Pretoria - Foreign national children housed at a care centre in Ga-Rankuwa are not attending school because they don’t have identity documents.
This came to light on Thursday during a surprise visit by members of the social development oversight portfolio committee from the Gauteng legislature to Rearabile care centre.
Centre manager Lucia Mokoena said the destitute children were allegedly smuggled into the country by child traffickers.
Mokoena shared the children’s plight with members of the portfolio committee.
They were led by chairwoman Thuliswa Nkabinde.
They were on a mission to play an oversight role on the services rendered by the Department of Social Services in different communities. Mokoena told them about a group of Ghanaian children who were found loitering in Sunnyside streets last year.
Children were allegedly lured to South Africa under the pretext of being introduced to a local soccer academy.
But the promise didn’t materialise as they were not placed at an academy on their arrival.
Mokoena bemoaned the fact that children were given false hope of playing in the top-flight football league. Instead, they ended up roaming Pretoria’s streets.
Fortunately, Mokoena said, the victimised children were eventually deported to Ghana.
“In most instances, the embassies don’t want to get involved in the deportation of the children to their country of birth,” Mokeona added. She added that foreign children couldn’t be admitted to schools in the township because they didn’t have identity documents. She highlighted the fact that foreign children were in a high-risk category.
This was especially when they were sent to faraway schools.
“We lose them when we send them out because they run away. They don’t want to be sent to an outside school,” she said.
The centre kept children on a temporary basis, usually for three months. However, there were cases of children who stayed there for more than the specified period because of the delay in the verification of their identities, said Mokoena.
The centre accommodated children who had been abused and abandoned. Children were usually placed by social workers and were not taken directly from their parents. “We protect children from further harm,” she said. There was an ongoing investigation which involved the police regarding suspected child-trafficking cases of children from Zimbabwe.
“We can’t place the children at school because they don’t have proper papers,” she said, adding that even if they had proper documentation they couldn’t fit into the local schools because of language barriers.
A shortage of nurses at the centre was identified as one of the problems. Since March this year the centre had been without a nurse after the only nurse who worked there resigned.
Earlier on, the committee visited a sewing co-operative business called Dia Dira in Mabopane run by five women. Business founder Nese Moatlhodi told them about the bad treatment they received from social development officials, who always threatened to take business away from them. She started a business in 2011 after her retirement, but didn’t get any funding from the department.Members identified the lack of financial management skills among the women as one of the problems that stymied the business growth.
They assured Moatlhodi that it was their responsibility to protect them from hostile officials.
Pretoria News