The North West department of community safety and transport management has attributed the late payment of scholar transport to budgetary constraints.
The officials from the department were speaking at the South African Human Rights Commission’s second leg of the scholar transport inquiry on Tuesday.
This comes after it was discovered that the department does not pay the majority of scholar transport service providers on time, leaving some of them abandoning the routes or failing to take the children to school.
The commission was informed by Hans Kenana, the department head, that his department was in disarray.
Guilty as charged
“We are guilty as charged as far as payments are concerned; there were long payments that were outstanding due to budgetary challenges,” said Kekana.
“The challenge is our capacity internally, which is very limited, and on the roads, as law enforcement officers are limited.
“On payments of invoices within 30 days, we are working 24/7 on that aspect. On internal capacity in terms of human resources, we have taken a lot of leadership into that space so that they assist us with capacity.”
The inquiry, which seeks to examine and assess the challenges affecting the provision of learner transport, especially in rural and underprivileged communities, was held in Mahikeng, North West.
This comes after numerous complaints about inadequate, unreliable, and unsafe scholar transport services that undermine pupils’ constitutional rights.
Kekana said that one contributing factor to many unroadworthy scholar transports in the province was the lack of traffic officers.
Department working to fill vacancies
He said that 600 traffic officers were assigned to the department to monitor both public and student transport.
“In terms of the capacity of law enforcement on the road, we are very limited. They monitor both the scholar transport and public transport.
“We are very thin on the ground, and we take responsibility for that gap. We are working on filling vacancies to make sure that we resolve this problem,” he said.
Many people have questioned why the department does not own buses and give the same service to its sister department, the education department in the province.
Kekana attributed this to budget constraints. “The responsibility cuts across all of us, but we are relying on these service providers because we do not have the budget to buy the buses.
“Both the education department and the transport department provide this service. We still rely on the service providers.”
A thorough investigative report containing conclusions and suggestions to ensure safe, dependable, and easily accessible transport for all students will be informed by the inquiry.
