MATSHIDISO LENCOASA | We must build the schools the Class of 1976 fought for

Fifty years ago, Soweto became the heart of the struggle for education rooted in dignity and equality.

Hundreds of young people gave their lives in that fight. The Class of 1976 fought against a system that treated black children as less deserving of dignity, opportunity and freedom.

The violent regime these children went up against wielded various tools of oppression, including the education budget, where it invested an average of R1,211 a year on each white learner, compared with a measly R146 a year on each black learner.

Many of us in the born-free generation have walked through doors the Class of 1976 suffered to open, aided by redistributive gains like no-fee schools. However, we risk betraying the sacrifice of the Class of 1976 if we allow education inequality to remain the inheritance of another generation.

If apartheid used the education budget as a tool of destruction, democratic SA must wield it as a tool of restoration: restoring dignity, overcoming inequality and building schools worthy of the freedom they fought for. This Youth Day, honouring 1976 must mean using public funding to dismantle the unequal status quo and build an education system worthy of their courage.

A budget keeping inequality alive

The Freedom Charter imagined democratic SA as one where “the doors of learning and culture” opened through education that is “free, compulsory, universal and equal”.

However, today, many learners still pursue this hard-won freedom in overcrowded, dilapidated classrooms and so face undignified barriers that hold our education system from fully realising this aspiration.

While no-fee schools remove some economic barriers to universal education access, the budget undermines this promise when debt-service costs are protected above the investment needed to keep public education genuinely free, universal and equal.

In 2025/26, more than R1 in every R5 of government revenue went to servicing debt. This is inequality reproduced through the budget itself: learners suffer overcrowded, crumbling classrooms while lenders and investors receive the lion’s share of public money.

Over the past five years, basic education funding has failed to keep pace with need, forcing impossible trade-offs: in Gauteng, scholar transport, nutrition and learning materials were cut to protect 3,400 teaching posts amid a R4.5bn deficit.

Meanwhile, despite a “pro-infrastructure” budget, the education infrastructure grant rises only from about R16bn to R16.2bn in 2026/27 — a 1.4% increase that is being eroded by 3.3% inflation. Debt costs grow without building new schools or classrooms.

So with all this expensive debt taken in our name, what do we have to show for it? In a Budget Justice Coalition community outreach in Mofolo North, Soweto, residents told us that their children attend the same schools they attended before democracy, and they remain neglected, overcrowded and characterised by broken windows, unusable toilets and collapsing classrooms.

As a society, we must distinguish between debt that builds a school system for all and debt that drains our nation. Debt that builds would finance new schools and classrooms that future generations will actually use. However, ballooning debt servicing costs while schools decay entrenches the very inequities learners took to the streets to overcome.

Local government funding crisis in our schools

Rising debt-service costs also squeeze the wider public services that schools rely on to function. In Gauteng, this pressure is visible in a growing municipal debt crisis: by the end of March, public schools owed municipalities R583.9m, with electricity already cut to at least 36 schools.

At Julius Sebolai Primary School, a no-fee school in Soweto, electricity disruptions reportedly forced the school to rely on diesel generators costing R8,000 every two days.

In March, 138 schools in Ekurhuleni faced water and electricity cuts over unpaid municipal bills exceeding R81m. Chronic local government underinvestment is one factor compounding municipal debt into disrupted learning.

We effectively have a budget that is closing the doors of learning by squeezing them between national underinvestment in basic education and local government budget failure.

This devastation hits no-fee schools hardest because they cannot legally cushion the blow through compulsory fees. In communities we engaged, parents lamented the pressure of rising “voluntary donations” at schools meant to be free, to make up for a state rolling back its investment in its people.

Turning the budget into a tool for equality

The Class of 1976 did not lay down their lives for freedom only for the budget to keep apartheid’s education inequalities alive. Fortunately, we can still course-correct, wielding the budget as a tool to undo inequality rather than a machine that reproduces it.

If the government borrows in our name, that debt must build classrooms and safe schools, not merely reassure markets while learners are neglected.

Parliament must insist that every major budget decision affecting learners, including the debt government takes on in their name, undergo participatory human rights impact assessments to ensure public money builds, rather than regresses, an equitable education system worthy of the Class of 1976’s sacrifice.