South Africans have spoken, Ramaphosa must come out of hiding and address the nation on the loadshedding crisis

Please find attached a soundbite by Kevin Mileham MP.

The DA would like to thank each and every South African who participated in the “Power to the People” mass protests against ANC loadshedding and unjust electricity price increases, in Johannesburg and across the country.

Thousands of our compatriots made their voices heard on the National Day of Action against the ANC for the role that the party played in collapsing Eskom and engineering the ongoing electricity crisis.

This is a first of many public action campaigns that the DA will be making until the ANC government wakes up from its slumber and fixes the loadshedding mess that they have created.

A few hours after the end of the DA’s mass action, Eskom escalated its loadshedding scheduling to stage 5 – further underlining the depth of crisis that the country is facing. Conspicuous by his absence in this worsening crisis is the ANC’s ‘Chief Slumberer in Chief’, who also moonlights as the state President – Cyril Ramaphosa.

It has become untenable for Ramaphosa to continue hiding behind the walls of the Union Buildings, while loadshedding is wreaking havoc across the economy, devastating people’s livelihoods and putting national security at risk. Ramaphosa cannot ignore the anger festering across the country and should now come out of hiding and address the nation on the escalating loadshedding crisis.

The real tragedy of South Africa’s electricity crisis is that Ramaphosa has chosen to take the back seat and defer to his disastrous Minister of Energy, Gwede Mantashe. This lack of leadership on the electricity crisis has been at the center of the poor implementation of his Energy Response Plan, six months after it was launched in July 2022.

Ramaphosa’s hurried attempt to paint a positive picture on the progress made by his National Energy Crisis Committee (NECOM) on the implementation of his Energy Response Plan, failed to hide the undeniable reality that they missed key targets and could possibly be trying to save face amidst a progressively worsening electricity crisis.

The DA’s Energy Response Plan Implementation Tracker (hereafter referred to as the Tracker), launched a month after the release of Ramaphosa’s Energy Plan, reveals that practical interventions to increase generation capacity and increase energy availability have either stalled or completely gone off track. Stymied by a NECOM body that is constantly pointing fingers at imaginary foes, the plan has become a political football for the ANC’s warring factions with no clear path towards full implementation.

Amidst this lack of leadership, DA governments are showing the way on how to fix the electricity crisis. Recently, the City of Cape Town initiated a first of its kind initiative to buy electricity from homeowners and businesses who are privately generating power. This has the potential to provide residents with increased protection from loadshedding, in addition to the prevailing system where Cape Town has one stage lower of loadshedding than the rest of the country.

With the looming 2024 national elections, South Africans only have to look at the practical steps that have been taken by DA governments to address loadshedding. Only the DA has a plan to end the electricity crisis and give power back to the people.

PA extortion collapses Joburg coalition talks

In a repeat of the fate that befell Johannesburg last September, the Patriotic Alliance (PA) appears set to hand control of the city back to the African National Congress (ANC). This follows after the PA last night refused to support the current multiparty coalition government unless it got access to the city’s finances through control over the two most lucrative portfolios on the mayoral committee: economic and infrastructure development.

From the start of the current round of negotiations to stave-off a motion of no confidence in Mayor Mpho Phalatse, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has made it clear that we will not hand over the hard-earned taxes paid by the people of Joburg to a party that has patronage extraction as is its goal. Our concern over this possibility only intensified as negotiations progressed, with Gayton McKenzie repeatedly making it clear that his party has no interest in principled governance and exists solely to leverage and abuse any power it obtains to extract corrupt rents. As a result, the current round of negotiations were characterised by the PA’s constant extortionist tactics, apparently designed to play the coalition off against the ANC to get a better deal for itself.

Despite the DA’s concerns over working with a party that already betrayed the multiparty government last September in a failed attempt to let the ANC back into power, we nonetheless undertook weeks of negotiations to explore whether a solution could be found that met the following three conditions:

(1) Protect the multiparty government against a motion of no confidence;
(2) Prevent the PA from obtaining any control over finances and tender processes in Johannesburg; and
(3) Not amount to “rewarding” the PA for its earlier betrayal.

This culminated in an offer that would have placed the PA in substantially the same position it occupied in the coalition before it sold out to the ANC.

But the PA rejected the reasonable compromises that the DA was willing to make. Talks finally collapsed after it became clear that the PA’s only interest all along was to either obtain control over the coffers in order to rob Joburg blind, or to leverage its failure to obtain such control to get a better deal from the ANC.

It is also important to note that, as was the case last September, ActionSA (ASA) is once again complicit in the PA’s attempted extortion of the coalition. While other partners joined the DA in negotiating in good faith, ASA chose to dishonestly attack the DA in public before the negotiations even concluded. This exposes that, like the PA, ASA also abused the negotiating process with an ulterior motive: to score cheap political points against the DA.

It will be disappointing to residents of Johannesburg that ASA was not only willing to hand over control of Joburg’s coffers to the PA, but that it sided with the PA rather than the DA when it became clear that McKenzie’s party was using the negotiations to extort the coalition.

The DA painstakingly built this multiparty government to offer an alternative to ANC rule marked by zero-tolerance for corruption and dishonesty. We did not build it only to be extorted by the PA, aided by ASA, to surrender power over tenders and contracts to people who are every bit as corrupt and dishonest as the ANC.

The DA condemns the PA’s greed and dishonesty in the harshest possible terms for putting the future of the multiparty coalition at risk. We will vote against the motion of no confidence in the mayor today, and will hold accountable any party that chooses to join the ANC at the feeding trough.

Only your vote can reclaim your power from the crooks in Luthuli House

The following remarks were delivered by the Leader of the Democratic Alliance, John Steenhuisen MP, at the DA’s Power To The People march to Luthuli House in Johannesburg today.

Democrats, fellow South Africans,

I am so pleased to see so many of you out here this morning. You look magnificent.

While our country is going through an incredibly tough time, it is inspiring to see that you still have the spirit for this fight. You haven’t given up yet.

If we can keep that spirit alive, I promise you we will overcome not only this electricity challenge, but every other challenge facing South Africa today.

Together we will beat crime, together we will beat unemployment, and together we will beat poor service delivery.

But today’s challenge is the energy crisis, which threatens to derail not only our fragile economy, but our entire project South Africa. Because if we don’t solve this problem soon and end load-shedding for good, our society will start falling apart.

Already we are close to breaking point, and communities across the country have run out of patience. We have to restore power to the people before the situation explodes into chaos.

And that is what today’s march is about. It is about taking back the power from a small elite that has insulated itself from poverty, from crime and from load-shedding, and then placing that power in the hands of the people of South Africa.

That’s where the power belongs in a democracy – in the hands of the people.

So why are we here today, in Library Gardens, across the way from the ANC’s headquarters, Luthuli House?

Why are we not at the Union Buildings, as some have asked?

Why did we not march to Parliament, or to Eskom’s head office, Megawatt Park?

Why did we choose to bring the fight against load-shedding and the destruction of Eskom here to the ANC?

The answer is simple: If you are serious about tackling the problem, you need to go straight to the source. And that building there, Luthuli House, is ground zero of our electricity crisis.

That is where the destruction of Eskom was engineered through terrible, outdated policy, through disgusting greed and corruption and, above all, through the deployment of useless and often criminal cadres to the state power utility.

Almost every single problem that has beset Eskom and has brought about fifteen years of load-shedding can be traced back directly to the ANC’s cadre deployment programme.

By their own shameless admission, the intention of cadre deployment is to control every single aspect of the state from inside those party headquarters across the street. They deliberately set out to hijack for the ANC the power that belongs in our state institutions.

That is a blatant violation of the very first principle of our democracy: the separation of party and state. And they’ve never even tried to hide this.

What you see happening to Eskom now – the looting, the purge of skilled staff, the neglect of infrastructure and the complete lack of a long-term plan – is the only way cadre deployment could ever unfold. And the DA has been warning about this for decades.

Every decision to delay the building of new power stations or to delay the procurement of electricity from other sources, every decision to put off station maintenance until things started falling apart, every corrupt contract issued to a connected crony, was either made inside that building, or by an ANC cadre deployed by a committee that sat inside that building.

That is why we are here at Luthuli House today, and not at Megawatt Park or the Union Buildings, or Parliament.

Our country’s electricity supply wasn’t destroyed by Eskom Cadre Deployment, or by Government Cadre Deployment. It was destroyed by ANC Cadre Deployment.

And while that destruction was taking place, some people got very rich.

Most of you will know about the looting that took place – and still continues to take place – around the construction of South Africa’s two largest coal power stations, Medupi and Kusile. But it is worth repeating, now that we are standing at the very scene of the crime.

When those power stations were being planned, the ANC’s front company, Chancellor House, bought a stake in Hitachi Power Africa, and then quickly made sure Hitachi would get the mega-contract worth billions of rands to supply the boilers to those two stations.

It was reported all the way back in 2015 that this deal gave Chancellor House – or let’s just call them what they are: the ANC – a staggering 5000% return on their investment.

That’s a massive profit on the back of crooked contracts. And that wasn’t a government profit, or an Eskom profit. That was purely an ANC profit.

Today, fifteen years after those corrupt boiler contracts were awarded, these stations are still not fully operational. As we speak, Kusile is facing critical structural threats and has five of its six units out of commission.

Those two enormous coal stations were meant to solve all our energy problems, and nothing else was added to the grid in the meantime. But thanks to the greed, the incompetence and the ancient Cold War-era world view of the cadres in that building, Eskom now produces less power than it did before they started building them.

That’s why load-shedding has steadily increased every year for the past five years, instead of getting less.

That’s why we had 200 days of power cuts last year.

That’s why you now have to deal with Stage 6 load-shedding, week after week, and have been told to expect permanent power cuts for at least the next two years.

And that’s why you are expected to pay 19% more from April for the little electricity you receive, plus another 12% next year. You have to pay more to make up for their corruption, incompetence and failed policies.

That is the price of cadre deployment. That is the price South Africa has to pay for the party in that building.

But I’ll tell you who doesn’t have to deal with Stage 6 – or any stage for that matter – and who won’t have to worry about any tariff increases. President Ramaphosa and his cabinet of pampered ANC ministers, that’s who.

You see, while they’ve made you pay for their failures, they have exempted themselves from all these consequences.

ANC ministers don’t get load-shed at all at their official residences. And why not, you may wonder? Apparently because they are so important that they need to have power 24/7.

We are told that their need for uninterrupted electricity is in fact more important than that of hospitals, old age homes, businesses, schools or any of the things that keep our economy afloat and our people alive.

In addition, these pampered ministers all have generators purchased for them by Minister De Lille’s department and paid for by you, and she has given them hundreds of thousands of rands worth of free diesel to run their free generators.

And when Nersa says you must pay 19% more and then another 12% more, on top of 650% increase you’ve already paid these past 15 years, they don’t care. Because they don’t even pay for their electricity. You do, for all of it.

So why would these ministers feel any urgency to fix a situation that doesn’t affect them at all?

And why would the people inside that building stop doing what they’ve been doing all these years when it’s been so rewarding for them?

Why would they stop deploying crooks to Eskom who let the party get rich off Medupi and Kusile?

Why would they stop deploying the crooks who let the Guptas plunder Eskom for years?

And why would they stop deploying the crooks who still want to tie South Africa to the Russians for decades in a nuclear deal?

They won’t change a thing, because enrichment is the only reason they’re in government.

So that change is going to have to be forced by you.

It is a simple binary choice: Either the ANC, or a prosperous South Africa with electricity. You can’t have both.

Luckily we’re just over a year out from the most important election any of you will ever vote in, and that is where you will get to make this choice.

If we want to end load-shedding, we have to start ANC-shedding. And that will only happen if you remember on voting day exactly what they did to you.

Don’t be fooled if they run the diesel turbines for weeks around elections to temporarily halt load-shedding. Don’t be fooled if Stage 6 suddenly becomes Stage 2.

Remember them at their worst, because that is what it will undoubtedly return to if they are given another chance.

Today we say: No more. They’ve been given their last chance. They are finished.

Next year they can all clear out their offices at the Union Buildings. Next year we will be done with the ANC, and we will start building the South Africa we all want to see.

2024 is the year you take the power back.

Thank you.

Sergey Lavrov’s visit poses significant risk to South Africa’s economic and trade relations

The red carpet rollout for Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, at Waterkloof Air Force Base by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, is a dangerous foreign policy stunt that risks compromising South Africa’s diplomatic ties with our most important trading partners.

By acceding to Lavrov’s visit to South Africa as Vladimir Putin’s emissary, Pandor and the ANC government have dispelled any notion that they are a neutral arbiter on Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine. Pandor and the ANC have willingly agreed to become underwriters of Russian aggression in Ukraine – an invasion that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and damaged major power installations.

The dangerous message that the ANC government is communicating to our largest trading partners from the US, Germany, Japan to the UK is that South Africa is prepared to compromise relations with them in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Even if alliance with the Kremlin carries with it significant economic risk, the ANC is prepared to crater the South African economy in support of Putin’s imperial ambitions.

Thanks to the ANC, South Africa’s geopolitical gravitas has been severely compromised by this ill-advised walk of shame with Russia.

The DA has consistently said that withdrawal from Ukraine by Russia is non-negotiable and should be implemented as a matter of urgency. Instead, the ANC government has chosen to pander to Moscow based on some outdated ideology of ‘comradeship’ that does not serve South Africa’s interests in any way.

If there is any sense left in the ANC government, they should start acting in South Africa’s best interest and stop pandering to Russia’s silly war games. Now is not the time to appease Putin’s war mongering impulses, we need to stand with the people of Ukraine in resisting the madness from Russia’s Kremlin.

Minister Didiza and Eskom must release agriculture plan

Note to editors: Please find attached soundbite by Noko Masipa MP

While farmers across the country continue to suffer under ANC-engineered rolling blackouts, the Minister of Agriculture Land Reform and Rural Development, Thoko Didiza is yet to release a plan to assist the agriculture sector.

Last week Eskom announced that there was a positive engagement with the Minister and the sector, yet no plan has been tabled.

This is not good enough.

The cost incurred by continuous loadshedding can never be recovered. It can take farmers up to five years to fully recover from one season’s crop failure. Where mitigation plans are in place, they must be shared and executed immediately to avoid a disaster situation.

Farmers in the Northern Cape have recently experienced fires, whilst they have just survived the locust outbreak and almost 11 years of drought. Most emerging farmers who bought their farms through bank loans are selling their farms because the promised new dawn is proving to be very dark.

South African farmers’ support to the nation comes with a debt of over R130 billion because, unlike their EU and American competitors, South African farmers don’t receive any subsidy and secondly South Africa has only 12% arable land.

It is now of crucial importance – for the fate of the farming sector as well as food security – that the minister not only releases her plan, but also implements it as soon as possible.

The DA’s proposed plan includes, amongst others, the following:

  • Ringfence and declare Eskom a national disaster
  • Declare agriculture an essential service
  • Protect current harvest season during loadshedding
  • Implement alternative loadhsedding schedules according to commodities and regions, and
  • Finance schemes for disaster and support for alternative energy sources.
  • Additionally, Eskom Ruraflex costs must be adjusted to reflect the lower usage of electricity by farmers. Currently farmers are being charged without the consideration of the impact of loadshedding.

Everything must be done to avert an agriculture disaster. It is now time for the Minister to take action.

Fire Mantashe if you are serious about suspending tariff hikes, Mr President

If President Ramaphosa is serious about wanting NERSA and Eskom to abandon their plans to increase electricity prices by 18.65% on 1 April, he needs to show it by firing Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe.
Whereas he claims his “hands are tied” when it comes to electricity price hikes, they certainly aren’t tied when it comes to several other crucial interventions, the first of which must be firing his useless, obstructive, corrupt, socialist energy minister.
Mantashe is a major obstacle to urgently needed reform of South Africa’s electricity sector.
Without meaningful reform, South Africans will be paying more for electricity either way, whether through price increases or by taking on more Eskom debt.
President Ramaphosa must not take South Africans for fools.
We all know that either electricity price hikes or taxes are needed to pay for the ANC’s incompetence and corruption, and that the only way to bring real relief is to deal with the incompetence and corruption.
If President Ramaphosa is serious about wanting to bring relief to South African households and businesses, he needs to grow a spine and use his considerable constitutional powers to rapidly implement the following reforms as a matter of urgency:
  • Stop political interference in Eskom, preferably by replacing Gwede Mantashe and Pravin Gordhan with capable individuals who understand that socialism has failed and that open markets deliver prosperity.
  • Bring back experienced, skilled engineers at Eskom.
  • Declare a ring-fenced State of Disaster in order to exempt the energy sector from all obstacles to efficient spending and rapid decision-making such as localisation and race-based procurement and employment legislation.
  • Ramp up security at all key Eskom sites and deal decisively and harshly with saboteurs.
  • Unbundle Eskom into separate transmission, distribution and generation entities and open the market for electricity generation to private power producers. A separate transmission grid will be better able to raise finance for expanding the grid.
  • Do everything possible to ramp up private electricity generation, such as removing the 100MW cap, incentivising rooftop solar and solar geysers, and allowing businesses and households to sell energy to the grid.
  • Allow Eskom to import diesel directly.
Of course, if President Ramaphosa really cared about the suffering of South African households and businesses, he needs to end the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment which has produced an incapable state without democratic checks and balances, and which has enabled corruption and state capture on a grand scale.
President Ramaphosa could have instructed all this a long time ago. South Africa didn’t have to get to this level of crisis.
This is why the DA was in court yesterday and today, to have cadre deployment declared unconstitutional and illegal, as per Chief Justice Zondo’s findings.
And it is why in 2024, South Africans are going to take back their power by firing the corrupt ANC.

DA calls for an independent adjudicator on Alexkor mining tender

The Democratic Alliance has written to the Minister of Public Enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, and the CEO of Alexkor, to request that they consider appointing an independent adjudicator to review submissions made under the recently issued Alexkor call for expression of interest to contract diamond miners interested in mining areas along the West Coast of South Africa.

In order to ensure an open and fair tender adjudication process, Alexkor must remove itself from the review process entirely and allow an independent adjudicator to evaluate the submitted bids. Based on the magnitude of the tender, Alexkor cannot afford to have doubts cast on the adjudication process, especially considering the scathing findings that were made by the Zondo Commission on state capture over the Scarlet Sky Investments 60.

In a scathing finding against Alexkor, the Zondo Commission found that a tender that was awarded to Scarlet Sky Investments 60 in 2015, giving it exclusive rights to market and sell the diamonds produced by the Pooling and Sharing Joint Venture (PSJV), a joint venture (JV) between Alexkor and the impoverished Richtersveld community, was irregular as Scarlet Sky Investments had no diamond licence.

With this cloud of irregularity still hanging over Alexkor, it would be fundamentally wrong for Alexkor to play both ‘player and referee’ over an extensive mining tender covering South Africa’s West Coast. If Gordhan is genuinely interested in undoing the legacy of state capture at Alexkor and to set this SOE on a path to recovery, he must ensure that the tender adjudication process is handled by an independent arbiter with no interest in the outcome of the process.

Perhaps even more important is that, a transparent adjudication process on the submitted bids will ensure that the most important constituency in the Alexkor enterprise – the impoverished Richtersveld community, derive as much benefit from mining operations in the area as possible. The Richtersveld community has always been at the receiving end of poor decision making by Alexkor and the Pooling and Sharing Joint Venture (PSJV) which underpins their business partnership with Alexkor. This has to change, starting with this ongoing open call for mining contractors.

Pravin Gordhan shows Parliament the middle finger on the SAA/Takatso deal

Note to editors: Please find attached soundbite by Alf Lees MP

Once again Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Public Enterprises, has shown Parliament the middle finger by refusing to provide information/reports on the SAA/Takatso deal, the airline’s current operational performance and remaining obligations on taxpayers – as directed by SCOPA at its meeting on the 15th of November 2022.

Not only has Gordhan refused to provide the required information and reports on SAA and its new equity partner, he has obfuscated and taken more than two months to provide his non-response, which he was requested to provide in two weeks.

It is astonishing that part of Gordhan’s obfuscation is to claim that he has been waiting for a legal opinion more than two months after appearing before SCOPA.  Any legal practitioner worth their salt would not dare to provide an opinion in favour of Pravin Gordhan withholding information from Parliament and thus being in violation of his Constitutional obligations.

The disdain with which Gordhan, as the Minister of Public Enterprises, treats Parliament is astounding. The question remains, whether or not the SCOPA chair will escalate Gordhan’s malfeasance to the Speaker of Parliament and the Deputy President, the Leader of Government Business, to force him to provide the required information and ensure that Parliament takes whatever disciplinary action against him for failing in this regard.

Failure by Parliament to ensure that Gordhan provides all the information as required will set a dangerous precedent whereby any Minister will be able to refuse to provide information /replies to Parliament whenever they do not wish to do so.

I will write to the Chair of SCOPA, urging him to escalate Gordhan’s malfeasance as well as to obtain an opinion from the Parliament Legal Advisor on Gordhan’s obligation to provide all information and reports required by SCOPA. I will also write to President Cyril Ramaphosa, to demand that he takes action to ensure that Gordhan provides all the information required by Parliament. I will also demand that President Ramaphosa dismiss Gordhan as the Minister of Public Enterprises and not appoint him to any other cabinet position.

Permanent stage 2 – 3 load shedding is an admission of failure

Note to editors: Please find attached English and Afrikaans soundbites by Kevin Mileham MP.

The announcement made by Eskom today that South Africa will be placed on permanent stage 2 or 3 load shedding for the next 2 years is the clearest admission yet by the ANC government and Eskom that they have failed to solve the electricity crisis.

This unprecedented step by Eskom will continue to place an onerous burden on the economy and our citizens. Essentially, South Africans are being asked to stay in the dark for four hours a day while paying extortionate electricity tariffs which are due to rise by 33,77% over the next 16 months.

What is more infuriating is that the ANC government has, for the past week, been telling the country outright lies to the effect that load shedding will be a thing of the past. First, it was Gwede Mantashe who said he could end load shedding in 6 to 12 months, and then Enoch Godongwana who claimed that power cuts will end in 12 to 18 months. Eskom has rubbished these claims and placed the country on permanent load shedding for 2 years with no guarantees after that.

Architects of state capture who were responsible for the wholesale looting and subsequent collapse of Eskom, remain free while South Africans are being forced to bear the burden of permanent load shedding.

The DA rejects this unrelenting punishment of ordinary citizens and it’s precisely why we have declared Wednesday a National Day of Action. We will be marching to Luthuli House to protest against ANC load shedding and unaffordable, unfair electricity price increases. It is time that power is given back to the people!

Report card: Minister Angie Motshekga

Note to editors: Please find attached soundbite by DA Shadow Minister of Basic Education, Baxolile ‘Bax’ Nodada MP

The DA wishes the 2022 matriculants who received their results last week the very best of luck. We hope you enjoy the fruits of your hard work as you take a step further in your careers and the exciting journey ahead towards a bright future.

It is only fair that the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga’s effort also be evaluated.

Report Card

Name: Matsie Angelina “Angie” Motshekga, Minister of Basic Education

Subject Grade Remarks
Foundation phase outcomes D
  • A 2020 report supported the 2016 PIRLS findings that 8 out of 10 grade 4 learners in South Africa could not read for meaning in any language.
  • Due to continuous Covid-19 lockdowns and the disruptions to education, learners are up to two years behind in literacy and numeracy skills.
  • TIMMS revealed that South Africa’s grade 8 learners have a substandard grasp of mathematics when compared to other developing countries.
Teacher development F
  • In 2022, a total 1 575 unqualified  and under-qualified  teachers were teaching in classrooms.
  • A SACMEQ study that measured teacher knowledge revealed that South Africa does not measure up to its African counterparts. South African teachers struggled to pass tests in the subjects they teach with grade 6 teachers achieving results of less than 50% – 41% for mathematics, 37% for reading subjects.
  • The AG found that SACE struggled to produce credible performance reports.
Drop outs F
  • Dropouts remain a major problem. The real 2022 matric pass rate was a mere 54.6%, with a dropout rate of 31.8%.
  • Between 2017-2021 the average annual number of teenage pregnancies was 115 761, and DBE reported that 30% of girls do not return to school after falling pregnant.
  • StatsSA revealed that 21.2% of dropouts are due to poor academic performance.
School safety F
  • Second quarter crime statistic for 2022/23 revealed 83 rapes and 19 murders committed at primary, secondary and high schools, day care facilities, special schools and tertiary institutions.
  • 258 cases of assault/grievous bodily harm and 22 cases of attempted murder occurred on educational premises.
  • 411 gang-related incidents reported to DBE.
  • DBE seeks to remove reporting structures from the regulations for the norms and standards for the Public School Infrastructure Act, which will enable officials to avoid accountability.
  • SAFE initiative deadline to eradicate pit toilets continues to be extended, despite the fact that it was supposed to be eliminated in 2022 – 1 423 schools still have pit toilets.
  • 436 mud schools in the Eastern Cape.
  • 900 schools in KZN still have asbestos roofing despite a 2016 deadline to replace the roofing with safe materials.
  • According to the 2021/22 PFMA report, infrastructure projects on average, are delayed by 27 months, after the initial projected completion date due to DBE’s failure to appoint qualified contractors, ineffective monitoring systems, payment issues, and consequence management failures.
Mother tongue education C
  • Despite numerous local and international studies showing the benefit of mother tongue education, it remains a contentious issue with comparatively few schools with a single medium school of instruction, especially in the indigenous languages.
  • Strides towards the expansion of mother tongue education have been made with IsiXhosa and Sesotho being piloted as language of instruction beyond the foundation phase in the Eastern Cape.
  • Clause 5 of the BELA Bill seeks to disempower SGBs from determining the language policies of their schools. This could be used to target schools that offer a single language of instruction, which would rob learners of their Constitutional right to mother tongue education.
Quality of education D
  • The 2017 OECD Benchmarking report placed South Africa 75th out of 76 countries in term of quality of education.
  • A 2018 study found that South African teachers could not pass simple mathematics and English tests, with some scoring as low as 10% for English first additional language and 5% for maths.
  • Delayed implementation of systemic tests to assess learners’ language and maths skills.
  • 69.9% of public schools do not have any libraries.
  • 35% do not have access to any sports facilities.
  • 58.16% of schools do not have access to computer centres.
  • 80.7% do not have access to laboratory facilities.
  • South Africa scored lowest of 50 countries in the 2016 PIRLS.
  • South Africa compares poorly to other developing countries in the TIMMS survey.
  • 10 667 vacant teacher posts (December 2021).
  • Umalusi’s benchmarking study revealed that the South African curriculum compares quite favourably to other programmes/qualifications. Although quality of teaching was not an aspect of the study, it was raised as a concern during the presentation to the portfolio committee.

Minister Motshekga has ample room for improvement. Although her Department has a number of worthy initiatives, they will not succeed without focus and a concerted effort to address and solve the numerous serious concerns plaguing the South African education system.