National Government Fails to Address Child Killings

This speech was delivered by GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament Brett Herron during today’s debate on child killings.

“That this House debates the failure of the National Government to adequately address the systemic issues that are leading to spate of child killings in the Western Cape”.

This debate is unfortunate because it is fundamentally dishonest.

The DA has been in control of the Western Cape, on its own, for nearly 20 years. If the best it can do is to blame the national government for spiralling violence, we must ask what’s the point of having a provincial tier of government at all?

Besides which, perhaps the news hasn’t filtered down to the Western Cape; the DA is in national government.

Children on the Cape Flats have been let down by government at all levels.

Let down by indifferent policing.

Let down by increasingly irrelevant provincial politicians nominally in charge of housing, schools, health, transport, safety etc.

And let down by a city hell-bent on proclaiming itself the best-run in the world, but in certain areas only.

A few years ago, I was introduced to a 14-year-old child who was abducted in Mitchell’s Plain on the way to a cellphone repair shop and taken to Strandfontein beach where she was raped through the night.

She survived because the perpetrator was interrupted in the act of slitting her throat from ear to ear by an off-duty policeman who happened to be walking his dog.

She’s back at school, now, despite never having received proper trauma or HIV counselling. She went back to school because she was bored of sitting at home.

She has a mother who loves her but also loves drugs.

Several appointments with social workers were missed due to not having money for transport; social services haven’t bothered to visit the home.

With three of her siblings, she lives on a road that opens into a bleak courtyard of sorts.

There was no food in the home when I last visited.

It is a cold and anti-social environment; a number of houses in the immediate vicinity are smokkies or tik houses.

To get to school she must pluck up the daily courage to walk past these places. She wears a light scarf to cover her scar.

She survived by a miracle. It takes daily miracles for hundreds of thousands of Cape Flats children to survive life in the ghettoes of this best-run city, let alone develop with dreams intact.

Her story strips the DA’s concern about what it calls “systemic issues” responsible for child killings in the province of any veneer of truth or reality.

This debate was called to create a platform for its members to absolve themselves of responsibility for the lawless environment they govern by repeating their call for the devolution of policing powers.

Sies!

GOOD Community Engagement: The party encourages active community participation in governance.

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