It has been seven years since five-year-old Limpopo child Michael Komape died an excruciating death after drowning in a pit toilet at Mahlodumela Lower Primary school in Chebeng village, outside Polokwane.
Throughout the seven years the Limpopo department of education and the national department have been embroiled in running court battles with Komape’s parents supported by public sector law firm, Section27, to ensure that pit toilets are eradicated as a matter of urgency to guarantee the safety and dignity of other learners.
After a seven-year battle, the Limpopo High Court handed a judgement compelling the state to provide a list of all schools with pit toilets within 90 days, along with plans to eradicate them.
The provincial and national education departments were ordered to show how funds would be sourced and explain what measures would be implemented “to address schools’ urgent sanitation needs and immediate safety risks, pending the delivery of permanent sanitation measures”.
Basically, the government was provided with a project management blueprint and ordered to do what it was elected to do in the first place. In a scathing judgment, the state was also ordered to provide reports every six months with details of steps taken to implement the revised plans, revised deadlines for eradication along with detailed budgets.
This judgment represents a victory of poor and vulnerable people against a heartless state. This is a government that has failed to respect and protect the right to human dignity of its most vulnerable citizens as guaranteed under section 10 of the Bill of Rights.
In a 2020 reply to a parliamentary question, the minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga, indicated that close to 4,000 South African public schools still used pit toilets and that the department planned to eradicate them by 2022.
However, in anticipation of its limitations, the department kicked the can down the road when it proposed replacing pit toilets at 1,498 schools in the Limpopo province over 14 years. The court found the departmental projections unduly long, unreasonable and unconstitutional. According to the court, the replacement of pit toilets is a national emergency and must be treated accordingly.
It is a further indictment on a government that always claims to care for its citizens that it has taken a court of law to give clarity on an issue any capable and caring government should have expedited with the urgency it deserves.
Pit toilets have no place in democratic South Africa and eradicating them should have been a major priority from 1994 to ensure the protection of the right to human dignity and the right to education, which the continued presence of pit toilets is at odds with.
According to the World Health Organisation, poor sanitation is linked to the transmission of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio, as well as exacerbating stunting.
The minimum uniform norms and standards for public schools infrastructure also compels the government to provide teaching and learning environments by stipulating that “a school must be provided with adequate sanitation facilities that promote health and hygiene and that comply with applicable laws”.
It is unconscionable that in the middle of a deadly pandemic, scandals abound about the misappropriation of funds meant to mitigate the effects of Covid-19. The SIU is currently seized with a matter where the Gauteng Department of Education is alleged to have spent a jaw dropping R431m for decontaminating, disinfecting, deep cleaning and sanitation of 2207 schools and 38 administrative offices.
It has since been revealed that many companies awarded contracts and listed in the Gauteng Expenditure Disclosure reports had no prior expertise or track record in sanitation or deep cleaning. The SIU investigation also revealed that 173 of the appointed 280 contractors were not accredited on the Government Supplier Central Database.
It is clear that the awarding of these tenders was questionable, if not downright corrupt. In other words, money that could have been fruitfully spent elsewhere to ameliorate the plight of the downtrodden was stolen by the ANC elite.
Notwithstanding the astronomical amounts stolen by ANC thieves, the R431m could still have gone some way to kick-start the project of the eradication of pit toilets. With endemic ANC corruption and incompetence, service delivery has taken a serious knock. It is often said that corruption is not a victimless crime.
In the view of Corruption Watch, “not only does corruption affect economic development in terms of economic efficiency and growth, it also affects equitable distribution of resources across the population, increasing income inequalities, undermining the effectiveness of social welfare programmes and ultimately resulting in lower levels of human development”.
The perspicacious observations of Mahatma Gandhi are worth noting in this regard, “the world has enough for everyone’s needs but not everyone’s greed”. It can be surmised that Michael Komape was a victim of ANC greed and corruption, which the Limpopo High Court judgement has sought to redress.
Our country and children deserve a better government that regards their welfare and needs as paramount. Corruption is the enemy of progress and development, and should be fought with the same vigour displayed in the Struggle against apartheid.
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