Former Sibula Primary School students are appealing for financial assistance to rebuild dilapidated classroom blocks and teachers’ cottages.
The group of former students embarked on the project about two years ago but were stalled by the Covid-19 induced lockdown.
They have since reconstructed one block which has three classrooms, and have managed to replace windows in all other classrooms but the work is far from finished.
Speaking to CITE, one of the former students, Hloniphani Ndlovu said the school is in a terrible state hence as a group they decided to come together and source resources to fix it.
Ndlovu said at least ZAR14 000 is needed to fix the teachers’ cottages which they plan to start on soon.
“The state of the school is now terrible and as former students, we have tried to raise funds to fix the school. So far we have managed to renovate and roof a block with 3 classes. We also replaced window panes for all the classroom because most of them were broken,” Ndlovu said.
“As we speak we are working on raising an amount of about R14 000 to renovate the teachers cottages. The situation is terrible even on the other classes that we have not yet worked on. For the block that we managed to fix we used about ZAR18 000.”
He added “We have one block which is in a really bad state. It has four classrooms so it may require a higher budget than the one we used for the previous block.
“On the one we renovated, we changed the trusses to metal trusses because of termites. So we are looking forward to buying metal trusses for the other block and also put metal doors for all the 4 classrooms. We will need to buy paint and also pay the ones who will do the roofing and painting.”
Ndlovu said they are a group of about 50 former students working together to contribute towards the project but not all of them are financially capacitated.
“We are about 50 and most of them are based in SA but not all are able to contribute. We started before the COVID era and we were contributing R100 each per month but we were crippled during the COVID and then we started later,” he said.
Ndlovu listed the material needed for renovating the teachers’ cottages.
3 litres gloss enamel R510
300 litres water paint R5100
Butimen putty R204
4 bags of cement R880
20 litres black paint R2040
4 locksets R1080
2 metal doors R1800
18 deformed bars 12mm R1944
2 deformed bars 10mm R180
2 roller brush R108
2 brushes R72
Total R13 918
Those who wish to assist can deposit money into:
Sibula Community Club
Standard Bank Savings Account
Account Number: 10131306764
The contact persons for the project are:
South Africa: Hosea Mawana Sibanda +27 83 713 3253
Gwanda: Hloniphani Silunde Ndlovu +263 77 617 8759
