In 2019, National Treasury took the extraordinary step of withholding R500 million in Education Infrastructure Grants from the Eastern Cape Department of Education. The reason: the department had demonstrated such chronic underspending and poor project management that releasing additional funds would effectively be throwing money away.
This withholding occurred against the backdrop of hundreds of mud schools still in use across the province — despite a 2013 court order (the Mud Schools judgment in Komani) requiring the government to eliminate inappropriate school structures. Years after the court order, children in the former Transkei and Ciskei regions continued to attend school in structures made of mud, with no electricity, no running water, and pit latrines that posed a safety risk.
The department's inability to spend infrastructure grants was not for lack of need — it was for lack of capacity. Project management was virtually non-existent. Contractors were appointed and abandoned projects. Environmental impact assessments were not completed. Designs were flawed. Local political interference redirected resources to politically connected areas rather than areas of greatest need.
The consequence for children was stark: overcrowded classrooms, teaching under trees, schools that flooded in rain, temperatures that dropped to dangerous levels in winter. The Eastern Cape produces some of the worst matric results in the country, and the infrastructure crisis is a direct contributor. A generation of children in the rural Eastern Cape has been denied their constitutional right to basic education because the government could not spend money that was available.