This State of the Nation Address (SONA), the president’s first under the new coalition government, offered a significant opportunity to outline a better developmental pathway for the nation’s future. While we welcome commitments to expand and improve early childhood development (ECD) and early grade literacy, as well as the implementation of the BELA Act, we are ultimately disappointed by the absence of several other priority concerns that plague the basic education sector.
EE has been campaigning for 17 years for learners to access safe and dignified school infrastructure. It is frustrating to note that none of the R940 billion in planned infrastructure spending was explicitly committed to school infrastructure in the SONA. We hope that it will be reflected in the national budget, but if the 2024 MTBPS is to give us any indication, then we are expecting the government to reduce school infrastructure spending by nearly R1 billion in real terms over the next three years.
Total government spending on basic education has declined by more than R6 billion since 2019, after adjusting for inflation. This has occurred amidst increasing learner enrolment and the migration of ECD from the Department of Social Development. Additional budgetary pressures on provincial education departments are expected to accumulate to R176 billion by 2027. This will worsen critical problems like overcrowding, school safety, and poor learner outcomes, especially in working-class communities.
Despite his acknowledgement that education is central to the new government’s apex priorities of reducing poverty and developing the economy, President Ramaphosa offered no assurance that his government will reverse the tide of deteriorating resource provisions for our nation’s future.
He provided no hope to learners at Qonce High, who are forced to attend classes without electricity or functioning toilets. He continued to neglect the plight of learners at Maphutha Secondary School, where dilapidated infrastructure contributes to a dangerous environment that is not conducive to learning and teaching. This SONA failed to provide any semblance of accountability or redress to any of the 2,407 teachers in the Western Cape, whose posts are no longer funded. It is so far removed from the reality of more than 28,000 learners who did not have a school to go to at the beginning of this year.
Perhaps this aloof approach comes after years of failing to hold true to his commitments. We have heard President Ramaphosa in previous SONAs commit to offering coding and robotics programmes in all foundation phase classrooms and eradicating plain pit toilets by 2022. He also previously committed to having a tablet in every learner’s hands by 2025. None of these have come to fruition.
This brazen avoidance of accountability extends beyond the president’s office and deep into our schooling system. A glance at annual reports between 2019/20 and 2023/24 tells us that provincial education departments incurred an accumulated total of nearly R23 billion in Unauthorised, Irregular, Fruitless and Wasteful Expenditure. Far too much of this has occurred without any meaningful consequences enacted upon those responsible. We are extremely concerned about how widespread mediocre financial management opens the door to nefarious corrupt activities. Every cent stolen from the public education system directly undermines our future.
While education departments struggle to hold implementing agents and other profit-driven actors in the education sector accountable for corruption and poor service delivery, we fear that the new coalition government may be rushing into more risky partnerships with actors whose motives do not always align well with the public interest. This is something to be especially wary of in the provision of public goods, like education.
We can, at best, extend cautious optimism to the reforms to TVET curricula to partner with the private sector and combine formal learning with job training. While experiential learning can and should be encouraged and is likely to boost employability, an ill-fitted model can also serve as a wasteful public subsidy to industries and corporations that do not serve developmental goals.
A model that appeared to work well was the teaching assistance programme under the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative. This provided direct employment to young people and meaningful support to under-resourced schools. We are thus disappointed that the President did not commit to its continuation.
South Africa’s children cannot afford another cycle of SONA promises untethered from implementation. If the GNU is to credibly claim a nation that works for all, it must move from vacuous platitudes about the importance of education towards concrete budgetary allocations, measurable timelines, and transparent accountability mechanisms. Until then, the gap between the state’s aspirations and its actions will continue to betray a generation of learners whose future depends on more.
Media Queries: Ayanda Sishi-Wigzell, Equal Education Communications Manager
Email: ayanda@equaleducation.org.za
Cellphone Number: 0768793017
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