The financially constrained KwaZulu-Natal Education department will soon commence with procurement of learning and teaching support materials (LTSM) after receiving an R800 million bailout from the provincial Treasury.
In a joint media briefing in Pietermaritzburg on Thursday, Finance MEC Francois Rodgers announced that he has managed to source the funds for LTSM which will also assist the department in running the final examinations. Rodgers, who had announced a few days earlier that the Education department had no available funds to order textbooks, said after meeting with MEC Sipho Hlomuka, they agreed that the department would receive R800 million to start placing orders for textbooks next year.
“On the LTSM, we are looking at R881m which is what we tried to take out of the baseline of the department. The money includes running the exams. We have taken into account that additional funding will come from the National Treasury during the budget adjustment. The LTSM process can start now,” said Rodgers.
He also highlighted that the Education Department could save up to a billion rand by removing ghost employees from its system. He noted that despite having unfilled positions and retired employees, the salary bill was not decreasing, which was a significant concern.
At the briefing, Hlomuka said his department had already started the LTSM procurement process and was just waiting for the approval from the Treasury to start paying for orders. He said the department also managed to allocate norms and standard funds particularly for quintile 1 to 3 schools, adding that the department was only not ready for matric exams but for all schools.
Last week, Basic Education minister Siviwe Gwarube, who held an urgent meeting with the provincial government in Durban, revealed that paying ghost employees and inflated pupil numbers in schools contributed to the department’s financial crisis.
Gwarube said the reason for the crisis was a historical underinvestment in education but the financial crisis was also compounded by paying ghost employees and for non-existent pupils. She said despite previous manual head count exercises to root out the problem, it persisted because people managed to find new ways of cheating the system.
The department has already commenced the verification of the number of the pupils in schools using a digital process.
It also emerged that the R3.4 billion will be needed in the short term to stabilise the department. However, Rodgers believes as much as R7bn would be required in order to normalise operations.
He said that another reason for the financial mess was the national government’s mistake in approving an unfunded wage bill which cost the provincial fiscus R80bn. He defended his decision to place the department under partial administration, insisting he would not allow the department to spend money it did not have.
In response to the deteriorating education department’s finances, Rodgers placed it under Section 18 interventions provided under the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), with technical support, monitoring, and advocacy from national government for the reprioritisation of resources across the national fiscus.
Gwarube’s urgent visit was prompted by the concerns that the department was sliding into a deep financial crisis ahead of the final matric examinations and had delayed the process for the delivery of textbooks in preparation for the next year’s school calendar.
