Big storm brewing over new laws for South Africa
Parliament’s portfolio committee on basic education has raised concerns about new regulations out for public comment governing the admission policies and capacity limits of public schools in South Africa.
The regulations were gazetted for public comment by Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube last week, with the intent to give effect to the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act.
Despite this intent, the chairperson of the portfolio committee, the ANC’s Joy Maimela, accused the minister of deviating from the wording of the Act, saying that she appears to be trying to change the laws and deviate from their intended purpose.
This is specifically related to the admissions policies contained in the laws, which have been a highly controversial aspect of the entire BELA process.
Under the gazetted regulations, the department specifically refers to taking into account the demographics and education needs of the ‘surrounding community’ when setting admission policies.
Maimela said that the BELA Act, meanwhile, explicitly refers to the responsibility for admission policy lying with the head of department (HOD) and is based on the ‘broader Education Districts’.
She said that this change in wording could potentially reinforce local demographic homogeneity, rather than dismantling this as was the intent of the BELA Act.
Maimela said that the regulation referring to the HOD determining “feeder zones” for public schools, to control learner numbers and co-ordinate parental preferences, have also been included in the regulations, with no mention of the education districts.
“This, once again, points to keeping previously disadvantaged learners out via location. Historically, it has been linked to exclusion,” she said.
“It seems these regulations are attempting to rewrite the BELA Act and reintroduce matters that were unsuccessfully contested in the BELA Act legislative drafting process,” she said.
Maimela also took exception to the proposed regulations being published in a piecemeal fashion, saying that the commitee had previously called for all the regulations to be gazetted at once.
While understanding that the “modular release” of regulations may help avoid technical delays, Maimela said that fragmented rollout undermined coherence, urgency and, again, the integrity of the BELA process.
“South Africa’s children cannot afford to wait for bureaucratic caution or political compromise,” she said.
BELA storm brewing
The BELA Act has been fully implementable since 24 December 2024 when president Cyril Ramaphosa signed the remaining sections of the Act into law.
Ramaphosa signed the bulk of the Act into law in September 2024, but gave the newly formed Government of National Unity (GNU) space to find consensus on the two most controversial aspects of the laws, namely, the admission and language policies.
To achieve this, he hit pause on section 4 and 5 of the Act (admission and language policies, respectively) for three months to further debate the matter within the GNU.
These sections were opposed by the Democratic Alliance in the processing of the laws, and were used as a “red line” in the party’s election campaigning ahead of the 2024 national elections.
The DA, and other critics of the BELA laws, opposed these sections on the basis that they centralised control within government, and took away the power of communities and school governing bodies (SGBs) to set the terms for who they admitted into a school and what language they used for teaching.
While the ANC and other proponents of the laws have pointed out that the laws still allow SGBs to set these policies, it is explicitly clear in the Act that the state HODs have final say.
Despite the three-month pause, the DA was completely steamrolled by the ANC within the GNU, with the BELA Act being fully signed by the president with no changes in December 2024.
At the time, the DA spun the loss as a victory, saying that its minister, Gwarube, would be in control of setting the regulations giving the BELA laws effect.
This resulted in a more ‘lightly worded’ set of regulations gazetted last week, which have even been welcomed by school governing body groups that were opposted to the hard lines introduced in the Act.
However, this has evidently not gone unnoticed by other parties, with the portfolio committee now on high alert and ready to challenge the ministry.
“The committee will continue to closely monitor this process and engage robustly with the Minister on the gazetted regulations, which seem to deviate from the national objective,” Maimela said.
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