31 March 2025
Media Statement:
Unsurprisingly, yet another deadline to eradicate plain pit toilets has been missed. This comes after over a decade of missing multiple promises and shifting deadlines. Minister Siviwe Gwarube, much like the political leadership before her, has failed to priorities the safety of her primary constituency and continues to list a plethora of excuses as to why she did not abide by this self-imposed deadline. Equal Education (EE) has continuously emphasised the lack of accountability and lack of urgency that the Department of Basic Education (DBE), along with provincial education departments, have in meeting their Constitutional obligations, even after formal correspondence and engagements, marches, pickets, court orders and the promulgation of legal frameworks. We ask the government, what other ways should learners and school communities voice out their frustrations for it to fulfil its obligations?
In 2013, after years of advocacy and pleading with the DBE to clearly define the basic components of a school, the Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure (Norms and Standards) were signed into law. The binding law immediately banned the presence and use of plain pit toilets in schools and set two key deadlines for providing adequate, safe school sanitation –2016 and 2020. Education departments dismally failed to meet these deadlines even after multiple fatalities and injuries in these toilets. The reasons behind this began sounding like a broken record with no solution nor effective accountability measures in sight. Instead, departments set arbitrary and what they often referred to as “more realistic” deadlines for themselves that they unashamedly continued to miss.
The pinnacle of this blatant lack of accountability happened in June 2024 when the reviewed Norms and Standards were published with all the deadlines for the eradication of infrastructure backlogs removed. A decision made against the backdrop of several years of missed deadlines and without the development of any consequence management strategies. Removing deadlines stripped the public of its most important mechanism to hold education departments accountable and diminished the protection of the immediately realisable right to education. Additionally, the new Norms and Standards changed the language around the setting of timeframes from setting timeframes for when infrastructure deadlines must be eradicated to now setting timeframes for when infrastructure backlogs must be addressed. This essentially places it at the discretion of the DBE and PEDs to decide when they must fulfill their constitutional obligations while only ensuring that they develop plans and report on said plans.
In the Limpopo province, we have seen how having no real accountability mechanism can result in blatantly unreasonable plans being put forth. In the Michael Komape court case where EE represented by the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC) was admitted as amicus curiae (a friend of the court), we witnessed the Limpopo Department of Education claim that it could only begin eradicating plain pit toilets in schools in 2026 due to budgetary restrictions as removing these unacceptable and dangerous structures would cost an estimated R1.6 billion. The LDoE further estimated that all plain pit toilets would only be removed from schools in the province by March 2031, 15 years after the deadline of 2016 specified in the original Norms and Standards. Essentially, the department was planning to fail to provide its constitutional obligation to ensure that learners access education immediately. If access to education is immediately realisable, learners must have a way to ensure that instances like this do not happen again.
More than 230 schools across the country still solely depend on plain pit toilets, while an additional 590 schools have pit toilets alongside other sanitation facilities. These numbers paint a harrowing picture of the continued inaction by the DBE and provincial education departments. The recent policy decision to make Grade R compulsory will only worsen this backlog, as more young learners enter a schooling system that already lacks safe and dignified sanitation. The existing infrastructure cannot accommodate the growing number of learners, and yet, instead of prioritising urgent sanitation upgrades, the government has only made nominal increases to infrastructure budgets that do not align with the actual needs on the ground.
The failure to meet deadlines, the continued existence of dangerous sanitation, and the absence of sufficient funding are all symptoms of a broader failure of governance and planning. By removing the deadlines, the DBE has signalled its willingness to tolerate these conditions indefinitely, leaving learners, particularly those in rural and working-class communities, at risk. The learners who risk life and limb by being in schools with dangerous pit toilets can only hope these realities will inform Minister Gwarube’s recent commitment to review the Norms and Standards. We cannot afford another unkept promise!
If the government is serious about ensuring every child’s right to a safe and dignified learning environment, it must immediately:
- Commit to new, binding deadlines for the eradication of school infrastructure backlogs including eradicating banned plain pit toilets
- Develop clear accountability and consequence management systems
- Ensure that school infrastructure budgets reflect the true scale of the crisis, with urgent and substantial increases.
- Develop urgent and transparent implementation plans that prioritise schools with the most hazardous conditions.
- Provide regular, publicly accessible, and accurate progress reports detailing sanitation upgrades.
- Implement strong consequence management for education officials and contractors who fail to deliver on school sanitation projects.
Failure to act on this crisis is a failure to protect learners’ rights and dignity, a failure of leadership. The time for empty promises is long past. The DBE and PEDs must take decisive action now to ensure that no learner is ever forced to risk their safety in a pit toilet again.
To arrange a media interview, contact:
Ayanda Sishi-Wigzell, Communications Manager
Email: ayanda@equaleducation.org.za
Phone: 076 879 3017
