THE Democratic Alliance (DA) has called on Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to make the Jobs for Cash report public without any further delays.

Earlier in March, the Basic Education Department confirmed that the Ms Motshekga had received the final draft report from the ministerial task team investigating the sale of teacher posts by trade unions. The department said the minister would first meet with the relevant stakeholders cited in the report and share it with President Jacob Zuma before releasing it to the public.

“The minister expects these processes (to) be finalised by mid-March,” the department said at the time.

DA MP and basic education spokesman Gavin Davis said on Wednesday “mid-March has come and gone, and there is no sign of the ‘Jobs for Cash’ report”.

“The DA calls on Minister Motshekga to explain the latest delay in releasing the report, and when she expects to have the report ready for public release … delays and goalpost shifting have plagued the ‘Jobs for Cash’ report from the outset,” said Mr Davis.

He said the report promised to expose the core problem at the heart of the education system: “the capture of provincial education departments by the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu). This has enabled (the union) to operate with impunity in those provinces, at a huge cost to the education of disadvantaged learners.”

Ms Motshekga needed to assure the public that she was doing everything in her power to release the report, and that African National Congress (ANC) internal politics was not a factor in the delay, said Mr Davis.

“The only way for Minister Motshekga to do this is to announce clear time frames for the release of the report and to stick to them.”

Department of Basic Education spokeswoman Troy Martens said the “processes” involved with sharing the task team report with stakeholders were still ongoing.

“The minister has committed to release the full report once these processes have been finalised,” said Ms Martens. But she did not say when the processes would be finalised.

The task team was set up last year following reports that Sadtu members were selling principal and deputy principal posts at schools for upwards of R30,000 each. The selling of teaching posts was alleged to have been prevalent in the Eastern Cape‚ KwaZulu-Natal‚ Limpopo‚ Gauteng‚ Mpumalanga and North West. Sadtu denied the allegations and undertook to co-operate with investigations.

Apart from the allegations of irregular appointments and the role played by members of unions or department officials, the task team was also instructed to investigate the problems regarding the advertising and filling of posts.