Kashiefa Ajam asked welfare agencies how they could have helped needy children with the money spent on Zuma’s Nkandla.
Saira Khan
Chief executive, Stop Hunger Now Southern Africa
R246 million. Nkandla? Scandalous, when more than 2.3 million children in South Africa face chronic hunger every day. It is embarrassing when our country, supposedly the light of Africa, cannot explain to taxpayers why it frivolously spent so much money that could have ended hunger for many children.
We’re part of an international group of NGOs working to eradicate hunger. Our annual spend is R10 480 997 and this includes a new branch in KwaZulu-Natal that will serve the children of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape. This gives us a presence in three key provinces, facing the challenge of ensuring children never go hungry.
The annual spend indicated includes the production of 3 687 635 meals per year, which ensures 14 183 children are fed a hot, nutritious meal daily.
Imagine what the balance of R235 519 003 would have done? At a cost of just R2.75 we are able to feed one hungry child a hot nutritious meal – not soup, not pap, not butter/bread/jam but a nutritious meal, according to Unicef standards. We calculated Stop Hunger Now Southern Africa would have been able to provide an additional 329 397 children with a meal every day for a whole year. Alternatively, we could have fed every hungry child in the country for a month.
Imagine the impact of ensuring 343 580 children went to bed well fed at night? Imagine the satisfaction of knowing that we, as a country, are looking after our children by ensuring a basic human right is met.
How wonderful it would have been to report to Parliament that the money alleviated hunger in close to 350 000 children. Instead, the money was used to upgrade Nkandla, the presidential mansion.
So many children live in poverty and helplessness. It is deeply disturbing to know that while we have achieved democracy, we still fail as a nation to nurture our children.
We need to question frivolous expenditure that benefits a few. We owe it to ourselves and our children.
Joan Van Niekerk
President of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, former spokeswoman of Childline SA
Politicians often talk about children as the “future”. That amount – R246m – would have been be a wonderful investment in children’s services to ensure a positive future for South Africa. This would enable organisations such as Childline SA to reach a vast number of children.
The first focus should be on prevention – few services are directed at prevention and once abuse and neglect have happened, the child has been harmed. Although one can ameliorate that harm through appropriate responses, the experience of abuse and neglect remains with the child.
I would look at prevention programmes that have the best evidence of impact and success with preventing harm to children. These are usually programmes that target parents and caregivers. The earlier the intervention in the parenting activity, the more positive the outcome for the child.
Research on child deaths in South Africa indicates that the 0-to-2-year age group is particularly vulnerable to abuse and neglect that results in fatality.
Young parents are not given sufficient support when caring for this age group, often resulting in physical and emotional neglect at a critical stage in the child’s development.
I would look at programmes that target parents through antenatal clinics and focus on more than the physical health needs of pregnant and expectant parents, extending it to assessing and caring for the emotional and psychological health of parents and preparing them for caring for the child holistically. Parents and caregivers who are “in tune” with and bonded to their children are far less likely to abuse and neglect them.
An essential aspect of this programme would be the involvement of fathers.
Research shows poverty contributes to the vulnerability of children on many levels, compromising health and the child’s ability to benefit from education, and creating vulnerability to sexual exploitation, particularly of teenagers.
A hungry and needy child (both in terms of physical and emotional needs) is far more likely to be lured into inappropriate relationships.
Appropriate nutrition is a priority. Research in KwaZulu-Natal indicates 60 percent of child deaths in hospitals and clinics involve children who are malnourished.
However, simply feeding children is not sustainable. Some of this money should be used to provide incentives – seeds and implements – to enable all schools and families to establish food gardens.
There is an urgent need for quality life-skills programmes that assist children to make good decisions (particularly in relationships and sexual behaviour), and to cope with intense emotions, such as anger and frustration, without causing harm to and violating the rights of others.
I would start in schools that have a history of peer-on-peer violence and include, where possible, educators, parents and caregivers to ensure that the skills taught and practised in the programme are supported and encouraged in the environment in which the child lives and learns. These skills would then be carried into adulthood and the cycle of violence would be broken in the long term.
Dr Shaheda Omar
Director of the Teddy Bear Clinic for Abused Children
It hurts to see R246 million mismanaged in our country. It’s especially painful to see such mismanagement when you know exactly how it could have been better spent.
Our clinic would have been able to use this money to effect a huge amount of positive change. For 29 years, we’ve been offering holistic services for abused children.
We offer medical examinations, forensic and psychological assessments, therapy and legal services to affected children and their families.
We also provide services to babies and toddlers who have suffered non-accidental injuries and are brain-damaged.
All of these services are provided free of charge, to ensure that every abused child has access to the services they require to heal. With our services we help 46 553 abused children to recover from the trauma of abuse.
With this money, we could expand our training services across the country, deep into the rural areas where resources are few and many children remain traumatised and continue to be violated.
A child is raped every 30 seconds and each child needs more than R4 000 to begin healing from the trauma. There are 500 000 rapes estimated annually, which is still under- reported.
With this money, we would have been able to train the entire police service to respond properly to cases of child abuse.
We would have been able to advise medical practitioners in hospitals on the correct protocol for medical examinations when dealing with possible child-abuse cases. With proper medical protocols in place, we are much more likely to hold child-abuse perpetrators accountable and put them in jail, so they can’t reoffend.
With even a small percentage of this money, we would have been able to roll out our child protection programmes nationally to increase awareness and work towards our dream of creating a standardised protocol for our country.
We could place billboards across every major urban area in southern Africa that would list contact details for child-abuse support services.
We could conduct nationwide school talks where children could learn about their rights, what are appropriate and inappropriate touches and who they should speak to if they witness or experience abuse.
We would be able to set up support services in courtrooms across the country, where trained legal staff could advise abused children of their rights and how to testify in court to successfully put their abuser behind bars.
We could create a social media campaign to help children access resources if they have been abused.
Can one put a price tag on the well-being of a child? Children are priceless. A child taken care of today is a leader tomorrow. Money cannot be better spent than on a child and on every child.
*Kashiefa Ajam is the Acting Editor of the Saturday Star
Saturday Star