Northern Cape has 27 ‘inappropriate’ schools

A TOTAL of 27 schools in the Northern Cape need to be rebuilt as they were built with inappropriate materials.

This emerged in a parliamentary reply from Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to the DA’s Patricia Kopane.

Kopane had enquired about the current backlog for schools requiring sanitation, electricity, water and replacement due to inappropriate materials.

Northern Cape Department of Education spokesperson, Geoffrey van der Merwe, explained yesterday that an inappropriate structure, according to the Norms and Standards for Public Schools, referred to a school built entirely from mud as well as those built entirely from materials such as asbestos, metal and wood.

“Currently there are still 27 inappropriate structures within the Northern Cape, of which three schools are currently under construction.”

Van der Merwe added that construction on a further four inappropriate structures would start in the coming 2018/19 financial year.

The planning of a further two replacement schools will also start in the coming year.

“Due to the budget cuts only the planning and not the construction for these two new schools will start in the new financial year.”

Nationally there are 566 inappropriate structure schools that need to be replaced, most of them in the Eastern Cape with 471 such schools.

According to Motshekga, 205 schools built of inappropriate material were due to be completed by the end of the 2017/2018 financial year. A total of 57 schools built of entirely inappropriate material were targeted to be completed in 2018/2019 and 48 others in 2019/2020.

“The remaining schools built with entirely inappropriate material are going to be replaced in the outer years as the backlogs are huge and not all the schools could be addressed within the current MTEF (medium-term expenditure framework) due to financial constraints,” she said.

During her question to the Minister of Education, Kopane also enquired about schools that do not have sanitation, electricity and water.

According to Motshekga’s reply there are no schools in the Northern Cape that do not have sanitation, electricity or water.

Motshekga’s reply comes amid President Cyril Ramaphosa’s directive to her in March to “conduct an audit of all learning facilities with unsafe structures, especially unsafe ablution facilities, within a month and to present him with a plan to rectify the challenges, as an emergency interim measure while rolling out proper infrastructure, within three months”.

The directive was sparked by the drowning of five-year-old Lumka Mketwa in a pit latrine at Luna Primary School in Bizana, Eastern Cape.

According to a preliminary report 55 schools in the Northern Cape still have pit toilets.

During an urgent Council of Education Ministers meeting recently it was revealed that of the Province’s 541 schools, 55 have pit toilets, 41 have enviro loos, 84 have VIP toilets, 127 have flush toilets with a septic tank, 343 have flush toilets municipal, five have mobile toilets and one has chemical toilets.

During this year’s budget speech, the MEC for Finance, Mac Jack, announced that a total of R1.5 billion for the Education Infrastructure Grant had been provided over the MTEF in order to deliver the required school infrastructure, as well as maintain current infrastructure.