‘More than 100 pupils share 1 toilet’

Published Sep 10, 2014

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Johannesburg - Sixty-five inmates sharing a single toilet at the overcrowded Joburg Medium A Prison are better off than schoolchildren in Tembisa - where a single toilet is shared by more than 100 pupils.

This is according to Equal Education, the education NGO that has conducted a snap survey at the state of ablution facilities at schools in the area.

The NGO’s Gauteng leader, Adam Bradlow, said the organisation had done an audit of school toilets from the beginning of this month and identified more than 200 blocked or closed toilets in Tembisa alone.

“This includes 50 toilets housed in 10 new pre-fabricated toilet blocks, which the Gauteng Department of Education delivered to five Tembisa high schools in January,” said Bradlow.

The sanitation problem in Tembisa schools first came under the spotlight after a similar survey by EE was conducted this time last year and found that 90 percent of the schools surveyed, which was two-thirds of all high schools in Tembisa, had “insufficient infrastructure or dysfunctional” facilities.

“In some schools there are days where there are no functioning toilets for students to use,” Bradlow said at the time.

“Many schools have broken or non-functioning taps - sometimes there is no water supply to the toilet blocks. Many schools didn’t have sanitary bins.

“Of those that did, the sanitary bins were often full, resulting in students throwing their sanitary pads on the floor,” he said.

When schools opened for the academic year in January, then Gauteng education MEC Barbara Creecy said the problems with toilet facilities in Tembisa schools were caused by high pupil numbers, old infrastructure and issues with water pressure.

This left many schools without functional toilets and some even resorted to locking the toilet blocks.

When MEC Panyaza Lesufi was appointed after the May 7 election, he said all schools in the province would have functional toilet facilities within the first 100 days of his term.

The 100-day deadline was last month yet, according to Bradlow, “the sanitation crisis at schools in Tembisa has continued unabated”.

Equal Education is planning to march to the department’s head office on Saturday to demand a plan of action and time frames on the issue.

Following the handing over of the memo, Equal Education has given the department 14 days to respond to their demands.

“The (MEC’s) plan should define a standard for the quality of sanitation in each school, provide a timeline for ensuring all schools reach this standard and include accountability measures so we know how much government is spending and which private companies are meant to fix or replace our toilets,” Bradlow said.

The department’s spokeswoman, Phumla Sekhonyane, said the department had identified 580 schools across the province that had challenges with sanitation.

“Contractors were appointed to do work in all of these schools and a budget of R115 million was set aside for this purpose.

Repairs have been completed in 400 of the 580 school identified for repairs,” she said.

“The MEC has seriously reprimanded the managers who dropped the ball on this crucial mandate and a new team with centre project managers was appointed to remedy the delay.

“The MEC remains firm that sanitation deadlines remain non-negotiable. The department is expecting repairs in the remaining 150 schools to be completed by the end of this month.”

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