WHILE the department of education received R24,9 billion of the total provincial budget of R51,4 billion, some 39 schools in the province have still not received all the textbooks due to them.
This is contrary to what premier Stanley Mathabatha said during his state of the province address, when he claimed that all schools had received their teacher support materials, including textbooks.
To make matters even worse, over 3 000 textbooks were found dumped in an old classroom at Phatlaphadima Special School in Ga-Mashashane last week. Provincial education spokesperson, Pitsi Maloba, said the matter of the dumped textbooks would be investigated. Public interest litigation centre, Section 27, will represent several Limpopo schools in an application against education minister Angie Motshekga.
Section 27 executive director, Mark Heywood, said three months into the school year, 39 schools in the province said they had not received their textbooks. He further said the department had been threatening to dismiss teachers if they released any information about these shortages.
Section 27 wants the court to rule that the department of basic education must provide all outstanding books by April 7. “What we are hoping to achieve is to see that the court makes sure the department of education complies with learners’ basic rights to education,” Heywood said.
Spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), Matome Raphasha, said the union had been trying to persuade education MEC, Dikeledi Magadzi, to ensure the distribution the textbooks, but their plea fell on deaf ears.
Last week some 20 000 Sadtu members marched to the provincial education department with the immediate delivery of outstanding textbooks as one of their demands.
Maloba said his office could not comment on the textbook situation because it was being dealt with by Motshega’s office.
National education spokesperson, Elijah Mhlanga, said his department suspected there was, “a nefarious agenda at play”. He said it was untrue that schools had not received textbooks.
According to Mhlanga, the majority of the 18 000 books alleged to be short, were actually books that schools should have retrieved from learners last year. “We acknowledge that there are schools that reported shortages in February and orders were placed and the books delivered.”
“We are taken aback by the allegations of shortages as it is unusual to have shortages once deliveries have been made on the reported shortages of textbooks. It is surprising to learn that the same organisation (Section 27) that applauded the department provincially and nationally for the successful procurement and delivery of books, is the same organisation that has now turned to court,” he said.
“The evidence at our disposal has revealed that the shortages reported are not even books that are in the catalogue. It appears that the majority of the 39 schools listed in the court application did not check or verify the deliveries of textbooks against the orders placed. They only did so after the advent of the 2014 school year during 2014.
“There is no excuse for these schools not to have reported the shortages, keeping in mind that workshops were held and attended by the representatives of the schools where they were informed about the process to be followed in the event of shortages,” he said.
“We took extraordinary steps to ensure books were delivered on time and any reported shortages were addressed, including a series of meetings with principals in 2013. In those meetings nothing came up on the issues raised in the court papers that we have received,” according to Mhlanga.
