Hon House Chair, hon Minister and hon Deputy Minister, 38 years ago, the National Cultural Liberation Movement, now the Inkatha Freedom Party, was founded. At the time, the political situation was paralysed, waiting for leadership, and the IFP emerged to provide it. We are now in a similar situation of paralysis and the education system shares a fair amount of this paralysis, at the most important levels, including provincial and district levels.
The ongoing power tussle between Sadtu and the Minister of Basic Education is paralysing our education system. The work-to-rule policy of Sadtu has only further crippled the system. The continued politicisation of teacher unions is holding most of the department's policy choices and programmes to ransom. For example, for over four years now, the department has been unable to have simple performance agreements for principals and their deputy principals signed. Competency tests for markers were abandoned at the last minute last year because unions objected to it. This is simply unworkable. The system is crying out for bold, decisive and accountable leadership. Let me turn my focus to the immediate task before us. That is the Budget Vote. This year's budgetary allocation shows that government is spending enough on education. The budget has increased from R16,3 billion to R17,6 billion. The vexing question remains, though: Why are our children still taught so badly? Why are our children still performing poorly in competitive forums? For instance, the recent World Economic Forum ranked our learners at 142 out of 144 countries. That is very bad.
The bulk of this year's budget has been allocated to programmes 4, 5 and 2. These allocations consist mainly of transfers to provincial education departments, for them to address core priorities such as infrastructure, the national school nutrition programme, curriculum implementation and monitoring. However, the main challenge which has continued to fail the Department of Basic Education is that some provinces are still showing signs of poor fiscal discipline.
Last year, for instance, only the Free State, Gauteng and Mpumalanga received unqualified reports. The Eastern Cape and Limpopo received disclaimers. Whilst the picture has somehow improved this year, instances of irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure still persist in most provinces. Therefore we need to put in place more mechanisms that will assist provinces to improve their financial management capacity and their internal controls, especially the serious weakness so prevalent in leadership.
The department's monitoring and delivery unit must play a more effective role in this regard. Our education system will continue struggling if we do not get the basics right. Teachers are at the centre of our struggling school system. Government as a whole has acknowledged that the system lacks sufficient quality teachers. According to Umalusi, many teachers who mark matric papers cannot apply marking tools consistently because their subject knowledge is often poor and inadequate. Research findings of the CDE have indicated that many of the existing teachers are not teaching well and are also poorly managed. The key reason for all this is bad training.
The department has set itself five strategic goals, the first three being the most important: improve quality of teaching and learning; improve quality of early childhood development; and track progress across the education system through regular assessment.
These goals are achievable only if we have well-trained teachers; unfortunately most are not. Many studies have confirmed that poor performance of many teachers is a major reason for the continued bad results, especially in essential subjects.
The debate about the role of teachers leads to another very important question: Are our teachers being adequately remunerated? The IFP welcomes the establishment of the Presidential Remuneration Review Commission as announced by the President during the state of the nation address. One only hopes that this will not go the way of other promised initiatives, which have not been followed up on, the teacher laptops being one of those unkept promises. Rural areas continue to suffer the most. Teachers in the rural areas were promised rural incentives, but this never happened. The IFP supports this Budget Vote. Thank you. [Time expired.] [Applause.]