Make people accountable
The horrific pictures shown on TV recently detailing the condition of the toilet facilities in some of our rural schools has resulted in a serious wake-up call for some of our leading politicians, in particular the president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
This is as it should be, but why now when these facts and pictures have been shown on TV many times over during the past years?
All the ministers have been well aware of the situation, but have been reluctant to do anything about it.
Now suddenly there is an urgent call for waterborne sewerage to be made available throughout the rural areas.
This will be an expensive and time-consuming experience, and it will not be done.
However, remedial action has to be undertaken, not next year, but right now.
Had these toilets been properly planned and built, with lockable doors for privacy, solid seats with a chute depositing waste into pits well behind the buildings and concrete slabs over the pits, this system, although not ideal, would have been acceptable.
This is provided of course there had been adequate maintenance and accountability. Included in the maintenance programme would be the weekly deposit of chemicals into the toilets which would have prevented all unhealthy smells.
But of course accountability and adequate maintenance are not familiar to the ANC.
Every one of these schools has a principal at its head.
Surely a daily inspection of these toilets would have brought to the principal’s notice the broken doors, the broken seats and, in many cases, the complete absence of seats.
The pigsties that these toilets have been allowed to develop into could surely have been prevented.
All these schools have a parents body and surely they could have been available to attend to minor repairs, had they been asked to do so.
After all it was their children whose health was at risk.
But of course with the complete absence of accountability, the situation was allowed to deteriorate to such an extent that children's lives were in danger, and only when a poor little girl fell down an open toilet hole where the seat had long disappeared, and tragically died, was the situation declared sufficiently serious to warrant something being done about it.
How could this be allowed to happen? Shameful!
Again I refer to the absence of accountability.
One of the worst decisions made by the ANC government in 1994 was doing away with school inspectors.
These inspectors would not only inspect the work and progress of the scholars (as they were called then), but would keep an eagle eye on all the school facilities.
Yes, I attended a small farm school for five years. We had pit toilets, but they were always kept clean and tidy.
The inspector made sure that he inspected these and their condition was included in his report of the school. There was accountability. Resuscitating the regular visit by school inspectors to all schools would go a long way towards preventing many of the problems evident in our schools at present.
Trevor Bradfield Walmer Heights, Port Elizabeth