Pupils at risk: asbestos still found in EC schools
Believed to be more than 1,000 institutions with vestiges of mineral
Asbestos infrastructure blights many parts of the Eastern Cape, raising the risk of people getting sick or even dying.
Asbestos poisoning is why controversial businessman Edwin Sodi, through his company Blackhead Consulting, was appointed to conduct an asbestos audit in the Free State.
The audit did not go according to plan. Sodi and six others now find themselves in court for fraud and corruption amounting to R255m related to the project. Sodi is out on bail of R500,000.
The seizure by the Asset Forfeiture Unit of Bentleys and Ferraris aside, the asbestos risk remains, even at schools.
It is understood there could be more than a thousand schools in the Eastern Cape that still have asbestos roofing, despite a court ruling two years ago ordering the education department to speed up school infrastructure improvements.
Asbestos roofing was banned in SA by then-environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk in 2008. According to the World Health Organisation, tiny asbestos fibres from damaged roofs can get lodged in the lining of lungs, where corrupt cells then cause the cancer mesothelioma.
In a report released in February, Amnesty International SA found that many schools in SA were built of inappropriate materials”. One of these is asbestos.
In 2018, the provincial department of education conceded that it would not be able to meet its deadline to replace asbestos roofing at all schools due to its infrastructure backlog of more than R70.3bn.
The Bhisho high court gave the department three years to replace mud, wood and asbestos structures in the province.
When the Dispatch contacted department spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima on Thursday, he was not sure what had happened since.
He asked for detailed questions to be sent to him. But at the time of writing on Friday he had not responded.
In the wake of the 2018 ruling, the department indicated that R16.1bn was needed to attend to the 1,350 schools with asbestos.
DA MP Yusuf Cassim told the Dispatch on Friday the school infrastructure programme had been a huge failure at national and provincial department level.
Cassim said he would be tabling questions to education MEC Fundile Gade to ask what the current extent of the problem was, what had already been done and what plans were in place to address the issue.
He believed nothing had been done to deal with the asbestos issue in schools.
In the 2019 financial year, the department had a R100m under-expenditure on the infrastructure budget. Even more concerning is that the implementation of infrastructure projects has caused huge losses.
And that’s because of the way the projects were managed by the implementing agents,” Cassim said.
“This is an issue that we are taking up.
“The current infrastructure has been drained by PPE [personal protective gear] expenditure for Covid-19 and that money, which is over R570m, came from the infrastructure budget.”
Cassim said the department had overspent much-needed funds on PPE and “it has created millionaires across the province without benefiting the local economy”.
The department is really to blame because it spent over and above on PPE, draining the infrastructure budget and thus harming the health of our learners.”
Cassim said it was a positive sign the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) was probing tenders that had been awarded during the pandemic.
He said there had been little progress in addressing the infrastructure issue in schools. Most of the structures were falling apart.
The asbestos fibre presents an immediate cancer risk to learners and teachers and the department must address this.
We might have a Covid-19 pandemic, but actuallywe nowface an asbestos cancer pandemic because of the department’s inability to address the problem and that’s why I will table questions to MEC Gade.”
Amnesty International SA found that many schools in SA were built of ‘ inappropriate materials ’. One of these is asbestos