Eleven days before the beginning of the 2024 school year, Chatsworth Secondary School on Lenny Naidu Drive in the southern part of Durban was destroyed by criminals allegedly from a nearby community, who vandalised and stripped the infrastructure bare.
On Friday, IOL was present at the scene and witnessed the devastation caused by the criminals.
To add insult to injury, the brazen criminals not only defaced an educational institute, but also stole a pulpit from a church inside the school.
But the Department of Education in KwaZulu-Natal believes that community members need to stand up to thugs who deface educational institutes and work with police to bring them to justice.
In some of the classrooms, all of the desks and chairs were stolen.
Glass from the windows lay shattered all over the grass alongside the hallways, some still intact and others broken into shards.
The metal frames that once stood as burglar bars lay on the floor of the classrooms and outside on the lawn as well.
Some burglar bars were bent inward, suggesting suspects tried to gain access into those specific classrooms as well.
The doors from an entire block of classes were removed off their hinges, and some were broken into pieces.
The fluorescent light fittings and bulbs and the electrical ducting were stripped out of the trusses that run the ceiling of the classrooms.
The pastor of Shammah Ministries, housed inside a multi-purpose classroom inside Chatsworth Secondary, walked IOL through the school, showing us the various classrooms that were broken into and defaced.
She did not want to divulge her name but told IOL that it was her church that the chairs and pulpit were stolen from.
What’s worse, she allegedly saw those same chairs for sale nearby her community a few days after they were stolen on Tuesday evening.
“We received a call saying that the church had been vandalised. They [pointing to a group of men cleaning the church] came up and saw what happened. Everything inside was gone—the desks, the chairs, our pulpit.
“They left broken glass all over. They even took out large sheets of glass; I think they sell those,” she said in dismay as members of the congregation cleaned up the shattered glass and tried to repair the burglar bars.
“They [suspects] did this on Tuesday night. They even came back on other nights and stole stuff from inside. They knew there was nobody to stop them,” she said.
The guard on duty at the time IOL visited the scene said it was his first day at the school, and the other guard who was on duty was off.
The police in Bayview were also notified of the incident, according to the pastor. IOL has reached out to the South African Police Service for a comment and is awaiting their reply.
The pastor also told IOL that when she approached the guard after finding the classrooms in a vandalised state, he “did not react the way he was supposed to”.
“He told us that he was alone and working long shifts. He said he was asleep,” the angry pastor said.
The Department of Education in KwaZulu-Natal said it was disappointed to hear about the incident, given the fact that budgeting constraints have already made it difficult to run the portfolio optimally.
Head of Communications at DOE, Muzi Mahlambi, said it was worrying to see communities treating their schools in such ways.
“We are worried that this can happen in our communities. This is what is happening to schools in our communities. Things like this set us as a department back heavily, as we are already restrained by the fiscus.
“We believe that there are members of the community who will respond to this. There is such a thing as community policing, and we urge the members of this community to approach the authorities if they see or know of something,” Mahlambi told IOL.
IOL