MVULA Primary School

Meet the feisty principal who wants compensation for building a school for the government A 65-year-old grandmother accused of stoking a protest at Mvula Primary School over a pension dispute says it is unfair that all she gets for building and running a school for 30 years is five years' worth of pension.

Cape Town – "All I want is some compensation for the 27 years that I built this school up," says 65-year-old Nyanga grandmother Florence Dlamsha, who has been accused of stoking a protest at Mvula Primary School over a pension dispute.

At the centre of the row is her handover of the school she started from donated pieces of corrugated iron in the bushes of Nyanga in the 1980s to educate and care for the children of black parents hounded by the pass-law obsessed apartheid government.

Without the paperwork required for black people to be in specific areas of the country, many of the earliest residents of Nyanga and Crossroads, outside Cape Town, lived in hiding in small structures in bushes, hoping not to be found and arrested. Their children were also not able to get into government schools because of this.

And with political violence raging around the community, parents also wanted to keep their children safe while they were out looking for work.

For more than 30 years, Dlamsha has built up what is today known as Mvula Primary School, starting with donated pieces of corrugated iron, and moving on to wooden poles and plastic and eventually getting volunteers to help level the site for containers and build classrooms from donated bricks. In addition, she lobbied relentlessly for funds from philanthropists, development organisations and foreign embassies.

But after more than 30 years' service to her community, and handing the school over to the Western Cape education department, last week News24 reported that the retired principal found that she only qualifies for five years of government pension.

READ: Retired principal's pension shock behind Cape school shutdown

Comment was not immediately available from Dlamsha at the time that story was published, so News24 went to Nyanga to seek out Dlamsha to hear her side of the story.

While many parents and residents have thrown their weight behind Dlamsha's claim that five years' pension was not enough for what she had