Dishonouring Madiba wish
The Mandela School of Science & Technology was supposed to stand as an ambitious and striking symbol to its namesake’s love of education, which he firmly believed was the root to any nation’s success.
It was former president Nelson Mandela’s passionate wish that a school be built in his small rural hometown of Mvezo that inspired private investor, Siemens, to pump some R98million into the construction of the environmentally sound school and to cover the school’s running costs for its first three years.
But instead of being a monument to Madiba and his belief that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” it seems the school is turning into a symbol of all that is wrong with our education and general governance systems.
Personal greed, a battle for control of the resources, mismanagement and a complete lack of concern for the would-be beneficiaries of the school – the children – threatens to capsize the project.
The school falls under government’s ambitious R8.2-billion public-private Accelerated School Infrastructure Delivery Initiative (Asidi), established in 2011.
Its noble aim was to replace hundreds of mud or uninhabitable schools and provide water and sanitation to others by government’s self-imposed deadline of March 2016.
The deadlines have shifted numerous times as the embattled department seemed simply unable to achieve its own set targets. In the 2015-2016 year the Eastern Cape education department managed to build just three of a planned 24 schools.
The failure of Asidi can be counted – not just by the number of schools not built or the number of mud or uninhabitable schools still in use – but also in this province’s shocking failure to meet the legal norms and standards for school infrastructure.
School infrastructure regulations set the end of November last year as the deadline for provision of running water, electricity and sanitation to every school, and required that every mud, or otherwise inappropriately built and unsafe school be addressed
The Eastern Cape is in violation of the regulation’s first deadline.
Figures indicate that about 31% of all schools without water supplies nationally are in this province, as well as 91% of those without sanitation facilities – a situation that the NGO Equal Education describes as indefensible.
In the last financial year some R530-million from the education infrastructure grant was unspent and had to be returned to national coffers for redistribution to provinces that need it less but have the capacity to spend the money.
The blame must be shared by the national department whose section 100 takeover of the provincial education department failed dismally to build technical or managerial capacity in the province.
The Mandela school should have been our royal standard – not just in terms of its beauty, functionality and environmentally friendly materials – but also in terms of management, achievement and implementation of its namesake’s educational ambitions for this country.
It’s a sad state of affairs that this government simply cannot get things right for its citizenry, including its most vulnerable. The future will judge us for the lost generation we are creating.