Johannesburg - Equal Education, an organisation advocating for quality and equality in the South African education system, said the Limpopo Department of Education’s failure to meet the March 31 deadline to provide schools with safe sanitation was yet another one in a long list of missed deadlines.
The Department of Basic Education promised to eradicate all pit toilets in schools by 2020, but it failed and pushed the mission to 2023. The deadline has now moved to 2025.
In March, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga vowed to do away with pit toilets at some of the schools across the country.
Equal Education said the national department and its provincial education departments keep on shifting the deadline for safe sanitation in schools.
“Pit toilets were supposed to be completely eliminated by 2020, but the DBE (Department of Basic Education) failed. The deadline was then pushed back to 2023, and now they want to wait until 2025. The DBE keeps setting and missing its own deadlines,” it added.
“The Limpopo education department’s failure to effectively plan and upgrade school sanitation, particularly in priority one schools, shows the government's lack of political will and urgency to address the sanitation crisis in schools. We no longer want to hear excuses, pit toilets must go now,” said Equal Education.
While the government stalled in replacing illegal pit toilets with safe sanitation at schools, Equal Education said learners’ safety and dignity were threatened daily, affecting their experiences of quality schooling.
“The national and provincial education departments had until 2016 to remove and replace all plain pit toilets with safer sanitation. But that deadline was missed while learners continued to endure these illegal sanitation structures in our schools,” it said.
It said that up to so far, all they got was confident promises from the department, but very little urgency and political will in delivering on the promises.
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