While education has been receiving a lion’s share of the national budget for years, the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 resulted in drastic budget cuts for the sector.
The government reprioritised COVID-19 crisis and make money available to fight the pandemic.
In the previous financial year, the education sector had its fair financial challenges. The department has over the years come under fire for mud schools in some of the provinces.
While delivering the 2022 Budget Speech, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana announced an additional R24.6 billion for provincial departments of education to cover the shortfalls in the sector.
“In this budget, we are adding R24.6 billion for provincial departments of education to address the shortfalls in the compensation of teachers,” said Godongwana.
This comes after the National Treasury also revealed that the national Department of Basic Education wants to build more schools, repair those damaged during the storms and eradicate some of the mud schools.
When tabling the provincial budget in the Pietermaritzburg Royal Showgrounds On Wednesday, the KwaZulu-Natal Finance MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube announced that education will receive R57.5bn, which is the largest of the provincial budget.
According to Dube-Ncube, R9.1bn will be the infrastructure budget to complete five new and replacement schools in 2022/23 as it took over early childhood centres from the Department of Social Development.
MEC for Education in the province, Kwazi Mshengu, welcomed the allocated budget for the sector. He said they are going to honour all the commitments they have made for the 2022/23 financial year.
“We welcome the budget as allocated of R57.5bn, but the reality is that 90% of the budget is going to salaries of the existing staff, so we are only left with 10% of it to complete the number of commitments such as new building, refurbishing schools, boreholes programme, the ICT programme and scholar transport,” Mshengu said.
Kwazi revealed that this year's expenditure was cut off by R1.5bn compared to last year.
“The projections of the future expenditure will require that we get more funding because of the commitments that we need to keep as the department continues to rise on yearly basis but we will do with what we have and honour the commitments we have made.”
Meanwhile, the Gauteng Education Department also received a major financial boost to fill critical posts and to allow teachers to cope with the growing number of pupils in schools. For 2022/2023 financial year, Gauteng the Education is due to receive R59.7bn
Education expert from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Professor Vimolen Mudaly, said the amount awarded to basic education is minimal.
“The effects of past inequities will take a long time to resolve. The amount awarded to basic education is minimal at the least and I believe that the minister needs to have considered that this sector is critical to South Africa’s future development. We cannot constantly ensure that Eskom is sustained through taxpayers’ money without considering a few specific needs within basic education.
“A large number of schools are dysfunctional due to being under-resourced, ill-equipped and certainly not compliant with 21st century technology. Priority needs to be drawn to these issues. Teacher-learner ratios are not conducive for good pedagogy and a bigger budget will bring in more teachers into schools,” said Mudaly.
He also revealed that the early childhood development (ECD) sector is currently showing tremendous strain with a number of preschools on the verge of being closed because of a lack of funding.
“They need help now. South Africa needs to take a difficult decision about spending more money on education so that we don’t exist in the 19th century bubble while the world is passing us by in terms of innovations. The budget has to be larger and it must cater for individual sectors so that we don’t have all the money going into one pot and from there it gets disbursed at the whim of education officials,” concluded Mudaly.
IOL