State fails 30 000 EC pupils on transport

THIRTY thousand schoolchildren will have to continue walking long distances to school because the transport department has no money to transport them.

This emerged yesterday in the Bhisho legislature, where transport MEC Weziwe Tikana and other officials were grilled by the portfolio committee about her department’s budget vote for 2017-18.

Tikana said they could not make any adjustments to the R462-million allocation for scholar transport.

Instead, charged Tikana, they needed more money from provincial treasury if the 30 000 pupils are to be included in the programme.

At the moment about 30% of the 110 000 pupils eligible for the taxpayer-funded scholar transport will continue to walk to and from their schools.

According to Tikana, her department’s attempts to lobby treasury for additional funding drew blanks, leaving the department with no choice but to ferry only 77 774 pupils.

“If we do any adjustments to our budget vote now, we will not be able to transport the 77 000 pupils which we are transporting, and any adjustments will result in the department being unable to finish our financial year.”

In her budget speech in March, Tikana told the legislature her department had concluded three-year contracts with 1 948 public transport operators to ferry the 77 000 children.

Yesterday, the committee’s Nomachule Quvile of the UDM raised alarm over the length of the contracts with public transport operators. Quvile wanted to know what would happen when difficulties arose during the three years.

Of the 77 000 pupils transported, 23 000 were in the Amathole district, which has the biggest number of beneficiaries of state-funded scholar transport. Joe Gqabi district had the least beneficiaries, with just more than 6 000 getting a ride.

The two most rural districts in the province – O R Tambo and Alfred Nzo – where scores of pupils walk long distances to get to school, had a surprisingly low number of beneficiaries compared to Amathole, at 13 063 and 9 931 respectively.

It was in the same budget speech that Tikana revealed that numbers of transported pupils in the first quarter of this academic year increased compared to the same period last year.

She did not state how big the increase was. Yesterday, Tikana told the portfolio committee her department’s grant compared to last year had only increased by R10-million “which can never make any significant change on the number of pupils to be transported”. —