Educational publishers’ dirty textbook tricks revealed to Parliament

Some educational publishing companies are prepared to engage in bribery, collusion and deception to get their books on to the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE’s) school textbook catalogues, parliamentarians were told on Tuesday.

The claim was made when the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education met to discuss the DBE’s controversial new Foundational Phase catalogue.

MPs expressed strong concern in the wake of reporting by News24 that implied that the success of a new catalogue entrant, Lighthouse Publishers, was irregular.

Daily Maverick has since reported that in four consecutive articles on the subject, News24 failed to disclose that its sister company Via Afrika was one of the rival publishers who bid for the same catalogue.

Any wrongdoing by either Lighthouse or DBE officials has yet to be proven. But from the evidence of the meeting, a new company winning an unexpected amount of coveted slots on the catalogue was going to lead to questions being asked.

Two for the price of one

Educational publishing companies are overwhelmingly dependent on government textbook contracts for their revenue, with one publisher telling Daily Maverick, on condition of anonymity, that he estimated these textbook sales amount to 90% of his company’s total business.

With the chance to get featured on the first new Foundational Phase textbook catalogue for 14 years on the line, the stakes were sky high.

The DBE’s chief director of curriculum enhancement, Seliki Tlhabane, told the committee that one of the reasons changes had to be made to the way the new catalogue worked was that publishers had been submitting materials from different imprints which shared the same owner.

“Once you have more than one company, you’ve got to declare,” said Director-General Mathanzima Mweli after Tlhabane’s presentation.

For the old Foundational Phase catalogue, 23 separate publishers received approvals — but the revenue was not going to 23 separate parent companies.

The committee heard that both Via Afrika and Best Books were awarded catalogue slots despite sharing the same owner, Media24. Maskew Miller and Heinemann similarly won separate approvals while sharing an owner, and the same was true for the group of Macmillan, Clever Books and Avusa.

Daily Maverick understands that one of the new catalogue aspects currently being probed by the DBE’s internal audit team is to ascertain that nothing similar occurred this time around.

Allegations of collusion

One of the revelations of the meeting was that Lighthouse was not the first publisher to be accused by rivals of wrongdoing in the contest to be featured on the new catalogue, the formal process for which began in May 2024.

Minister Siviwe Gwarube told the committee that she and DG Mweli had “received allegations last year” from the Publishers Association of South Africa “about corruption in this matter”, and that a forensic investigation had been initiated in response.

Daily Maverick has established that this was a reference to claims by a whistleblower that leading publishing company Shuters — formerly Shuter & Shooter — had received advance inside information on the submission date and requirements from a DBE official.

Gwarube described the outcome of the investigation as “inconclusive”, which, she said, is why the process then proceeded.

Asked for comment on Tuesday, Shuters CEO Nomkhita Mona forwarded Daily Maverick a letter sent to Mona’s predecessor by the DBE at the conclusion of the investigation.

“In terms of the report there was nothing untoward found in the meeting that was held [between Shuters and DBE officials]. The investigator indicated that the whistle-blower did not take up the opportunity to provide his or her side of the story,” it stated.

Because the timeframe to submit materials was just four months, allegations of benefiting from advance information have been flying around the publishing industry. They have also been levelled at Lighthouse, whose directors strenuously deny them.

DBE officials told Parliament on Tuesday, however, that they had been consulting with publishing associations since 2020 on the call for submissions for the new catalogue.

Sifiso Sibiya, the DBE’s director for Learning and Teaching Support Materials, told MPs: “The guideline [for submissions] was the Caps [Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement], and it has not changed since 2011. So whoever would want to develop material would have had over 14 years at their disposal.”

Vacations on publishers’ tabs

Mweli told Parliament that the DBE was alert to attempts to game the system, as has happened in the past.

“We come from a history where some people were even given benefits by publishers which involved paying for their holidays,” Mweli claimed.

He said that changes to the catalogue system had been deliberately made to break up dominance of the catalogues by “well-established monopolies” and bring in new players and more previously disadvantaged stakeholders.

Mweli suggested that legacy publishers who had failed to win the number of approvals they expected were particularly aggrieved by the new emphasis on cost-effectiveness to spare taxpayers’ wallets.

“Some of them [big publishers] were really pushing that this [catalogue] process must be nullified so that they continue to benefit [from higher prices],” the DG claimed.

Tlhabane told the committee that in the old catalogue, which has been in place since 2011, the average cost of a Grade 1 reader was R55. In the new catalogue, the average price of the same item will be R16.

Several MPs raised the concern that quality was being sacrificed for price, which DBE officials insisted was not the case, saying that materials were initially assessed and accepted or rejected purely based on quality after a rigorous blind screening process.

“Quality, we weighed at 70%. Price comes after,” said Mweli.

Collapse of some incumbents

Mweli predicted that even if the new catalogue was allowed to stand, legacy publishers would try other ways to regain their market share.

“Some publishers that have not been successful in getting as much as they wanted, they are going to approach schools, though we’ve said to them, ‘Don’t do that’, because it has yielded undesirable consequences in the past,” he said.

“They are going to — some might even have started — approach provincial officials.”

The original reporting on the textbook controversy assessed that Lighthouse had won almost a quarter of the total new catalogue, the largest share of any publisher, based on simply counting the number of titles for which they were approved.

The DBE measures catalogue-share, however, in terms of the number of distinct submission packages each publisher entered. In terms of this, Lighthouse placed fourth on the list of most-awarded publishers, behind Oxford University Press, Maskew Miller Learning and Cambridge University Press.

Measured in this way, the extent of what some established publishers lost between the old catalogue and the new is illuminating. Based on the figures presented by the DBE in Parliament on Tuesday, Daily Maverick drew up the following comparison table:

Analysed in this way, it would appear that the publisher which lost the most was Via Afrika, followed by Macmillan and Vivlia.

Ten of the 19 successful publishers for the new catalogue were new entrants, suggesting that the DBE’s stated intention to widen the pool was successful.

Four investigations

It emerged in Parliament on Tuesday that the level of controversy now swirling around the catalogue could see it being the subject of four separate investigations — if MPs and officials have their way.

Last week, the DBE began an internal audit.

“This initial part was preliminary, and there were certain issues identified, possibly,” the DBE’s head of internal audit, Daniel van der Nest, told MPs. “But management must still be afforded an opportunity to give information through on that.”

The audit is examining the textbook catalogue and its process as a whole. Daily Maverick understands that the potential issues identified thus far do not relate to Lighthouse.

This is the second probe related to the catalogue, with the first being undertaken by the Treasury’s chief procurement officer after Gwarube referred the matter for investigation.

Gwarube told the committee that she first sensed something might be amiss with the catalogue after reading News24’s initial report on the matter, as she had not had sight of the catalogue before it was released to provincial education departments.

The minister said that she referred the matter to the Treasury rather than law enforcement because “there is no evidence of criminality”, but she stressed: “I take these concerns very seriously.”

The third probe will be specifically related to Lighthouse.

“Because of the prominence that was given to the Lighthouse issue, in addition to the internal audit that is being conducted, [which] will hopefully do a full population test of this whole process, there is also now a request for quotations for a firm to be appointed to specifically look at the Lighthouse appointment as well,” said Van der Nest.

In addition, committee chair Khomotjo Maimela said she would refer the catalogue issue to the Public Protector for investigation.

Mweli said that while he supported this move, it should be taken into account that the textbook procurement might be delayed as a result.

A serious time crunch is already developing: the materials are needed in schools by January 2027, and the start of ordering has already been pushed back to June because of the controversy. DM