Cape Town - Opposition parties in the province have called out the Western Cape government for “playing politics with teachers’ jobs”.
Nearly two weeks have passed since the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) announced its plan to cut approximately 2 400 teachers from its payroll, effective January 2025.
According to the WCED, the decision came after they received only 64% of the cost of the nationally negotiated wage agreement, leaving the province to fund the remaining 36%, resulting in a budget shortfall of R3.8 billion over the next three years.
However, the ANC spokesperson on Education, Khalid Sayed, slammed the WCED, saying Education MEC David Maynier’s reasoning for the cuts was “patently untrue”.
“The claim that the cut is about wage agreements or negotiations is patently untrue. Discussions are still under way. Stop playing the game of blaming the pursuit of a decent wage for educators and public servants as being the cause of the cut in teaching posts,” Sayed said.
The National Treasury said wage negotiations for 2025/26 will start later this month. However, Maynier pointed to the wage agreement that was announced in March 2023 and covered the 2023/24 and the 2024/25 increase.
“We should have received the extra funding to pay for the increase in the national Mid-Term Budget in late 2023. But during the MTBPS, the national government announced that it would not be paying for this agreement in full, despite the national government negotiating it with the unions,” Maynier said.
Parties also called out Premier Alan Winde for a 2019 decision to take over a billion rand from the education and health budgets to fund the first four years of the Western Cape Safety Plan.
GOOD Party secretary-general Brett Herron said another R700m was spent on the same programme in 2023 and 2024. “This despite crime statistics revealing no discernible reductions in crime. This year, the province’s choice to allocate R21.87bn to innovation and R5bn to boost safety interventions over the next three years creates the ‘shortfall’ of R537m for which teachers are being asked to pay with their jobs. It is indefensible.
“It has the option of simply re-directing a small portion of its discretionary funding to education, but if it proceeds with its threat to scrap thousands of posts the provincial government will effectively sentence the province to a return to bantu education-style inequality,” said Herron.
The parties called on the Western Cape government to join hands to fight the teaching cuts, adding it was not too late to save teaching jobs.
Winde responded, saying: “While R1.1bn was reallocated to safety five years ago, which represented just over 1% of the combined health and education budget, the real issue is the lack of sufficient funding from the national government.
"Despite these challenges, we remain committed to ensuring quality education for our learners. Last year, we confronted this crisis in health and had to make similar staffing cuts," he said.
tracy-lynn.ruiters@inl.co.za