Heat on Mvula Trust as parents cry foul over ‘unusable’ school toilets

The work of a controversial NGO which has benefited from hundreds of millions of rand in government water and sanitation projects is under scrutiny after parents at an Eastern Cape school cried foul over its “unusable” toilet facilities.

Ntlambela Junior Secondary School in Libode is one of many in the province that has struggled with proper ablution facilities and adequate sanitation.

According to school governing body (SGB) chair Mvuyelwa Fudumele, toilets built by Mvula Trust were leaking and “unusable”.

Since the reopening of schools under lockdown alert level 3, the school has had to rely on two temporary toilet structures — one of which fell over due to strong winds while a male teacher was relieving himself.

Fudumele told the Dispatch that “as result of this ongoing toilet problem” parents closed the school on Monday.

The school accommodates 327 pupils, 11 teachers and 10 non-teaching staff.

Mvula Trust is an implementing agency for a number of government departments, with the education department being its major client in the Eastern Cape.

For more than a decade, the trust has received hundreds of millions of rand worth of projects from both provincial and national governments.

In March 2015, the Dispatch reported that Mvula Trust was awarded a R21m tender to fix broken school hostels without the work being advertised.

A month later, the NGO was awarded a multimillion-rand contract to fix water and sanitation facilities in more than 150 schools in the province.

SGB chair Fudumele said Ntlambela Junior Secondary parents had indicated they would rather keep their children at home to avoid the unhygienic conditions of the toilets at the school.

“These temporary toilets were becoming a problem, they were also blowing away with the wind,” Fudumele said.

He said construction workers were last seen at the school in September 2019.

“The only other time workers arrived was to drop off the temporary toilets,” he said.

Mvula Trust CEO Silas Mbedzi said the construction of toilets at Ntlambela Junior Secondary  “is a project being implemented under Accelerated Schools Infrastructure Development Initiative (Asidi) Batch IV on behalf of the department of basic education”. 

Mbedzi said the project was constructed “and completed but could not be handed over to the school due water ingress into the pits”. 

“This ingress necessitated that the engineers come up with an engineering solution to deal with the water ingress.” 

Mbedzi said the contractor was now on site “implementing the solution”. 

“Practical completion will be achieved soon — within a week or so — and the school will be able to utilise the toilets after that,” Mbedzi said.

Provincial education department spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima said Mvula Trust had informed the school of the delay.

Mtima said measures to prevent sewage from seeping underground were in place.

 "(The) project completion date is set for September 16, 2020.” 

The National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA (Naptosa) in the province said it had escalated the Ntlambela matter to the province’s superintendent general, Themba Kojana.

Naptosa's Eastern Cape CEO, Loyiso Mbinda, wrote an urgent letter to Kojana, “to ensure that Mvula Trust completes the job”. 

In 2017, City Press reported that Mvula Trust received about R650m from the basic education department to build blocks of toilets that cost between R40,000 and R60,000.

In the 2012/13 financial year, the NGO won a multimillion-rand tender from basic education as part of Asidi to build toilets at schools in the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.

In a report this year titled Broken and Unequal, The State of Education in South Africa, Amnesty International said in the Eastern Cape, issues of concern included lack of sufficient toilets for the number of pupils in line with the learner to toilet ratio of 1:30 and a lack of an adequate and/or reliable water supply. — DispatchLIVE