South African children must be placed in South African public schools first. This is a matter of national responsibility, state sovereignty, and historical justice. Any government that cannot guarantee school placement for its own children has forfeited its moral authority to govern.
What is unfolding is not a crisis of numbers or administration. It is a deliberate political failure, engineered and maintained by those in power. Working-class South African children are being structurally locked out of public education while the state normalises exclusion through bureaucracy, press briefings, and hollow assurances.
We locate responsibility without hesitation. The Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, the Premier of Gauteng, Panyaza Lesufi, and the Department of Basic Education preside over this collapse. They do so knowingly. Year after year, they reproduce the same outcomes because exclusion has become policy practice, not an error.
The roots of this injustice are structural and violent: township and rural schools deliberately left underdeveloped, classrooms overcrowded beyond learning capacity, budgets that starve black education while protecting privilege, and admissions systems designed to appear administratively neutral while actively marginalising the children of workers and the poor. This is how inequality is institutionalised. This is how dispossession continues under democratic language.
We say this without apology: the ANC–DA governance arrangement is central to this disaster. It is a political pact that manages inequality instead of dismantling it, that preserves elite comfort while black children are turned away at school gates. This arrangement has collapsed the social mandate of the state and replaced it with crisis management and blame-shifting.
The situation in Gauteng, particularly in Ekurhuleni, is nothing short of criminal. For learners to be expected to return to schools without electricity is an open declaration that black children’s futures are disposable. It is an insult to dignity, a sabotage of learning, and a betrayal of constitutional obligations.
We therefore demand immediate, decisive action. EMPD and all relevant authorities must restore electricity to all public schools without delay. More than that, the state must guarantee placement for South African children as a first principle, not a negotiable outcome.
We reject this crisis, we reject the political choices that produced it, and we condemn, in the harshest terms, a system that sacrifices South African children while those in power remain insulated from consequence.