Western Cape Education Department’s “F” for accountancy
16 January 2025
After approving a balanced budget 10 months ago, promising to employ more teachers this year, the Western Cape Education Department changed its mind and determined that 2400 teacher posts would be scrapped – blaming the situation on a shortage of resources from an incompetent national government.
Today it announced that although the 2400 posts had indeed been scrapped, 477 new teacher posts have been created to alleviate its self-made crisis.
The reason it’s a crisis of the Western Cape’s own making is because the province receives more than enough money from the national fiscus to retain its full complement of teachers, but uses the discretion provinces have to take money away from education and plough it into other projects and programmes.
On the last day of November, at a meeting of the provincial education committee, the province was adamant it had no option but to fire 2400 teachers as it simply had no money. So where did the money for 477 new teachers suddenly spring from? Father Christmas?
politicsweb.co.za
www.politicsweb.co.za