During her outreach in the Gamtoots Valley in the Eastern Cape yesterday, Minister for Public Service and Administration, Ms Noxolo Kiviet, told stakeholders who had gathered at the beleaguered Hankey Secondary School that the solution to resolving the challenges that the Hankey community faces lies in how they work together to address the education challenges they confront.
Hankey, classified as a Quintile 3 no-fee secondary school, has just over 1000 learners. Minister Kiviet described the school as a microcosm of the broader Gamtoots Valley area since the community’s challenges play out on the school grounds.
Results from the National Senior Certificate (NSC) have consistently improved Hankey Secondary School’s performance over the past few years. The Grade 12 learners who sat for the NSC exams in 2022 achieved a pass rate of 70.3%, compared to 42.2% in 2018. Nonetheless, the school continues to be plagued by the socio-economic problems typical of the disadvantaged sections of society, and more so in agricultural areas with large communities of farmworker families.
Minister Kiviet’s outreach in the Gamtoots Valley followed her working visit in April 2023, when the stakeholders agreed to take an integrated approach to the social and service delivery challenges that continue to conform schools and communities in the area. Again, during the feedback session with local stakeholders this week, the Minister listened to the difficulties Hankey Secondary School continued to encounter. These include teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, school violence, and gangsterism, which all entrench rather than break the community’s legacy of poverty. The school itself has been classified as a “red zone” by the South African Police Service (SAPS) due to the number of violent incidents associated with it.
The Gamtoots Valley, which is located within the Kouga Local Municipality and falls under the Saartie Baartman District Municipality, is one of the thriving agricultural regions in South Africa. It is best known for its citrus fruit as much as for its breath-taking tourist sites. Yet, like many small dorpies across the country’s hinterlands, poverty, inequality, and unemployment are glaring, giving rise to all sorts of social ills that mainly affect youth.
According to the Minister, many of the community’s woes stem from the country’s agricultural sector’s dark legacy, which includes the so-called “dop” system, in which farm workers were paid in rations of alcohol, leading to dependency and dysfunctional families and communities across several generations.
“The effects of the dop system are still with the communities, and uprooting this scourge would require efforts from multiple angles as there is no single solution,” the Minister observed.
For this reason, Minister Kiviet expressed the view that the combination of high teacher-to-learner ratios, ill-discipline, and poor educational outcomes at Hankey Secondary School is a perfect storm of the Gamtoots Valley’s past. She added that the resolutions to the community’s many challenges would require more than raising awareness of the effects of drug and alcohol abuse or the dire consequences of teenage pregnancy.
Among the changes that Minister Kiviet seeks to foster within the Gamtoots Valley is the need to encourage integrated service delivery and the District Development Model approach to serving communities. The approach to resolving the challenges that the school and the community faced was practically tested through the provision of “Services on Wheels” on the premises of the school in partnership with provincial and local stakeholders, including the Kouga Local Municipality, provincial departments of education, social development, the Social Security Agency, the South African Police Service, and community-based organisations.
“We need change management for everybody, including organisations,” the Minister noted, adding that “the problems we face are not insurmountable. They need all of us to work together to benefit the community”.
Minister Kiviet said her outreach activities indicate a commitment to the communities of the Gamtoots Valley, which is her constituency. However, she hastened to stress that the solution to the challenges faced by the school and the community can only come through the efforts of all local stakeholders and that she would ensure that red tape is cut.
“Wherever I get deployed, the first place I check is a school because it usually reflects the kind of community you’re going to deal with. Suppose you don’t pay particular attention to what happens in a school. In that case, you won’t understand the environment you are dealing with, which means you’ll never be able to build that community,” Minister Kiviet concluded.
