The bickering by politicians over the long-delayed payments to more than 150,000 teacher assistants across the country has finally come to an end.
That is if the announcement by basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube yesterday is anything to go by. Gwarube said payments to the assistants working under the basic education employment initiative were being processed from Tuesday. The assistants are deployed in schools and early childhood development centres to help teachers manage school curricula.
The nonpayment of their salaries for months was becoming a crisis in which government departments involved in the initiative pointed fingers at one another instead of prioritising the plight of those affected by the lack of payments.
The department of employment and labour shifted the blame to the basic education department when news emerged that the assistants had not been paid for months. So bad was the situation allowed to degenerate that Gwarube and Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi butted heads over the matter on social media as the problem was turned into a political football between the DA and the ANC in government.
It was an ugly and outrageous public spat between two senior leaders in the government who chose to play blame games while poor people were suffering without pay.
Take, for example, the story of *Paulina, a participant in the initiative, who told this newspaper that she had defaulted on paying rent at her rented backroom in Soshanguve and depended on borrowing money to get to work.
She was one of those who did not get their monthly stipend of R3,500 for two months but couldn’t be bothered with who between the DA and the ANC is responsible for her suffering if they are all in the government. What she wanted was a solution to ensure she could pay her landlord the R2,400 rent she owed for two months. She also wanted to know that her government cares enough to do something about her plight and for those who lead not to engage in spats while she suffers.
We are delighted that sanity has prevailed, with Gwarube stating yesterday that the cause of the delays was to do with the verification of attendance registers. She has promised consequence management for those who were responsible for this blunder.
We welcome this and hope that lessons have been learnt from this debacle by our political leaders not to fiddle when Rome is literally burning because the implications of doing so can be far-reaching.
SowetanLIVE
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