THE community of Olievenhoutbosch, led by local ANC, SACP and South African National Civic Organisation officials, inspect the papers of an alleged illegal school in the area. Bongani Shilubane African News Agency (ANA) THE community of Olievenhoutbosch, led by local ANC, SACP and South African National Civic Organisation officials, inspect the papers of an alleged illegal school in the area. Bongani Shilubane African News Agency (ANA)
Pretoria - Foreigners were ruining the future of learners by building illegal and unregistered private schools in the overcrowded Olievenhoutbosch, residents have said.
The residents yesterday shut down a school. In addition, they appealed to parents to act swiftly and take their children out of all suspicious schools.
They were led by ANC, SACP and South African National Civic Organisation structures in the area. The group walked from one school to another in the township that has seen an increase in small private schools.
They said the demand for school space in Olievenhoutbosch created an opportunity for smart criminals to operate unregistered schools and charge parents monthly fees.
It was not possible that the government would accredit the private schools in RDP houses and back rooms, they said.
The group went to Emmanuel English Private School offering Grade 1 to 7 classes in back rooms. The school has two properties and uses the RDP houses as offices.
The crowd stopped academic proceedings and asked the teachers to call parents to fetch their children. They said there was no certainty that the teachers, mostly foreign nationals, were qualified to teach.
A visibly nervous deputy principal Peter Mokwakwa was confronted and surrounded by community members who rubbished all the documentation he produced as proof of compliance with the laws of the country.
He told the crowd the school was registering with the Department of Education and had made an application for land to the City of Tshwane.
However, the crowd responded that South African law did not allow people to start running schools while they were still registering for them.
The residents looked at the documents and said the owners only registered as a non-profit organisation.
The chairperson of the ANC Youth League in the area, Tebogo Koloane, told Mokwakwa: “You are playing with the future of these children with what you’re doing here.
“What is going to happen when these kids finish Grade 7 because real public and private schools will not recognise their qualifications to admit them to their high schools?”
People said they had also noticed that most of the pupils going to these allegedly illegal schools were of foreign descent.
Nonetheless, they were determined to remove South African pupils from these facilities and put them in government public schools
From there, they went to Philane, Walter Sisulu and Bathabile primary schools to demand the records of learners in classes.
They said they intended removing foreign children who used illegal documentation and replace them with South Africans in the illegal schools.
Beauty Matlhhare and Khomotso Khalushi of the ANC said they did not want to know about capacity and limits by the department. “The department has to come here and help us solve this problem and watch us do this.
“We are not going to watch criminals ruin our children’s future. We don’t mind if the department wants to accommodate foreign national pupils; we are just saying we will not watch our children be without schools because an illegal child took the last space.
“The department must bring mobile classrooms if need be,” said Khalushi.
Earlier this month, the community burnt tyres and blocked roads over the same issue.
They said they had caught a foreign national manufacturing illegal and fake documents used by foreign pupils to be admitted to local schools.
Their demonstration was fuelled by seeing the suspect back in the streets walking freely. They also accused the local police of failing them.
However, the police said all the accusations they had made needed to be verified and investigated because only SAPS management could say there was wrongdoing by the police.
Spokesperson for the Gauteng Department of Education Steve Mabona said: “We are aware of a school operating illegally. We have interacted with the owners and they agreed to cease operations. We will facilitate a process to place all the learners in our schools accordingly.
“We discourage anyone from opening and operating an illegal school the necessary application process must always be adhered to in order to operate a school.”