ramaphosa in the run-up to the ANC conference than rooting out systemic bribery and corruption in the education system.

Now that the Minister has washed her hands of the ‘Jobs for Cash’ scandal, it is up to independent institutions to hold SADTU to account for its central role in the buying and selling of teacher’s posts.

The DA will, therefore, be writing to the Public Protector to request that she investigates systemic bribery and corruption in the education sector at the hands of SADTU.

This doesn’t mean we will stop holding Minister Motshekga’s feet to the fire. We will keep using every parliamentary mechanism at our disposal to force her to act on the ‘Jobs for Cash’ report’s findings.

We cannot allow one union – aided and abetted by a politically compromised Minister – to damage our education system further. The future of South Africa’s children must not be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

 

Issued by DA