Hon Speaker, hon Ministers and Deputy Ministers present, and hon members, I greet you. It gives me great pleasure to participate in such an important debate today on the Department of Basic Education's intervention into the troubled Eastern Cape department of education. The Minister of Basic Education so ably outlined the problems that the Department of Basic Education is experiencing within the Eastern Cape and the interventions that will be made.
It is within the above context that I would like to premise my input, and on the visit of the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education and the select committee to the province on 26 January 2011. I would also like to give our views that are already in the ATC Report - Announcements, Tablings and Committee Reports - that I would like to speak to because a conscious decision was taken to go to these areas.
Education remains an apex priority for the ANC-led government. It remains a pillar that our government wants to use to reach its long-term development goals.
When it comes to the terms of reference of our oversight visit to the Eastern Cape, it was in the spirit of co-operation, because it was both the National Assembly portfolio committee and the National Council of Provinces select committee that visited the province. We assessed the state of readiness of schools in the region and the impact of the extreme weather.
There was also a need to give the provincial department of education support in identifying their challenges and assisting in finding effective solutions. We needed to monitor and support progress in the implementation of pronouncements made in the 2010 state of the nation address for both learners and teachers to be at school, in class, on time, learning and teaching for seven hours per day. There was a need to assess school readiness in terms of learner support material and the workbooks for Quintiles 1 and 2.
The oversight visit coincided with the oversight programme of the provincial legislature which has been conducting oversight visits to selected schools since the commencement of the school year. We in the committees agreed to join our provincial counterparts. At the same time, a national departmental team and the Minister of the national Department of Basic Education were in the province. In our engagements with the chairperson and committee members of the education portfolio committee of the Eastern Cape, they spoke, inter alia, about the changes in the appointment of the new head of department and the MEC for education. Another aspect was the financial and budgetary constraints which saw the department exhaust its R24 million budget allocation and go into overdraft. Also, the school nutrition programme and scholar transport were suspended. Furthermore, there was the suspension of 3 000 temporary teachers within their employ. The stakeholders spoke about infrastructure.
Our recommendations overlapped mostly with the intentions of the department. We recommended a need for the department to have an immediate intervention plan, based on the intergovernmental relations spirit in order to address administrative and financial challenges facing the province. We further recommended that the suspension of temporary teachers and the school nutrition and scholar transport programmes be lifted.
We, as the ANC, regret that the matter regarding temporary teachers was dragged to court, and this may affect the intervention plan by the department, although the suspensions were lifted.
Before I commend the department on the stand it took as the ANC, I would like to make it very clear to the DA ...