The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has once again made promises to eradicate the problem of pit toilets within South Africa's schools.
This has been an ongoing initiative as part of the Department's plans to improve school infrastructure, which has been a long-standing issue in a number of schools across the country.
According to the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, government has "taken action to fast-track the provision of school infrastructure."
Motshekga briefed the media on Sunday, 26 March 2023, regarding developments in the Basic Education Sector, which included an update on infrastructure issues at schools.
The Minister announced that the Department has plans to get rid of pit toilets by 2025.
While this sounds hopeful, the Department made that same promise last year, stating that pit toilets would be eradicated by 2023, through its Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE) initiative.
The Sanitation Appropriate for Education (SAFE) initiative aims to replace all basic pit toilets with appropriate sanitation in accordance with the Norms and Standards for school infrastructure.
South African schools have faced issues regarding appropriate sanitation facilities for many years and this has sometimes resulted in learners unfortunately losing their lives or sustaining serious injuries due to inappropriate sanitation facilities, such as pit toilets.
Initial research to solve the issue of inappropriate sanitation was done ten years ago and over the years, there have been backlogs in the improvement of school infrastructure, which has caused Provincial Departments to miss the deadline in which schools were no longer supposed to have pit toilets.
Tsukudu Moroeng, from the Legal Resources Centre stated that missing the stipulated deadlines to meet the regulations of the Norms and Standards for school infrastructure means that learners' rights to basic education is being breached, and imposes on their right to dignity.
In 2013, the Department adopted the Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for public school infrastructure which banned pit toilets at schools and created a legal responsibility for the Department and provincial departments to eradicate them.
At Sunday's media briefing, Motshekga stated that the Education Sector has been working on programmes to roll-out school infrastructure across the country, but that the matter became even more urgent after Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, as they were faced with a major overcrowding crisis that needed urgent addressing.
In a bid to fast-track the provision of improving infrastructure in schools that are in desperate need, the Department has taken action on two fronts.
“The first is we increased the technical capacity of officials in the infrastructure team by recruiting five built environment specialists, including a head of infrastructure, who are solely focused on implementing our infrastructure projects.
“Secondly, as you are aware, the President launched the Sanitation Appropriate For Education (SAFE) initiative to specifically address the infrastructure backlog in our schools. The rapid and successful rollout of Grade R in our schools meant that just under 4000 schools were found to be lacking in either age-appropriate infrastructure, in particular, or adequate infrastructure in general,” said the Minister.
Despite all this work the Department says it has done to improve and/or eradicate the problem of poor school infrastructure, it has missed several of the previously stipulated deadlines.
In the latest incident, four-year-old Langalam Viki, a Grade R learner, drowned in a pit latrine toilet in Vaalbank in Eastern Cape earlier this month.
The Minister reported that the school where Langalam died has been provided with new South African National Standards approved infrastructure, meaning the school has new toilets.
Motshekga said the Department has identified 3,398 schools countrywide with pit latrine toilets, since the implementation of the SAFE initiative.
“Since that time, we have delivered 2 478 projects to schools across the country [and] during this period, we had the Covid pandemic which forced the lockdown of the country and significantly impacted implementation on the ground,” Motshekga said.
