‘ 2013 textbooks sor ted cabinet
THE cabinet has given the assurance that there will be no repeat of the Limpopo textbooks fiasco next year, saying it has adopted measures to ensure school books are delivered on time.
Speaking to journalists on Friday after this week’s cabinet lekgotla, Minister in the Presidency Collins Chabane said the government was confident there would be no delivery problems at the start of the school year in January.
“We can’t guarantee 100%,
We can t guarantee 100%, because if we say 100% we might not meet that target
because if we say 100% we might not meet that target, but at least we think a significant number of textbooks would have been delivered at that time.”
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga was heavily criticised for the textbook debacle, with her detractors calling for her dismissal. Even her colleagues in the ANC national executive committee expressed unhappiness over her handling of the matter.
Chabane said the national and provincial education departments had been instructed to set out “norm and standard procedures” to be followed when procuring textbooks.
“There needs to be a setting of norms and standards by national departments . . . in terms of schools to say: ‘ Look, we need to have textbooks to have been ordered by this date, we need textbooks delivered by this date,’ because if you don’t have those deadlines you will never be aware as to whether there is progress or not.”
Chabane said that at the lekgotla, cabinet had also discussed ways of curbing the escalation of costs in the government ’ s multibillion-rand infrastructure programme.
This sentiment was echoed by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe.
On Friday night he told a conference at the University of Cape Town that departments which handled big infrastructure projects such as health and education would be required to have an in-house capacity to detect inflated tender prices.
“The ministry of health has an in-house engineer, and recently they had public works indicating that the renovations of their head office would cost R23-million.”
Motlanthe said that, unbeknown to officials from public works, the Department of Health’s engineer had checked the figures and said the renovations would only cost R5-million. “So this is something that we are trying to tackle,” Motlanthe said. THE ANC and its alliance partners believe mining companies are to blame for the Marikana tragedy and the ongoing unrest in SA’s mines.
In a statement issued after an alliance meeting on Friday, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi and SACP boss Blade Nzimande accused mining bosses of “fanning up conflict” to weaken unions.
The alliance said there were