The Western Cape government’s decision to cut 2,407 teacher posts was debated in the provincial legislature on Thursday.
Following the Western Cape government’s decision to cut 2,407 teacher posts beginning January 2025, the provincial Parliament met on Thursday to debate the matter.
“This government can make better choices, and that’s what we are asking them to do,” said MPL Brett Herron, secretary-general of the GOOD party, which called for the debate.
To save the teachers’ positions, Herron asked the province to rather make budget cuts elsewhere, such as the R5-billion allocated for safety projects over the next three years, or the R21.8-billion for funding innovation in governance.
MEC for education David Maynier said the reduction in teacher posts was an “absolute last resort,” and it follows a shortfall of R1.1-billion rand in national funding. He said the province received only 64% of the cost of a wage agreement negotiated with teachers’ unions in 2023.
Premier Alan Winde said the budget shortfalls were the result of the ANC’s “mismanagement” of the national budget in the last term and a half, with the national government having spent R500-billion rand on bailouts for state owned enterprises.
“We want our fair budget, so that we can employ more teachers, not less,” said Winde.
Khalid Sayed, leader of the ANC in opposition in the legislature, said the reduction in teacher posts cannot be blamed on national budget cuts, but rather the way the province allocates its funds.
“While we understand the need to try and balance the books, this cannot come at the expense of our children, our economy, and South Africa’s future,” he said.
Sayed said only 37% of the provincial budget is allocated to education, compared to the national average of 41%. He said 72% of the provincial education budget is dedicated to staff compensation, compared to the national average of 76%.
“This crisis did not arise overnight,” he said.
Sayed said some classrooms have up to 60 learners per classroom, which will only get worse with the reduction in teacher posts.
Maynier defended the provincial government, saying education has the largest portion of the budget, and R6.3-billion had been added to its education budget in the past three years.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.
Eight Patrol
There was a postman who is always happy. in the other side there is harry who would just stares at the happy postman everyday and asks himself \”What\’s the secret of this man\”.
One day Harry decided to stop the postman and ask him why he\’s always smiling and happy, what he did.
the postman answered:\”Whenever I\’m handing a mail to a women I kisses her and I get more than just a kiss sometimes.\”
Harry liked the idea and went to a poste office and proposed for the job then he got it . In his first delivery Harry was so excited try the kissing thing out, and as he thought, there was a hot women in front of the first door, he went directly towared her and pasted her a kiss staight in the lips, in the middle of that her husband suddenly appeared in front him and asked:\”WTF ARE YOU DOING.\”
\”I\’m just delivering a \’kiss\’ was sent from China\” Harry answered in a sporadic tone.
\”Very nice, you came on time, I want to send a \’Fuck\’ with you to South Africa\” the husband responded while draging Harry into the house.
White Swan
Fun South African Fact: South Africa’s drinking water is rated 3rd best in the world for being “safe and ready to drink”.