Education: Lula did not resume any of the 3,700 stopped works – 04/13/2024 – Education

The Lula (PT) government has not yet restarted any of the 3,783 basic education projects stopped across the country after almost a year of announcing a major plan to unlock construction.

The MEC (Ministry of Education), led by Camilo Santana, was unable to reach a single agreement with city halls to allow the resumption.

Restarting stopped works, especially daycare centers, has been a promise from the president since the beginning of the government. Lula plans events across the country for inaugurations and the topic is treated as a priority at Palácio do Planalto.

Until now, however, the MEC has not started any work with federal resources since the beginning of the government. Only constructions that were already underway were completed.

The FNDE (National Education Development Fund) says, in a note, that the delay is due to the process involving several bureaucratic steps, also depending on the agility of the municipalities. It also states that 46 projects (1%) are now ready to sign the new agreement with the federal government.

Linked to the Ministry of Education, the fund is responsible for transfers and renegotiation of contracts.

In this model, the federal government finances construction and the contracting processes are handled by city halls and states — which are only able to initiate procedures, such as bidding, after signing terms with the Union.

These almost 4,000 stopped works, which continue to be abandoned during the Lula government, are in 1,664 municipalities. In total, 80% of them are in the North and Northeast regions. Half of the building skeletons are in four states: Maranhão, Pará, Bahia and Ceará — which was governed by Camilo until 2022.

Six out of every ten works stopped are school constructions, but there are also courts, roofs, renovations and expansions of classrooms. All these actions would benefit 741 thousand students, according to official data obtained by Sheet.

The construction of daycare centers is one of the country’s biggest challenges.

Around 2.3 million children up to the age of 3 are out of daycare centers due to difficult access, equivalent to 20% of the total age group, according to a survey by the Todos Pela Educação Movement.

And early childhood education accounts for the largest volume of abandoned buildings. There are 1,317 works stopped in this area, equivalent to 35% of the total.

In May 2023, the government published a provisional measure to allow the renegotiation of works contracted with federal money, considering adjustments to the initially contracted values. The minister had already mentioned that there would be a pact to resume work in April last year, in Congress.

After the provisional measure, city halls across the country registered thousands of works. In November, a law was sanctioned with what, in general, was in the provisional measure. Subsequently, more municipalities joined the pact.

Thus, of the 5,600 education projects abandoned across the country, there was a demonstration by entities to renegotiate 3,783. The FNDE, however, has not been able to overcome all the bureaucratic procedures of any of them so far — another part of the works came under the scope of the PAC (Growth Acceleration Program).

The assessment of government members is that there were management failures and, above all, a lack of teams at the fund to carry out technical procedures quickly. 30 consultants work on this topic within the FNDE.

“Quality education also demands a complex logistical operation, and it is expected that they will be able to build this capacity both at the federal level and in the states and municipalities”, says the president of Instituto Singularidades, Cláudia Costin. “It is not enough to have political will, management skills are necessary.”

The slowness in the MEC and FNDE has caused pressure within the government against the Minister of Education, according to reports collected in Planalto and the Civil House.

Lula’s own expectations with the topic are what inflates the pressure the most. He has been talking about this since the first ministerial meeting, on January 6, 2023.

“We have 4,000 works in the area of ​​education at a standstill,” said Lula at the time. “We’re going to have to get our hands dirty so that we can produce and rebuild by improving education.”

The government’s assessment is that the scenario has worn down the president of the FNDE, Fernanda Pacobahyba — the position is a target for parties in the center. A Sheet showed last week that the agency delayed the payment of school transport resources for the entire country.

With the new rule for readjusting contracts, the estimate is that the resumption of all works will cost R$3.9 billion. The FNDE has already disbursed R$2.3 billion in these interrupted projects.

The biggest reasons for public works to be interrupted are errors in engineering design and interruption of payments by the federal government.

Of the total works, 90% were started at least ten years ago (between 2007 and 2014), still during the PT governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff. Only 5% are from hires made after 2019.

The Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government reduced budgets, stopped transfers and was unable to change the situation. But practically all currently halted works were already in that form when he took over.

In a note, the FNDE stated that the renegotiation provides for “initial and complementary technical measures, in addition to ample deadlines so that entities can have time to respond.” At the beginning of the month, the body published an act allowing a new deadline for municipalities to respond to technical procedures

“The resumption largely depends on the proactiveness of federal entities in collecting and sending the correct documentation and complying with all steps and due diligence”, states the fund.

The FNDE also said that the time lag between the loss of validity of the provisional measure and the sanction of the law caused greater delay in the process. “Currently, we have 875 works being analyzed by the FNDE, while 2,662 are in due diligence, which is when the entity has already had the documents analyzed by the FNDE, but needs to return correcting or adding something”, says the note.

Regarding the lack of staff, the organization states that it is in the process of hiring 40 professionals and there are also plans to hire 60 on a temporary basis.

Since last year, the Ministry of Education has accelerated the payment of funds delayed by the Bolsonaro government for works in progress. R$650 million was transferred to the completion of 631 new educational works throughout 2023 — but these projects were all in progress, not including stopped works.