Opposition MPs walked out of parliament’s basic education committee on Tuesday in protest after the chair declined to take questions on a report on the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Bill that appears to have ignored thousands of public submissions.
Their walkout delayed the committee’s clause-by-clause deliberation on the bill because it left the meeting without a quorum, and it also drew attention to parliament’s constitutional obligation to consult the public on proposed legislation or risk having new laws struck down by the courts.
The Constitutional Court has declared several acts unconstitutional on these grounds, the latest being the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act, which it threw out in May.
The committee is expected to begin its line-by-line consideration of the bill on Wednesday.
The bill has elicited fierce public debate with its wide-ranging reforms that include giving provincial heads of education departments the power to override the admission and language policies set by schools, along with closer regulation of home schooling.
It also proposes extending compulsory schooling from grade 1 to grade R, and letting schools sell liquor on their premises to raise funds.
The report shows parliament received 17,452 emailed submissions on the bill, but only 7,951 of them were analysed, leaving 9,501 apparently untouched. The report does not elaborate on how this sample was selected or why it was only emailed comments that were partially analysed. By contrast, all 11,773 couriered submissions and all of the 4,733 forms submitted during provincial public hearings were scrutinised.
Attempts by the DA’s Baxolile Nodada and Anna Maria van Zyl, and Marie Sukers of the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) to interrogate the issue were rebuffed by committee chair Bongiwe Mbinqo-Gigaba, despite the presence of the report’s author, committee content adviser Portia Mbude-Mutshekwane.
“It is of utmost importance that all submissions are analysed. There seems to be an attempt to skew perception that the public supports the Bela Bill when all the data has yet to be analysed,” said Nodada, the DA’s shadow education minister.
The report said the majority of written submissions supported the bill, in contrast to the preliminary analysis presented to the committee by Mbude-Mutshekwane in November showing that most submissions were in opposition to the bill.
The report contained contradictory figures for the total of submissions and lacked a matrix detailing public input for each clause of the bill, which MPs require for their clause-by-clause deliberations on the bill, said Nodada.
He sent a letter to Mbinqo-Gigaba after the meeting, reiterating the concern he expressed earlier in the day.
“We cannot continue in good faith without answers to these questions and those reports, nor can we allow members of the committee to be muzzled when parliamentary processes aren’t adhered to,” he said.
Sukers wrote to the chair last week to express concern about unprocessed submissions, saying that parliament has a duty to consider the public comments it receives. “When we called for public comment, we did so on the basis that we would be considering the comments we received ... Subjecting public comments to a lottery in which some members of the public are winners and others losers is a disincentive to obtaining public comment,” she said.
After the DA and ACDP walked out, remaining committee members were given a brief presentation on the bill’s financial implications by the basic education department’s James Ndlebe. He said that extending compulsory schooling to grade R would require extra funding for teachers and infrastructure of up to R17.2bn a year. Of this amount, R4.77bn would be for extra staff and R12.43 for more infrastructure.
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