Initiative aims to put an end to pit latrines
• President calls on private sector as he launches campaign to eliminate dangerous toilets in schools
President Cyril Ramaphosa launched on Tuesday a campaign to eliminate dangerous school toilets, calling on the private sector to help ensure pit latrines become a relic of the past.
The campaign follows a series of tragedies at schools with unsafe sanitation. The most recent was the death of fiveyear-old Lumka Mkhethwa, who drowned in a pit toilet at her school in Mbizana in the Eastern Cape in March.
“This is an initiative that will save lives and restore the dignity of tens of thousands of our nation’s children, as our constitution demands. [It] will spare generations of young South Africans the indignity, discomfort and danger of using pit latrines and other unsafe facilities in our schools,” Ramaphosa said at the launch.
The Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE) initiative aims to eliminate pit latrines in schools by 2030 and is a partnership between the government, Unicef, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the National Education Collaboration Trust. Ramaphosa said almost 4,000 schools across the country have toilets that need to be replaced.
SAFE has already received funding pledges of more than R45m, along with pro bono provision of professional and technical services, according to the presidency. Private sector commitments are needed to help the department of basic education overcome cuts to school infrastructure grants, which are a direct result of the government’s revenue shortfall and the need to find funds for free higher education.
Lobby group Equal Education said it is ironic that the president has launched the campaign while basic education minister Angie Motshekga continues to resist fixing flaws in the rules governing school infrastructure.
Despite initial assurances from the basic education department’s spokesperson, Elijah Mhlanga, that the minister will abide by July’s high court ruling in Bisho, which set deadlines for fixing school infrastructure, her legal team is now seeking leave to appeal.
It has petitioned the Constitutional Court to hear the matter directly, failing which it is seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal.
“In light of this political movement [SAFE], why fight a decision that says you have to fix schools? We are very disappointed,” said Equal Education Law Centre deputy director Daniel Linde.
The judgment handed down by the Bisho high court on July 18 was the culmination of a long-running campaign by Equal Education to improve school infrastructure. In November 2013, the minister reached a court-sanctioned settlement with Equal Education and published legally binding norms and standards for school infrastructure.
These rules gave the government three years to replace unsafe structures and to ensure schools had appropriate sanitation, water and electricity. But, according to Equal Education, flaws in the minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure allowed the state to indefinitely delay fixing problems in some schools.
The high court upheld Equal Education’s argument and declared these aspects of the rules unconstitutional and invalid, in effect compelling the government to meet the deadlines set out in the law.
The appeal suspends the high court ruling.
Linde said it is difficult to reconcile the president’s initiative with the state’s reluctance to release its plans for fixing school infrastructure, which should have been published by November 2017.
Equal Education used the Promotion of Access to Information Act to obtain the plans but still lacks the one for the Eastern Cape — the province with the worst backlog, he said.