Matome Chiloane is the Gauteng MEC responsible for education. He says that municipalities have been a major problem in terms of increasing school capacity. This is because they are slow to approve their plans, and also take a long time to do so. “ridiculous” demands in exchange for approving their applications for schools.He said this on Thursday as he gave an update on Gauteng’s grade 1 and grade 8 admissions, revealing that 467 schools have reached full capacity.Municipalities have been quite a bit of a problem… When a private developer says he is interested in building an estate, the municipality will approve his plans quickly. But when a school comes… it takes forever.— Matome Chiloane, Gauteng MEC of educationChiloane said their plans to build more schools and upgrade existing ones are not moving forward, as municipalities want favours in exchange to approve applications for schools.“In some schools that are completed and ready for occupation, the municipality said that for them to give us an occupancy certificate, we need to build a road. “It is not my competence to build a road. When we calculated the cost of what the municipality wants [to build the road], it would require R165m, which we don’t have and which is not fair. “Our role is to build and sustain schools; we are not responsible for the road outside. That is the responsibility of the municipality. They are the ones collecting rates and taxes to build and sustain that infrastructure. It cannot be us. So, some of the requests by municipalities are quite ridiculous,” Chiloane added that while it can take a long time for local governments to approve plans for schools, they are very quick in approving residential plans.“One thing I’ll lament is the pace of municipalities in approving plans. I have to be honest: municipalities have been quite a bit of a problem in this regard. If a private developer comes and says he wants to build an estate, they approve those plans very quickly. But when a school comes and says ‘this is what we want to do’, it takes forever. “Clearly, they’ve got their priorities wrong in that regard. Look, we have to prioritise this because it’s pointless to build an estate but have no school. Municipalities are doing things the other way around. They start with residential areas. That’s why we have high-pressure areas,” he said.He said more than 3,700 classrooms have already been constructed, with 1,745 more underway – 1,300 to be completed by March. “It will create space for around 61,075…
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2025-12-04 10:02:01
