4 February 2020
Statement from Brett Herron, Western Cape MPL and Secretary-General for GOOD
WESTERN CAPE EDUCATION: PLAYING POLITICS OF DIVISION WITH CHILDREN’S LIVES
The Western Cape Education Department has deliberately engineered an education crisis in the province, with 6000 children reportedly unable to enrol for schooling this year due to alleged budgetary constraints.
A month after Western Cape MEC for Education Debbie Schafer surrendered R41m of the department’s budget in December to help fund the province’s crime plan, she declares that her department doesn’t have enough money due to the rapid rate of urbanisation from the Eastern Cape.
Eight years ago, Schafer’s boss, then Premier Helen Zille, was the subject of a complaint to the Human Rights Commission for raising the same divisive issue, on Twitter, referring to people from the Eastern Cape as “refugees”.
In DA-speak, “refugees” and “people from the Eastern Cape” are code words for Africans.
Schafer knows that urbanisation is a global trend, and they know that Africans were forcibly removed from Cape Town by their apartheid predecessors. But by raising swartgevaar in this crude manner they know, too, that they are appealing to the DA’s core constituency.
The Western Cape is not an independent volkstaat; nor will it ever be. The province is part of a constitutional democracy in which people born in the Eastern Cape have as much right to go to school in Cape Town as people born in Mitchell’s Plain have to live in affordable housing in Rondebosch.
It is the primary duty of Education MECs is to ensure that every child’s constitutional right to education is met.
Schafer has failed her most important task. After giving away money that should have been used to employ teachers, she claims she has no money. It smacks, not of urbanisation, but of rank negligence and incompetence.
Ends…