In keeping with the main theme of this year’s Taking Parliament to the People pre-visit to Gauteng province: “Impact of Migration – Deepening Cooperative Governance for Accelerated Service Delivery and Development”, the National Council of Provinces’ (NCOP’s) delegation met various stakeholders such as Gauteng’s Department of Economic Development; Human Settlements; Education; Health; Home Affairs; Community Safety and Security; and Correctional Services to get a sense of the impact of migration on the service delivery imperatives of the province.
The leader of the NCOP delegation that preceded over this briefing session, Ms Lungelwa Zwane, explained to them that they were not there to “find faults, but instead to formulate an opinion about their response to migration and the degree of its impact on the province’s budget allocation and its service delivery mandate”.
The Department of Education was the first to make a presentation. And it stated that migration has an unbearable effect on its planning capacity and on its infrastructure, that simply cannot cope with a number of pupils who come from other provinces and from the neighbouring African countries to enrol in Gauteng. This is exacerbated by the fact that “although we are faced with an increasing number of well over 100 000 pupils who enrol at our schools at any given year, our infrastructure cannot cope with these numbers and some is old and in bad condition and needs urgent attention,” said the Gauteng’s Director-General of Education, Mr Vuyani Mpofu.
Worst of all, there are 29 asbestos schools in the province which pose a huge health hazard to learners. “We are in a process of substituting these schools,” he assured the NCOP delegation, “but that won’t help us to alleviate the increasing number of pupils from other provinces who enrol in our schools every year.”
Migration has had a negative impact on the culture of teaching and learning in the province as well, he said, for it eroded our desire to have the prescribed number of pupils per teacher. “Now we have a significantly disproportionate number of pupils per teacher and this has had a negative impact on the culture of learning and teaching.”
As a result, we cannot plan our Learner, Teacher, Support Materials for the influx of pupils always catches us off guard every year and that “makes it difficult for us to plan ahead. In some cases you will find out that in March, there are still learners with no learning materials”.
“What also binds us is that education, according to our Constitution, is a right, therefore, we cannot deprive a pupil a right to education even if he or she is from outside our country,” he said.
Migration has exacerbated the burden of diseases to the provincial fiscus and that has fragmented the health support system of Gauteng’s Health Department, which is now riddled with inefficiencies due to an ever-increasing volume of patients, attested the Chief Director of the Department of Health in Gauteng, Ms Mogeru Morewane.
What makes things even worse, she reckons, is that the equitable share allocation, which is used to allocate budget to provinces, does not take into consideration the unofficial number of people who migrate to Gauteng.
To measure the impact of migration on its service delivery imperatives, the department has recently conducted a survey to determine who accessed its resources between the foreign national, and South Africans and at what frequency. “In June there were 66 delivery of babies by non-South Africans and 145 by South Africans. In Hillbrow, there were 216 delivery of babies by non-South Africans and 58 by South African mothers. These stats show the stark impact of migration on service delivery,” she said.
When budgets are allocated, she pointed out, they look for the population that is there, “they don’t cater for migration which is a fact of life in our province”. This is further worsened by the shortage of staff to serve the growing demands of migration.
Also, apartheid’s spatial planning has exacerbated the effects of migration in the province, for there is little that can be done to reconfigure the spatial design to meet the migration demands the city is faced with. And the demand for housing cannot be appropriately met due to the mushrooming of informal settlements in the province, observed the Mr Sthenjwa Ngcobo from the Human Settlement Department.
The Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, Ms Grace Molatedi, also decried overcrowding in their facilities, which is related to migration, because those who cannot find work resort to crime. As such, overcrowding has in some instances led to the spread of communicable diseases in correctional facilities. To alleviate this strain, the department had to move some prisoners to far-flung prisons in the province. But that is now a matter that has been taken to courts by the relatives of some offenders, and the department has to foot the bill to defend its decision, on top of the financial burden caused by overcrowding in its facilities.
There are push and pull factors to migration in Gauteng, stated Mr Jongi Ganyile, Deputy Director on Policy and Planning in the Gauteng Department of Economic Development in his presentation. According to him, the push factors relate to the economic hardships both in countries outside of South Africa as well as to economic hardships in some of the provinces within the country.
“The pull factors relate to Gauteng being seen as having prospects for better economic opportunities, jobs and promise of a better life. As a result, 47% of international migrants settle in Gauteng,” he said.
This has had a negative impact on township economy and the entrepreneurial development initiatives of the department, he emphasised. “Migration both within and outside the country has had an effect on the entrepreneurial demands of the province and SMMEs, which have been established to curb high levels of unemployment and job losses in key sectors of the economy like mining. For most migrants establish SMMEs to fend for themselves and they also apply for our entrepreneurial funds which cannot cope with the current demand.”
The members of the NCOP delegation asked if the health department has raised the issue of the shortage of staff with the national department. Ms Morewane responded that money alone could not solve what her department is faced with. And furthermore, it would be a costly exercise to fill all existing posts because 62% of the current budget is spent on salaries. But she commended the Gauteng Provincial Government for prioritising health in its budget allocations. “Health is one of the most funded portfolios in the province and its budget allocation increases every year, while the budget allocation of the national government is steadily decreasing every year.”
Some members of the NCOP delegation suggested that given the impact that the foreign nationals have on health, the country has to approach the World Health Organisation for assistance to mitigate the strain that this brings to bear onto the province’s budget.
On education, members of the NCOP delegation expressed their concern that if the migration of foreign nationals is not addressed as a matter of concern, South African kids would in future be crowded out of school by the kids of undocumented foreign nationals. As such, something needs to be done to legislate migration in a more manageable manner before it presents itself as a ticking time bomb.
The country’s porous borders were blamed for the influx of immigrants from the neighbouring countries. The members of the NCOP delegation could not emphasise enough the need to speed up the process of setting up the Inter-Governmental Border Management Agency to regulate access to South African borders, to mitigate the unintended consequences of illegal migration.
The Assistant Director in the Department of Community Safety in the province, Mr Thulani Sodumo, lamented the lack of adequate resources to fight the spike in crime in Gauteng, such as the lack of informers and intelligence in the sector, which are now complicated by inward and outward migration.
In closing, the Chairperson of the NCOP Ms Thandi Modise, stressed that what frightened her was the security report from Community Safety. “For it does not address issues at hand, in that it does not speak to the complicated nature of criminality in Gauteng – and this shows that the leadership of safety in the province does not change with time. And its tactics are not complicated enough to deal with the sophisticated nature of crime syndicates in Gauteng.”
The fact that the sector does not have adequate informers is a serious challenge. “How does it then gather its intelligence. A critical factor in any fight against a network of sophisticated criminal syndicates in Gauteng,” she asked.
“We may pour as much resources as we can, but if we don’t get the basic crime-fighting tactics right, such resources will not have the desired impact,” she observed.
According to the Chairperson of the NCOP, given all the challenges the country is faced with, South Africans need planners who will be able to plan for future scenarios. “If we had good planners we would not be where we are now. We would have had a forecast of these scenarios and would have come up with mitigation factors well in advance.
“We need to admit to our incapacities and weaknesses first in order for us to be able to deal with the challenges we are confronted with. As a matter of urgency, we need in future the minds of young and capable Members of Parliament who will help the country to plan for future scenarios and to mitigate their adverse effects on the economic well-being of our country,” she said.
By Abel Mputing
20 September 2018
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