Brad Brockman and Daniel Linde
ON March 10 this year, the day after the momentous uprising of university students was triggered at UCT, members of Equal Education (EE) visited Siyibane Senior Primary School in a deep rural area near Collywobbles, outside Dutywa, in the Eastern Cape.
Like UCT, Siyibane is located atop a mountain. The school cannot be reached by car. Each day the principal parks at the highest point possible and traverses a steep hill about 2km long. The school has no water, no electricity and no toilets. Its only physical structure is a three-roomed zinc shack, from which the teachers prepare lessons, teach, conduct their meetings and marking, prepare food for the pupils and convene meetings of the school governing body and parents.
We encountered eight young pupils struggling to ascend the mountainous terrain, fighting to carry a 19kg gas canister with them. The tank was fetched from the principal’s car so that there could be food prepared at the school that day. It was noon. The pupils had been trying to climb the hill since 9am. We carried the tank the rest of the way. It was a struggle for us. It was impossible for them.
During another visit – to Overton Primary near the East London airport – we visited the zinc Grade R classroom. It is so hot and dusty that the children were sick from being there and the teacher, who wears an overall over her dress, takes the pupils outside to learn under a tree.
EE is building a movement in the Eastern Cape. The activists are high school pupils, university students and parents. EE visits schools to evaluate the infrastructure challenges and educate communities about the Regulations Relating to Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure.
The norms and standards is a law adopted by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga in November 2013, which establishes the standards of physical infrastructure for all schools.
Crucially, they contain binding time frames for the provision of that infrastructure.
EE has also been bringing Eastern Cape school communities together to express the importance of the norms and standards.
On March 14, more than 250 teachers, school governing body members, parents and pupils from more than 60 schools gathered at Msobomvu Community Hall in Butterworth. They discussed the time frames in the norms and standards, and the work communities can do with EE to ensure these are complied with.
Parents spoke passionately about the challenges their children face, trying to focus in simmering heat or in overcrowded classrooms, or without safe and dignified toilets to use. Many people had never heard of the norms and standards. Those who had were in schools where EE is mobilised.
Many speakers, particularly teachers and principals, insisted on the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) duty to communicate the plans to deliver school infrastructure.
Provincial implementation plans were in fact sent to the minister by all provincial education MECs in November last year. At the time, the DBE released a statement promising to release the plans once the minister had considered them.
More than four months later, and 16 months after the norms and standards were adopted, the plans for their implementation have still not been released.
To get these implementation plans, today and tomorrow more than 600 EE high school members will sleep outside the DBE’s offices in Pretoria, Parliament in Cape Town and the Eastern Cape Department of Education in Zwelitsha, King William’s Town. The sleep-ins are being held to protest against Motshekga’s failure to release provincial implementation plans for minimum norms and standards, which EE has repeatedly requested.
The legally binding norms and standards state that by November 29 next year, all schools without any access to water, electricity and sanitation need to be provided with these services, and all schools made of mud, wood, metal and asbestos need to be rebuilt. According to the DBE’s latest report, there are still 1 131 schools without electricity, 604 without water and 474 without sanitation.
There are also 11 033 schools using pit latrines. Just over a year ago, Michael Komape, a 6-year-old Grade R pupil in Chebeng Village, Limpopo, died at school when the rusty seat of a pit latrine toilet collapsed under him. Michael’s mother Rosina discovered him.
When she looked down the pit latrine toilet, she saw her son’s hand stretched upwards, and fainted.
Michael’s father James was recently interviewed by journalists. “It is important the plans be released urgently because many children are suffering. Libraries are a long way away, desks are old and broken. The minister not releasing the plans means the standards of safety and infrastructure in schools are as they were when my son died,” he said.
Komape will be joining Equal Education at the sleep-in outside the minister’s office in Pretoria.
EE has expressed its strongest support for the Rhodes Must Fall Movement, which has taken the country by storm under the leadership of black university students.
It holds out the hope of re-imagining our education system at every level.
As EE said in endorsement: “The connections between poor schooling and untransformed campuses are clear.”
The struggle of thousands of high school pupils across the country won the norms and standards for school infrastructure, which has the potential to improve the lives of millions of South African youth. Implementation of these rights is one foundation stone upon which a transformed education system can be built.
l Cape Times sister newspaper The Star extended an invitation to the Department of Basic Education to contribute its own opinion piece on this subject, but had not received its reply by our agreed deadline.
l Brad Brockman is general secretary of Equal Education and Daniel Linde is the deputy head of Equal Education Eastern Cape and an attorney at the Equal Education Law Centre