Morena Mothupi
Two years after it was forced to abandon its plans, the Gauteng Department of Sports, Arts and Culture is finally set to roll out its School Sports Programme.
MEC Mbali Hlophe had intended to roll the programme out in March 2020, but the Coronavirus pandemic put a spanner in the works.
On Sunday, 06 February, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga announced that schools across the country would finally return to full-time learning from 07 February, paving the way for the programme to finally get off the ground.
MEC Hlophe is also looking to incorporate the Arts into the programme, this is with the goal to have more learners involved in extra-curricular activities.
Hlophe highlighted the issues facing society as one of the main reasons for the reintroduction of the programme.
“We really want to roll out the school sports programme. It’s really sports and arts and we’re bringing it back into schools, because we appreciate how much worth it will play in the lives of the young people. Because we’ve all seen the depressing numbers of the young teenage girls that are getting pregnant, the number of young kids that are getting involved in substance abuse. So, through this programme, we really want to reverse this tide and we can only do so now because things are looking far better and we’re quite excited about it” said the MEC, exclusively on Kaya 959.
The programme will broaden its reach to the disenfranchised schools in the Gauteng province, that don’t have any kind of sports or arts programmes in place.
Hlophe hopes to introduce a wide range of sporting codes that a lot of schools don’t have, but all of this while respecting the Adjusted Alert Level 1 Covid-19 regulations currently in place.
“There’s obviously the restrictions that are still in place, so it does mean we are dealing with smaller numbers, but we are still going to target the schools that we are looking into to make sure that we obey and respect the restrictions as much as possible. But we very much want to bring in the various sporting codes, like chess and so forth and some of the contact sports, but obviously respecting the restrictions that are there and making sure that we keep the kids safe because can’t afford to go back to what we through during the hard lock down and so forth” added the MEC.
There is no timeline for when the programme will be rolled out, with the MEC adding that her department is still finalising engagements with all the sporting codes to get involved.
There is a bigger goal to create a development pipeline, like what some first world nations have in place, so that the future talent of this country is unearthed as young as Early Childhood Development age.
