As South Africa, particularly Gauteng is mourning and reeling from a horrific scholar transport crash which left 13 pupils dead in Vanderbijlpark on Monday, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in the North West has released an incriminatory report same day, confirming prevalent constitutional rights violations within the province’s scholar transport system.
Speaking on YOU FM Newshour, the commission’s Provincial Manager Shirley Mlombo said that the report was compiled following an extensive investigation involving government departments, civil society, and parents.
“We found that the scholar transport challenges in the North West are systemic and not isolated events
These includes among other overloading, use of unroadworthy vehicles, unreliable scholar transport resulting in learning arriving late at school and also being collected late back home and issues of vetting of driver which does pose a threat to learners using scholar transport all of which we found really collectively amounts to a violation of learners rights,” said Mlombo.
Furthermore, Mlombo said that many schools reported frequent mechanical breakdown of scholar transport vehicles.
“That is due to many of these scholar transport vehicles being unroadworthy.
I recall during the investigative hearing one of the presenters inquiring as to whether these buses retired from regular public transport use and therefore susceptible to regular breakdowns which fails the unreliability of scholar transport in the main,” remarked Mlombo.
The report found that thousands of qualifying learners are deprived of transport, forcing them to walk long distances, arrive late, or drop out of school entirely, while certain categories of needy learners are excluded from the scholar transport system.
Mlombo said that they also discovered that the North West Provincial Treasury has been complicit in some of these failures by failing to take stricter measures to prevent the misuse of public funds.
“We also received reports that pointed to some of the service providers being paid for services that were not rendered and this is something that has reportedly been happening over a period of years resulting in over a R1 billion loss to the department.
Some of the submissions made indicated that there may be corruption that is exacerbating some of the challenges that have been reported.
Indeed, one of the issues that were frequently reported were service providers who present different set of vehicles for purposes of testing and roadworthiness, but when it comes to the day to day roll out of the programme, they use substandard vehicles,” highlighted the provincial manager.
The commission issued strict directives with tight timeframes to both the department of Community Safety and Transport Management and Department of Education to submit a progress report detailing the number of learners now provided with transport, the status of roadworthiness testing, and consequence management measures taken against officials and service providers within 60 days.
In addition, the Provincial Learner Transport Policy must be amended to close gaps regarding eligibility, driver vetting, safety standards, and the regulation of private scholar transport within 180 days and for the departments to establish a functional complaints call centre with whistle-blower protection, eradicate all outstanding payment backlogs, and ensure every learner requiring transport is accommodated within 90 days.
