The Crumbling Classrooms of Nelson Mandela Bay

In the very province that nurtured our nation’s father, Nelson Mandela, the institutions built to liberate young minds are being held hostage. The ransom? A half-billion-rand bureaucratic standoff that leaves children to learn in the dust.

While officials in distant offices debate compliance and grant frameworks, the reality on the ground in Nelson Mandela Bay is one of collapsing ceilings, stripped bathrooms, and a profound sense of abandonment. A staggering R529.8 million in crucial infrastructure grants has been frozen by the national government, and the walls of public schools are literally caving in as a consequence.

A Tour of Neglect

To understand the human cost of a frozen grant, you need only walk the corridors of Lamani Public Primary School in New Brighton. Here, a boys’ bathroom ceiling sags, its innards of wood and pipe exposed to the air. There is no running water. Rusted window frames are tethered together with scraps of cloth. The perimeter fence is a joke, a mangled welcome mat for criminals who recently stormed the grounds, holding staff at gunpoint and stealing their phones.

“We keep reporting problems, but nothing changes, and the school just falls apart a little more each term,” a staff member at Daniels Public Primary in Zwide confided, their voice heavy with a fatigue that no teacher should ever carry. The school’s play area is a wild, overgrown field; its bathrooms are fouled and overwhelming. The small maintenance budget they receive twice a year is a drop in a very deep, broken bucket. “Once you fix a single broken toilet or replace one door, most of it is gone.”

At Greenville Primary in Arcadia, the scale of decay is numbing. Of nearly forty classrooms, only ten are safe enough to use. Floors peel, windows are gaping holes, and corridors are scarred with vandalism. In one bright green bathroom, a collapsed ceiling reveals the corrugated roof above, a line of broken basins standing sentinel below.

“It wears you down,” another teacher shared anonymously. “You want to teach, but instead you’re checking which ceiling might fall or which toilet has been vandalised.”

The Paperwork Battle Behind the Crisis

Why are our children being forced to learn in such conditions? The answer lies in a high-stakes blame game between two tiers of government.

The national Department of Education, under Minister Siviwe Gwarube, has drawn a hard line. They state the Eastern Cape education department misused previous infrastructure funds, diverting them to projects not approved under the strict Division of Revenue Act. In response, they’ve slammed the brakes on the next R529.8 million payment, demanding the province return the misspent money and reallocate it correctly.

The Eastern Cape province, for its part, calls it a simple “miscommunication” that has now been resolved, promising a partial release of funds is imminent.

But for the teachers at Lamani, Daniels, and Greenville, this “miscommunication” has a very real face. It’s the face of a child trying to learn in a room filled with debris. It’s the face of a teacher, not as an educator, but as a makeshift security guard and maintenance worker. It’s the face of Liyolo Wakeni, the 18-year-old matric pupil knifed to death at Humansdorp Senior Secondary in Septembera tragic reminder that a crumbling environment is often an unsafe one.

A Glimmer of Hope, and a Mountain of Work

There is a flicker of hope. Provincial officials claim that R287 million of the frozen funds will be released soon. But money in a treasury account does not fix a collapsed ceiling. It does not replumb a bathroom or replace a stolen internet cable.

The damage inflicted during this 30-day freeze will take months, if not years, to repair. The trust eroded between communities and the government may take even longer to rebuild.

The classrooms of Nelson Mandela Bay are a stark, physical testament to a system failing its most vulnerable. The grant may eventually be unfrozen, but the question remains: who will repair the broken faith of the children who have learned, in the most visceral way possible, that they are not a priority?