Umm Muhammed Umar

An Eastern Cape court has ordered the provincial Department of Basic Education to provide all schools in the province with stationery and textbooks before the end of March. Attorney Cameron McConnachie, who co-lead the education program at the Legal Resource Centre, discussed the issue with Radio Islam.

McConnachie said that all public schools were affected but some more so than others; the ones that were most affected were the non-fee-paying schools. McConnachie said, “These are the poorest schools, and generally these schools don’t have much budget beyond what is given to them from the department. And so, they really can’t provide stationery and textbooks unless the department provides them.” He added, “Fee paying schools on the other hand, the parents are able to pay some fees, and schools have money to then buy stationery and textbooks. So, it really does affect the poorest schools and those that are really most in need of the station textbooks.”

While schools were returning to some sort of normality following the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, after two years, without learning material precious teaching time and learning time was still being lost. McConnachie said it was tragic. He said that many of the court papers dealt with statements from parents and teachers about the impact it was having on them. Poor families just don’t have money to buy stationery, so children go without. Teachers are lamenting that another whole month has been lost of the approximately 7 weeks that children have been at school.

McConnachie said that they had laid out the importance of the right to basic education. He said that there had been similar previous cases – in Limpopo in 2012, there was the ‘textbook fiasco’. McConnachie said “And so the courts have sort of spoken on this before, and said that textbooks and textbooks do form part of the right to basic education.” He added that the department had not really contested the case. He said, “Their only their main contention was that they just couldn’t deliver them by the end of this month, but they didn’t put up any information as to why they couldn’t do it.”

The court had ordered that the department has to file a report within seven days, which lists all of the schools that still don’t have textbooks, as well as a timeframe for when they would be receiving them. Over 80% of the textbooks were apparently already in the warehouse. McConnachie said, “So we don’t understand why it’s going to take seven weeks to get them from the warehouse to the schools.” He added, “we do sort of have some discussion from the attorneys for the state (which) seems to suggest that they are they will be able to meet the deadline. But we’ll just have to monitor it closely and hope that hope that they do.”

It unfortunately appears that South Africa has reached a stage where the courts have to be approached in order to get the government to do what it was supposed to in the first place.