Education department disputes reports that Limpopo schools have not received textbooks

The Department of Basic Education is disputing insinuations that there are schools which have not received textbooks. It is untrue that schools have not received textbooks. More than 6,5million have been delivered in 2014 and an additional 306,000 have been ordered to address reported shortages (see Mail & Guardian report).

The majority of the 18,000 books alleged to be shortages are actually books from previous years which schools were supposed to retrieve from learners at the end of the school year.

We acknowledge that there are schools that have reported shortages in February and orders have been made and delivered. We are taken aback by the alleged shortages as it is unusual to have shortages once deliveries have been made on appropriately reported shortages of textbooks.

It is surprising to learn that the same organisation that applauded the Limpopo Education Department and DBE for the successful procurement and delivery of books is the same organisation that has now turned to the courts. This same NGO even undertook earlier this year to inform the public that they would work with the Departments in resolving all issues regarding textbooks. This NGO has now elected to work with some School Governing Bodies to approach the courts on the same matters they said they would cooperate with the department on.

For the record some of the SGBs have not even reported these shortages to the authorities in Limpopo or DBE. The evidence at our disposal has revealed that the shortages reported are not even books that are in the catalogue. It appears that the majority of the 39 schools listed in the court appears did not check or verify the deliveries of textbooks against the orders placed. They belatedly only did so after the advent of the 2014 school year during 2014.

There is no excuse for these schools not to have reported the shortages to the LDoE, keeping in mind that workshops were held and attended by the representatives of the schools where they were informed about the process to be followed in the event of shortages.

The Department has taken extra ordinary steps to ensure that books are delivered on time and that any reported shortages are addressed. This includes holding a series of meetings with school principals in November and December 2013.

The meetings were called to engage school principals to deal with textbooks procurement, shortages and all other matters regarding textbooks. In those meetings nothing came up on the issues raised in the court papers that we have received.

It should be remembered that the entity to whom the shortages should have been reported is the LDoE to have enabled the LDoE to have timeously placed additional orders with the publishers. It is disingenuous for schools to report shortages to a non-governmental organisation even when a clear process of delivering books has been agreed upon.

It is indeed a sorry state of affairs that these schools did not comply with their obligations to ensure that adequate quantities of textbooks were delivered to these schools to ensure that each and every learner had his or her own textbook in the subjects required to have.

We are left with no option but to suspect that there is a nefarious agenda at play.

The Department continues to welcome reports of shortages from anybody and these are attended to as a matter of urgency.

Statement issued by Elijah Mhlanga, Department of Basic Education, March 31 2014

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