A 16-year-old girl on a dairy farm outside Kareedouw hitchhiked about 24km to school every day for two weeks in April. When the farm foreman who gave her a lift for most of the way stopped using the route on 22 April, she stopped going to school. She has been at home ever since.
That is not a story about one unlucky family. It is in court papers filed by the South African Human Rights Commission, which has gone to the Makhanda High Court to force the Eastern Cape government to transport her, six other farm children and more than 40,000 other learners who qualify for state scholar transport but are not getting it, IOL reports. The province is opposing the application, which will be heard next week.
This has already been decided
The most important fact in this case is that it should not need to exist. On 17 December 2024 the same court ruled that scholar transport is a mandatory part of the right to basic education and that the province’s failure to provide it was unconstitutional and invalid. In a statement at the time, the SAHRC, then a friend of the court, said the order required the education and transport departments to transport all qualifying learners, finalise applications by January 2025, and report back on progress.
The numbers since then do not show a province complying. According to IOL, the transport department’s acting head told the court in January that 49,504 qualifying learners were still without transport at the end of the 2025 school year. Department spokespeople put it at 47,835 in January and more than 40,000 in March.
The original case was brought by the Khula Community Development Project, which GroundUp reported in April 2024 estimated 50,000 learners were without transport. Khula withdrew from bringing this new application in July. Its director told the Legal Resources Centre that litigation had not produced results. When the group that won the case concludes that winning was not enough, that is a verdict on the state, not on the courts.
Everyone knew, nobody paid
The letters attached to the SAHRC’s application show the province knew for a year that it did not have the money. In December, Transport MEC Xolile Nqatha wrote to Finance MEC Mlungisi Mvoko warning that the department could not guarantee transport at the start of 2026, and that any non-compliance with the court order would be “not by choice, but by necessity”.
The transport department had asked the provincial Treasury for an extra R763.8m in October 2025. Treasury declined to recommend the bulk of it, saying the department was still paying taxi operators on an older, more expensive rate card and had not implemented its learner transport management system. Treasury wanted a verified database of every learner, route and payment. The department says the system stalled because the taxi industry resisted it.
Both positions can be partly true. Treasury is right to demand that money follows verified learners. The department may be right that operators pushed back. But neither explanation gets a child from a farm outside Kareedouw to school. A court order is not a budget request that can be declined because the paperwork is messy.
The blame-passing reaches down to individual families. When the families’ lawyers wrote in June, the transport head of department replied that the Kareedouw and Clarkson children did not appear on the education department’s list of approved learners, and that applications were education’s responsibility. The SAHRC says the education department did not respond to letters sent in May, June and September.
What the families are paying
The court papers put numbers on the cost of that failure. One mother on Carmel Farm says her household of eight lives on about R9,540 a month. Parents clubbed together in March to hire a private driver at R800 a child a month, more than a child support grant. He quit after two weeks. Near Butterworth, a grandmother spends R1,000 a month, close to a third of her household’s income, to get two grandchildren to school. Two brothers in Ceru village walk about two hours each way and are too tired for homework.
What to watch
The SAHRC wants the departments and the provincial Treasury given between five and 20 days to cost the shortfall, find the money and get learners to school, with the finance MEC ordered to apply to National Treasury within 10 days if the province cannot pay. Any MEC who misses a deadline would have to appear in court personally to explain why. That last part is the point. Personal accountability is the one lever the 2024 order did not pull.
Parliament has a slot too. The NCOP’s Select Committee on Public Infrastructure is scheduled to receive a Department of Transport update on a “multi-sectoral scholar transport plan” on 11 November, according to the PMG schedule.
Next week South Africans vote for municipalities, not provinces. The people responsible for this failure are not on Wednesday’s ballot. That makes the court, and Parliament, the only places they will be asked to answer before 2029. Some of these children have already lost more than six months of school waiting for that answer.