Bhisho needs R70bn to build better schools

Education faces major infrastructure backlogs as budget allocation shrinks

The provincial department of education needs R70bn to address schools infrastructure challenges – up from R52bn in 2015.

A report by education’s infrastructure department, which the Daily Dispatch has seen, highlights some of the infrastructure failures and achievements between 2014 and this year. In the 2015-16 financial year, R52bn was needed to fix schools. The money shot up to R62bn the following financial year and in2017-18, R65bn was needed.

In the current financial year the backlog stands at R70bn.

This is while the budget allocation for school infrastructure decreased over the same period from R1.8bn to just under R1.5bn in the current financial year.

In an interview with the Dispatch earlier this year, the late education MEC Mandla Makupula stated that with a shrinking budget allocation and an increasing backlog, eradicating inappropriate and unsafe schools was almost impossible.

“The backlog is huge and would not be met by the annual infrastructure budget of R1.5bn that the department received from treasury. While we are busy addressing some of the challenges such as sanitation, water and electricity supply, other challenges arise such as decaying structures,” he said.

Apart from budget constraints, the infrastructure report also cited unfilled senior management posts, non-performance and under-spending as some of the factors that contributed to the slow provision of safe infrastructure to schools.

In the 2015-16 financial year the department had only spent 18% from its R1.8bn budget allocation and 71 projects from the Independent Development Trust were removed due to nonperformance.

At the end of the year the department had failed to spend R530m from its budget and this was taken back by national treasury.

The most recent national education infrastructure management system (NEIMS) report revealed more than half of schools with no electricity and 100% of schools with no sanitation facilities in country are in the Eastern Cape.

The department of basic education revealed that 471 schools in the province were made of inappropriate material.

A report based on research conducted by Equal Education (EE) found that implementing agencies who oversee the construction of schools on behalf of the department were also at the heart of poor school infrastructure delivery.

According to the author of the EE report, Nika Soon-Shiong, while there was undoubtedly a need for government to increase the amount of money allocated to eradicate school infrastructure backlogs in time to meet the norms and standards deadlines, issues of under spending and poor spending speak to the complexity of the problem – one that more money alone cannot solve.

“What we have outlined in this paper is who this money is going to and how that money is being used,” the EE report stated.

“Public money meant for school construction is siphoned to professional fees of third party consultants, and to management fees of implementing agents whose CEOs make millions of rands a year while Eastern Cape teachers and learners languish in crisis conditions,” it added.

Education’s superintendentgeneral Themba Kojana said they would implement the EE’s report recommendations.

Public money meant for school construction is siphoned to professional fees of third party