Sometimes you wonder how government officials can so quickly veer away from the sort of principles that, you’d imagine, would have led them into public service in the first place. Take a little-known court case, which took place in the Grahamstown high court last week.
In that case, the Centre for Child Law, as well as 37 children, took basic education minister Angie Motshekga and the Eastern Cape education department to court on an urgent basis to ask that they be allowed the luxury of going to a public school when the schools reopen next year on January 9.
Motshekga’s department fought grimly to stop this.
Those children are, in some cases, as young as six, others as old as 17. Most are SA citizens, some with a mother from Lesotho and a father from SA, some whose parents are both from SA, and some whose parents have either died or abandoned them.
The common denominator: none of these children has a birth certificate, so the education department either booted them out of school, or barred them entry from the outset. It seems intuitively iniquitous, not least because section 29 of the constitution says that "everyone has the right to a basic education".
In the court papers, Anjuli Maistry, a lawyer for the Centre for Child Law, says that in some cases, the parents didn’t have the money to register their children. In other cases, they couldn’t register the births because "many mothers did not give birth in hospitals and did not see doctors after they gave birth".
Maistry argued that the children "are out of school" and "languish in extreme poverty with little hope or possibility of lifting themselves out of it". The older children have tried to find work, but "have not been able to find work, are idle and feel ashamed".
Take the case of Matabello Moeketsi, 54, a South African living in Dikathole, in Aliwal North, who ended up looking after a four-year-old girl from Lesotho whose mother had died and who had "no-one who wanted to, or who could look after her".
The child grew up and began attending school until one day, in grade 3, she was kicked out because she didn’t have a birth certificate. Moeketsi tried to fix this, but hit a brick wall. "The only other option I can think of is to return [her] to Lesotho. I would never consider this because first, she is part of my family and second, there is no-one there to look after her," she says.
It’s as if saving money is more important and creditable than creating productive members of society
Today, the girl is 11 years old and doesn’t know how to read or write. "Not only is she orphaned, but she is also not schooling. Instead of learning and developing friendships with children her age, she plays alone at home all day," says Moeketsi.
Bongani Sigo, a bricklayer who makes R400 a week, has three children, aged 10, three and two, with his girlfriend, who is from Lesotho. After his first child was born, the government refused to register her birth until his girlfriend got another passport from Lesotho. Then when she got it, Sigo was told he needed to have blood tests to prove he was the father — which would have cost him R2,800. "We simply cannot afford to spend our money on this over food and household essentials. As a result, we have given up on the idea of registering [our daughter’s] birth," he says.
But easily the most disturbing feature of this debacle is government’s jaw-dropping response.
In an affidavit signed in June, Mkuseli Apleni, the former director-general of the home affairs department (who joined the case as an interested party), says the constitutional right to education cannot "be interpreted as broadly as it may first appear".
"It is not a right afforded to each and every child … the right to access basic education by its very nature requires persons to be lawfully present in the country."
Startlingly, Apleni refers to unregistered children who were being educated as "fraudulent learners". As if children as young as six are criminals, intentionally seeking to cheat their way into getting an education.
Apleni also boasts of how, in the Eastern Cape alone, 85,000 "learners were weeded out from the system as not being properly registered, and a saving of R1.46bn was achieved". Again, it’s as if saving this money is a far more important and creditable goal than creating productive members of society. (Apleni quit government in July to join Discovery.)
Yet this week, the high court dismissed the children’s urgent application, effectively dooming the case to crawling through the normal court process. On January 17 they will argue for leave to appeal that decision — a week after the schools open.
And we wonder where it was that our priorities began to go tragically wrong.
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