Court victory: KZN ordered to pay overdue subsidies to crèches

Friends of South Africa Early Childhood Development Forum celebrate outside the Pietermaritzburg High Court on Tuesday. Photo: Joseph Bracken

About 1,000 people gathered outside the Pietermaritzburg High Court to celebrate an order to compel the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education to pay subsidies to Early Childhood Development (ECD)centres.

On Tuesday, acting Judge Jennifer Marion accepted a new draft order from the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) after the government respondents failed to appear for the proceedings, according to LRC attorney Kiara Govender.

“They’ve never set up any kind of notice to oppose. Also, they’ve not responded to our general queries,” she said.

The LRC is representing the Friends of South Africa ECD Forum and the KwaZulu-Natal Early Childhood Development Alliance.

The draft order states that a searchable report must be compiled by the province within a month, with the names and addresses of all ECD centres that are recipients of conditional grants or equitable share subsidies, and how much they are owed.

All outstanding payments to ECD centres must be made within a month of the report.

The report must be updated on the last day of every third month, starting on 31 October, until all payments are up to date.

“We hope that the government now complies,” said Lawrence Mngomezulu, the deputy president of the Friends of South Africa ECD Forum.

He said one of the main impacts of the department’s failure to make payments was that child nutrition has suffered.

“The kids are starving and the teachers are not getting paid on time,” said Patience Ntuli, a teacher from Sibonokuhle Crèche in Kokstad. She said she had not been paid for four months due to late subsidies.

Buyi Ngema, principal of iKusasa pre-school in Claremont, said she has struggled to keep staff because she is not able to pay them on time.

The order follows last year’s court proceedings where Judge Siphokazi Jikela ordered the province to pay three Early Childhood Development centres, owed tens of thousands of rands. But despite the court order, the KZN education department failed to pay within the timeframe.

The subsidy for ECD centres was recently raised from R17 to R18.95 per child per day. The LRC says it “remains modest and insufficient” to cover costs.

Department spokesperson Muzi Mahlambi said, “We will further engage the court to have an appreciation of the difficulties that we have as the department that may impede us from being fully compliant with the judgment.”

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