Primary school torched in Bushbuckridge

With only a week of school’s reopening Manyakatana Primary School had been torched.

Other classrooms were burned this morning by parents who were demanding the building of a new school while the department’s assessment says the conditions of the school only requires renovations.

This torching comes two days after the department had made a commitment to refurbish the school in the financial year 2019/20. “We convened a meeting on January 12 with members of the community and made a commitment that we are going to refurbish/renovate the school in the 2019/20 financial year, however, as an interim relief we will provide two additional mobile classrooms in line with their learner-to-teacher ratio,” said Jasper Zwane spokesperson of the department.
Some of the classrooms were damaged by a storm in 2011.

“The department wishes to state that it will not be in a position to fix the torched classes since there is no budget allocation set aside to intervene in such instances. As things stand, the department will only be able to construct and repair schools that are planned and budgeted for in this financial year, 2019/20

For this reason, the department requests school governing bodies to provide parents with accurate updates regarding the decisions reached between the schools and the department. There is really no number of challenge that justifies the disruption and setting alight a school or any public institution for that matter,” read a media statement from the department.