Shortage of principals in KZN

The feckless stewardship of KZN Education MEC Mbali Frazer is causing the wheels to fall off a department that is critical for the future of our children, our province and our country.

Having teachers in classrooms is a basic requirement, yet the MEC is not even able to ensure this much.

This while KZN does not have a shortage of qualified teachers, with many sitting at home unemployed and some even had their teaching qualifications paid for by government, in the form of the Funza Lushaka Programme.

Responses to parliamentary questions by the DA late last year showed that 685 KZN schools did not have full-time principals.

It also revealed that the department was short of 389 deputy principals, 1 215 heads of departments and 909 level-one teachers. Not filling vacancies is severely detrimental to our pupils. It diminishes the quality of education and leads to instability in schools.

During a press briefing in December last year, Premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube stated that vacancies would be filled by January 15, 2024. This appears to be another fable from KZN’s Taliban faction ANC government.

Then there is the unholy relationship between a particular teacher union and the ANC that has seen allegations of corrupt recruitment processes, if and when vacancies eventually reach the point of being advertised and filled.

While millions of KZN’s pupils are unwittingly disadvantaged due to inadequate political leadership, Frazer and the Department of Education (DoE) continue to blame budget cuts.

Yet, the reality is that the DoE coughed up R20 million for what appear to be ANC election campaigns under the guise of job creation and crime-fighting initiatives.

The DA has consistently spoken about the Good Quality Triad in education. This includes sound leadership at the apex, good parental involvement and well-built and maintained school infrastructure.

Meanwhile, KZN’s DoE continues to fixate on the matric pass rate as a determinant to its success, to the detriment of these critical areas and the quality of education in lower grades.

The DA has repeatedly called for the MEC to be fired and the department to be placed under provincial administration.

Our calls have fallen on deaf ears. The remedy to ensure our children’s futures lies in dealing decisively with an incompetent ANC-run government at the ballot box on May 29.