Nearly R1bn has been spent on school infrastructure in Gauteng, and the result is two schools. One started a decade ago.
The other should have been finished when today’s grade 5s were still in pre-school. If this were a private company, heads would have rolled long ago. Instead, we get excuses, new “systems”, and recycled promises while children sit in leaking containers or travel across dangerous neighbourhoods just to get an education.
This is not misfortune. It is failure.
Communities have watched half-built schools rot behind fences for years. They have seen contractors come and go, money paid out, bricks stacked and then stolen, buildings vandalised and sites abandoned. In some cases, people have died on these neglected premises. And still there is no urgency. Still there is no shame.
We are told there are more than 90 court cases, billions of rand in liabilities, contractors with cash-flow problems, and departments that cannot manage their own contracts. But none of this is new. None of it explains why the same mistakes keep happening while children carry the cost.
In Eldorado Park, learners were packed into sweltering containers for years because a school project stalled after violence and funding delays. In Zola, Soweto, more than R100m has been spent on a school that now stands stripped, broken and unsafe, a monument to state neglect. Learners are bussed elsewhere, and when transport fails, they walk through crime-ridden streets. This is what service delivery looks like on the ground.
Yes, poor governance is now being conceded. Yes, timelines were not enforced. Yes, contracts were mismanaged. But admitting failure after a decade of waste does not undo the damage. Children do not get their lost years back. Overcrowded classrooms do not disappear because a new digital platform has won an award.
Yet officials speak as if the problem has only just been discovered.
Yes, poor governance is now being conceded. Yes, timelines were not enforced. Yes, contracts were mismanaged. But admitting failure after a decade of waste does not undo the damage. Children do not get their lost years back. Overcrowded classrooms do not disappear because a new digital platform has won an award.
The department now promises rescue contractors, blacklists, real-time monitoring and faster terminations. All of this sounds impressive, but it raises a brutal question: where was this urgency when schools first stalled? Why did it take years of collapse, vandalism and public anger before action was taken?
The truth is uncomfortable. When it comes to public schools, failure has consequences for the powerless, not for those in charge. If a shopping mall is delayed, investors panic. If a school is delayed, children are told to wait in containers, on buses, or in unsafe buildings, and communities are expected to be patient.
There is nothing normal about spending hundreds of millions of rand and delivering almost nothing. There is nothing acceptable about repeatedly paying contractors who abandon sites. There is nothing defensible about allowing schools to decay into crime scenes while officials debate processes and platforms.
This is not just an infrastructure crisis. It is a values crisis.
Until incompetence and neglect carry real, personal consequences, not press statements, not new systems, not consultants, Gauteng will keep building monuments to failure instead of classrooms. And every year that passes, another generation of children will learn a hard lesson: in this system, their education comes last.
