Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Someone is missing from the month-long Mandela Day celebrations as ordinary people spend 67 minutes of their time in service to others in need.
At first, I thought I had no idea who they were or exactly what their way of remembering Tata Nelson Mandela in our economically struggling nation and bulging number of needy households would be.
But, as we near the climax point of this year’s celebrations, their absence becomes all the more glaring. They are the government and absentee parents.
Children are increasingly becoming vulnerable due to lack of safety and security, lack of access to essential healthcare services, and the double burden of under-nutrition compromising their cognitive development, education and employment prospects.
Also, over-nutrition caused by consuming junk food increases their risk of becoming obese and developing adult non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.
Faced with that picture, you would expect at least one leading voice in each national, provincial, and local legislative body to make a case for an ideological rethink. But at the heart of the spectacle of child vulnerability in our country is a nagging tension.
Outwardly, the consistently high number of children enrolling in primary schools since the dawn of democracy in 1994 and the adoption of policies to provide free primary healthcare services to pregnant women and children might suggest a society in tune with modernity.
Still, the lack of prioritisation of the needs of those most vulnerable and addressing discriminatory policies and practices have so far betrayed a telling mixture of lip service and political nostalgia.
South Africans must confront the consequences of inadequate measures by the government and absentee parents to ensure that children survive, thrive, and reach their full capabilities by developing their mental and physical abilities, personalities and talents to the fullest extent possible.
We need reliable child-centred data to make children visible, including how they are disproportionately affected by poverty, violence and climate change.
We must further disaggregate the data to identify the most vulnerable children, target support and track progress to ensure no child is left behind.
Several longitudinal studies, including those conducted by colleagues at the Children’s Institute in the University of Cape Town and published in annual South African Child Gauge thematic reports, focus on current and emerging challenges and explore how to realise children’s rights.
Many children in South Africa do not live consistently in the same household as their biological parents, and this separation is a long-established feature of childhood in South Africa.
International studies have shown that the country is unique because parents are absent from children’s daily lives. Also, many children experience a sequence of different caregivers, are raised without fathers, or live in separate households from their biological siblings.
Parental absence does not necessarily mean parental abandonment, as many parents support and see their children regularly even if they have to live elsewhere.
I noticed several local programmes focusing on children this Mandela Day. This focus is encouraging, especially in Limpopo, where the government recorded 11 287 pregnant pupils between 10 and 19 years old in schools across the province’s five districts.
Household food insecurity, hunger, poverty, and unemployment remain key challenges these programmes respond to, as the June 2022 Household Affordability Index shows that the average cost of the month-on-month the average price of household food basket increased by R78.92 (1.7%) from R4 609.89 in May 2022 to R4 688.81 in June 2022.
At the heart of these programmes are health workers who treat children, adolescents and their families with dignity and respect. They listen to young people and take them seriously. They work in partnership with young people to ensure child-friendly and youth-friendly services attuned to children’s needs and evolving capacities.
The need for more significant investment in community health workers, school health and rehabilitation teams, who play a central role in identifying and supporting vulnerable children and ensuring they can access care close to home, is increasingly surfacing across the country. Also needed are strong leadership for child services across sectors at district and provincial levels to champion child health, strengthen systems and drive quality improvement and inter-sectoral collaboration.
The government and various stakeholders must be more proactive in protecting children from harmful or predatory business practices.
These include laws, policies and standards to protect children from the predatory marketing practices of the food, alcohol and tobacco industries and exposure to chemicals, environmental pollution and climate change. Monitoring and enforcement are critical through the joint efforts of civil society and regulatory bodies that have the power and resources to investigate complaints and enforce remedies when there are violations of children’s rights.
The constitution provides for every child’s right to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care and social services.
Significantly, these rights are not subject to progressive realisation. In other words, children or those acting on their behalf must continue to call upon the government to make the goods and services attached to these rights immediately available.
The government cannot rely on a flimsy argument about resource constraints when fulfilling children’s rights, as it should have budgeted for its existing obligations.
It is not a coincidence that children’s socio-economic rights entitlements are framed differently from those of adults in the constitution.
The drafters of the constitution saw that, due to their vulnerability and lack of maturity, our society could not expect children to actively fight for their rights through human rights discourse. They decided to formulate the rights in a manner that would cause the state to make a more significant effort to secure children’s rights.
Most recently, the courts recognised the state’s obligation to provide nutrition to children whose parents lack the necessary means in the case taken up by the Equal Education against the minister of basic education. The Court also noted that once a state has taken on such an obligation, it cannot ‘back-track’.
The all-time challenge is for absentee parents and the failing government to do more in honour of Mandela by being future-facing in how they prioritise children. The question that should haunt them is whether they even can.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst and a human rights activist.
Cape Times