GOVERNMENT TAKES OVER PROCUREMENT OF SCHOOL BOOKS FROM PROVINCES
GOVERNMENT TAKES OVER PROCUREMENT OF SCHOOL BOOKS FROM PROVINCES
Motshekga announced in parliament that an agency would be established in her department to centralise the procurement of teaching materials such as textbooks. The rationale is that this would save the government hundreds of millions of rands and prevent teaching time being wasted at the beginning of the school year, when textbooks are late.
“We will appoint a national agency to man- age the central procurement of teaching- support materials, to deliver on our prom- ise of one textbook per child per subject,” said Motshekga.
Teaching at public schools has for years been compromised by the late or non-de- livery of textbooks and the annual delays in the supply of essential teaching aids.
Motshekga said the aim of the new agency was to cut out the many middlemen in the procurement of textbooks, which had led to an unnecessary rise in the price of the books.
“The most serious inefficiencies were around procurement and the value chain. There were too many actors in between, such that, by the time the book reached the school, we had paid almost three times the price,” she said.
“The agency is going to look at all those inefficiencies and mainly they are around procurement and using our power as a state to see if we can get better deals.”
It is not known when the new agency will begin operating, but Motshekga said it
would be during the 2011-2012 financial year.
Provinces would from now on be respon- sible only for the distribution of textbooks to schools, she said.
Her announcement was made against a backdrop of uncertainty about whether millions of primary and high school pupils will get their 2012 textbooks on time.
Earlier this year The Times reported that a series of missed deadlines, and the depart- ment’s indecisiveness about the content of textbooks, is likely to tarnish the 2012 school year.
At that time, department spokesman Gran- ville Whittle said the department had bud- geted R4.4-billion
for the development
of the textbooks, and “risk management plans” were in place to “ensure that the process is concluded in time”.
The director-general of Basic Education, Bobby Soobrayan, said the department ex- pected to make considerable savings from the centralised buying of textbooks.
Source: The Times, Apr 14, 2011,
www.timeslive.co.za by THABO MOKONE
138 CHAPTER 8 | TEACHING RESOURCES
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