(The following debate was delivered during a Sitting of the KZN Legislature held on 25 November 2025)
Perhaps the best way to understand today’s debate is not to begin with budgets or ratios but with one learner – a child from Ndwedwe named Bongeka. Uhambo lukaBongeka oluya esikoleni luyindaba engaphezu kokuhamba ngebanga. It is a sociological portrait of the lived realities of children in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Each morning, she walks to a school struggling with water supply, through corridors where toilets still use a bucket system, into classrooms where the teacher-to-learner ratio is no longer educationally defensible. Her walk is not simply a journey to a place of learning – it is a journey through the consequences of structural decline.
We return to Bongeka’s story because policy is meaningless unless it changes her experience. Academic literature on public finance warns that once a social sector’s wage bill rises beyond 80%, the system begins to lose its resilience, its ability to renew itself and ultimately its capacity to deliver. In KZN, 92% of the Department of Education (DoE) budget is currently consumed by Compensation of Employees (CoE). This is not merely high – it is fiscally unsustainable.
At the same time, National Treasury, through the mid-term review, has reduced KZN’s equitable share allocation over the MTEF by a further R2 billion, confirming that no external rescue is forthcoming. In other words, both cost pressures and austerity measures are accelerating simultaneously. Financially, as the DA has consistently warned over the last year, the DoE is in crisis.
KZN’s Education portfolio committee was formally assured that the payroll audit and employee vetting process would be conducted jointly with Provincial Treasury, ensuring transparency, credibility, and external verification. Yet we now learn that Treasury has been excluded. Lokhu kukhomba ngokusobala ukuthi uMnyango Wezemfundo esifundazweni awunandaba nokwembula obala imiphumela yokuhlolwa kwabasebenzi, ukuze kuqedwe ukusola okukhona ukuthi umnyango usagcwele abasebenzi abangekho emthethweni. Without Treasury, the audit risks becoming an internal exercise rather than a structural correction.
The DoE now finds itself facing a reality that is mathematically unavoidable. Unless fundamental restructuring occurs, it will be forced – by its own calculations – to eliminate up to 18 000 teaching posts across three years. This is not a DA projection, it is a function of the budget model that, if not done, may collapse the entire fiscus of our province.
This issue is raised by the DA in every Education portfolio committee meeting because it is within that committee – the engine room of oversight – where these crises are deconstructed clause by clause, with little input by the MKP. Somlomo kwiyiqiniso ukuthi izixazululo azidalwa lapha ephalamende kuphela. They are built in committees, through sustained interrogation, technical analysis, and policy refinement. Public statements cannot substitute for institutional work. They go hand in hand.
The MKP is correct to list the crises facing schools but listing alone is descriptive, not transformative. Without participation where budgets are scrutinised and reform negotiated, a cycle of diagnosis remains, without remedy.
As a partner within KZN’s Government of Provincial Unity (GPU), the DA’s responsibility is to confront the crisis honestly without collapsing into fatalism. We have been clear: The DoE has reached a point of no return, and only one reform path remains intellectually defensible – a comprehensive restructuring of the wage architecture.
Lokhu kusho ukuthi kumele sihlole kabusha izikhundla, silungise ukulingana kwezikole, sicacise izikhala ezixhaswe ngemali nezingenaxhaso, futhi siqinisekise ukuthi ukuhlolwa kwabasebenzi kubuyiselwa endaweni yokubambisana noMnyango Wezezimali.
Such restructuring is not an attack on teachers. It is an attempt to save the profession itself. It is the only way to restore breathing space for infrastructure, textbooks, psychosocial support and the basic dignity of the schooling environment. And it is the only measure that can shorten Bongeka’s long walk – turning it from a journey through deprivation into a journey toward opportunity and self-actualisation.
The education system is not merely an administrative department – it is the central engine of social mobility in a society that remains deeply unequal. When it falters, the consequences are intergenerational. Uma singakwazi ukulungisa lokhu manje, siyongcolisa ikusasa likaBongeka nabanye abantwana abayizinkulungwane ezweni lakithi.
This debate cannot be a recital of problems. It must be a commitment – from all parties, including those indifferent to committee processes – to engage rigorously in the difficult work of reform to restore fiscal sustainability, reassert transparency, rebuild institutional credibility and – most critically – protect the learner at the centre of our policy universe.