1,600 EC schools needs toilets

Just under 1,600 of the 5,400 Eastern Cape schools have been red-flagged as having inadequate pit sanitation structures.

A leaked internal provincial education infrastructure report from August 2019 reveals toilets in 1,598 schools in the province are not up to standard.

The confidential report, which DispatchLIVE has seen, shows the struggling provincial education department supplied only 169 public schools with sanitation facilities in the 2018/19 financial year.

DispatchLIVE reported earlier this month that a six-year-old boy escaped with a few bruises and a swollen face when he fell into a hole of what used to be a pit latrine at Lutholi Junior Secondary School in Libode.

The Grade 1 pupil was rescued by other pupils and teachers, covered in human faeces, after he fell into the hole at the school in Sibangweni village, 10km outside Mthatha.

Pupils at the school had been using the exposed holes in the ground for years while others relieve themselves in nearby open fields.

The school governing body chair, Tolekile Noraqa, told the Dispatch on Sunday that 150 parents staged a sit-in at the department’s Mthatha offices on Thursday to protest the violation of human rights.

“We hired nine taxis to travel there. The education MEC, Fundile Gade, promised us a contractor will be on site on Monday. If they do not come we will close their offices and they won’t be able to work,” Noraqa warned.

Lutholi is one of 60 schools in the province that the education lobby group, Equal Education (EE), red-flagged in 2016 for poor infrastructure. The boy is the latest pupil to fall into a pit latrine at school.

Lumka Mkhethwa, 5, died in a broken pit latrine at her Mbizana school in March 2018.

Education spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima on Sunday said the department was running Sanitation Appropriate for Education (Safe) and Infrastructure Rollout projects to address sanitation challenges in provincial schools. “The initiative was established in response to the directive by president Cyril Ramaphosa for the eradication of all unsafe sanitation facilities in schools.

“The projects are running concurrently. We are trying to deal with the sanitation issues in the province. The infrastructure rollout also prioritises toilets,” said Mtima.

He said the shared initiative of the provincial education and the national basic education departments aims to eradicate a backlog of 272 schools within three years.

“At the moment basic education, together with implementing agents, is busy with procurement processes. We are still far from addressing this thing. We inherited districts without schools, so we are starting from scratch when it comes to toilets,” Mtima said.

EE Eastern Cape organiser Itumeleng Mothlabane said there was “no sense of urgency” when it came to addressing the infrastructure and sanitation backlog in the province.

“In 2018 the department of basic education conducted an audit of sanitation conditions across the country. It found that 1,598 schools only had plain pit latrines or other unacceptable sanitation facilities.

“A couple of months later, the provincial department’s 2018 progress report indicated that the figure is actually 2,158.

“One can only conclude that neither department has a good sense of what the real infrastructure conditions are,” Mothlabane said.

She added: “The provincial department spends a significant proportion of its report explaining that implementing the norms and standards by the stipulated deadlines is not feasible. It largely attributes this to budgetary constraints, noting that it will need an additional R14bn to do so.”

Mothlabane said budgetary constraints remain a challenge for the department.

“This is especially after National Treasury’s decision at the beginning of 2017 to cut R7bn from education infrastructure grants.

“However, it is almost impossible to interrogate the provincial education department’s contention, as it does not provide the costs of different projects and also makes no attempt to suggest what timelines it is able or planning to meet.

“We know that these project lists exist, but it is unclear why these are not included in the annual provincial infrastructure reports,” Mothlabane said.