Dear Editor
The recent devastating report by the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund has breathed life into former president Nelson Mandela’s words, “There is no keener revelation of a nation’s soul than the way it treats its children”. The report laid bare how the ANC government’s twisted priorities have undermined South African children.
More than 27% of children under 5 are stunted due to malnutrition, which can cause irreversible physical and cognitive damage. Pregnant women do not have access to pre-natal support, and so their children’s health is being compromised before they’re even born.
In 2020, 10% of children lived in households that reported child hunger.
About 14% of children have treatable mental health conditions, yet the country’s lack of specialists and facilities means they will probably carry this burden for the rest of their lives.
Yet, government has done its best to collapse any programmes meant to empower, protect and support children in South Africa. The NGOs looking after children have had their subsidies stopped thereby forcing many of them to close, schools are death traps with pit toilets and drug peddling zones, food is unaffordable, the spaces they should be playing in are gang infested, and their mothers and caregivers fear for their lives everyday as they get abused and even killed.
Before the children are even born, their lives are threatened. Some mothers who are forced by their circumstances to give up their babies cannot do so safely, because the Gauteng government has denied them this by declaring baby savers illegal. These newborns end up dying horrifically in plastic bags, under train station benches, or in pit toilets – their blood is on the ANC government’s hands.
Those that survive this ordeal are denied the opportunity of loving and caring families as their adoption and fostering processes are hampered or cancelled.
Those children who escape dying live a life of suffering as their development is stunted, making the rest of their lives a misery.
The Children’s Amendment Bill, which was meant to change the sad lot of children, was cut into chunks, the biggest of which was “erroneously” rejected and is now dead. There are scant hopes that the 7th Parliament will resuscitate it as a committee bill, but it is not safe to even hold one’s breath on that one – if almost a decade’s experience in the goings on of the parliamentary portfolio committee on social development is anything to go by.
The DA had worked hard on the Bill in the hopes that South Africa’s soul would show signs of caring for the most vulnerable – our children – but that was not to be. Political expediency and box ticking got in the way of caring for children. And so, children wait for some semblance of political will to prevail on their behalf.
As we gear towards the 2024 national and provincial elections, children of South Africa can look forward to a government whose caring is not only in word only but in action as well – as the DA gets ready to rescue South Africa.
Regards
Bridget Masango MP
DA Shadow Minister of Social Development
Nacho
Fun South African Fact: South Africa’s drinking water is rated 3rd best in the world for being “safe and ready to drink”.
Twix Esses
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.