Millions of rands meant for school infrastructure projects were apparently “siphoned” off under the guise of “professional fees” to third party consultants and “implementing agents” in the Eastern Cape.

The basic education department’s annual report records about R550 million in irregular expenditure in the last financial year.

A new report released by Equal Education yesterday, titled Middlemen In Charge of Building Schools, highlighted the failure of the state to build 471 schools since 2009, despite being allocated the funds and securing the assistance of “implementation agents” to do the job.

While only 196 schools have been built since 2007 in the Eastern Cape, schools had opened illegally and used inappropriate materials, including asbestos, mud and zinc.

Equal Education criticised Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s 2018 medium-term budget policy statement relating to education, saying it “provided little relief to the already constrained basic education budget … allocations to infrastructure grants continue to decrease over the medium term and the total basic education budget is growing at a slow rate, when inflation is taken into account”.

However, department of basic education spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said: “We appreciate the allocation from the minister of finance. It is not enough but it will assist.”

Commenting on the new report, Equal Education head researcher Rone McFarlene said there was a great need for government to allocate more money to school infrastructure.

“Issues of underspending and poor spending speaks to the complexity of the problem which more money alone cannot solve. Public money meant for school construction was siphoned off for the fees of third party consultants, and to management fees of implementing agents whose CEOs make millions of rands a year, while Eastern Cape teachers and pupils are in crisis conditions.

“The Eastern Cape department of education, department of basic education, provincial treasury and National Treasury are failing to adequately monitor what is actually being built on the ground.”

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