Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube told the Cape Town Press Club on 14 September 2026 that provinces are sitting on R16 billion earmarked for school infrastructure and must spend the money urgently, as the national backlog in classrooms and sanitation has ballooned to R140 billion.
Speaking at the engagement, Gwarube did not mince words about the slow pace of delivery. She confirmed that while the SAFE sanitation initiative has delivered proper toilets to 3,201 schools, the programme’s completion does not mean the crisis is over. New schools and additional facilities for a shifting learner population still need billions in investment.
Her appearance comes two weeks after she launched the Leap 9 Maths and Science School in Kariega, Eastern Cape, where she first warned of a funding chasm. The figures have been a moving target. In March 2025, the Department of Basic Education briefed the NCOP that the backlog required R129 billion. By September this year, GroundUp reported Gwarube pegging the figure at R140 billion, driven partly by families migrating from rural areas to cities.
“We have an infrastructure backlog that is sitting at R140-billion. We have to be a lot more attuned to people’s movements and to migration patterns. We can’t just blindly build anywhere. We just simply don’t have the luxury to do that,”
Gwarube told the Cape Town Press Club.
The annual Education Infrastructure Grant is fixed at R13.8 billion, yet the Department of Basic Education says at least R20 billion per year is needed to wipe out the backlog by 2030. The constitutional obligation to provide a safe learning environment is undermined when 10% of public schools remain in poor or very poor condition, requiring urgent intervention. The ASIDI programme did replace all 331 schools built from mud, asbestos, and zinc, but overcrowding and broken toilets persist in many communities.
Gwarube linked the physical state of schools to the country’s learning crisis. Her signature “Strong Foundations, Strong Futures” strategy aims to fix foundational literacy and numeracy to build a pipeline into STEM subjects, yet the infrastructure gap makes that goal harder to reach.
“For me that was really quite urgent that we need to clear the backlog. Provinces have R16 billion in the kitty for infrastructure. Those things must be a priority,”
she said.
The national matric pass rate hit 88% in 2025, but Gwarube has repeatedly pointed to a darker statistic: eight out of ten children cannot read for meaning by the age of ten. She used her platform at the Press Club to call on businesses to partner with government, not only on building projects but also on strengthening maths and science education.
The Minister did not provide a province-by-province breakdown of the R16 billion in unspent infrastructure funds, nor did she detail how much each province has failed to utilise. Her office has been approached for comment on the specific allocations. The exact total cost to clear the backlog remains unverified independently and rests on the Department’s own modelling, which has fluctuated by R20 billion across different public briefings this year.