Collateral damage deals with any death, injury or other unintended damage inflicted as a result of military operations.
While this concept pertains primarily to the military, maybe the government and all those who have been plundering the country’s coffers for more than a decade should consider that they too are guilty of causing collateral damage.
And we are not talking of South Africa alone, but about so many other African countries.
For the innocent victims of all the looting, corruption, mismanagement and bad governance are the children.
Every day, children are born into chaos, and because of SA’s economic meltdown, which has resulted in rising unemployment and a desperate fight to survive, it is the young who are left to suffer terribly.
It is a tragedy bordering on a crime against humanity.
For all those who have bled the country dry, apparently at a cost of trillions of rand that has seen the government running out of money, maybe it is time for them to consider how their selfish actions and greed have directly and horrendously impacted on children.
They need to consider how mothers cannot feed or clothe their children or provide a stable future for them, all because of SA’s intensifying woes.
And so the children of South Africa, and of Africa in general, become collateral damage. They never asked for such suffering, trauma and pain, yet they are the victims of people’s agendas for self-enrichment.
A case in point are the mothers we see sitting at intersections, begging for food. Dragged along is a child who has to endure the heat of the day, the bitter chill of winter and the rain.
All because the mother is most likely in a struggle to survive herself and has to somehow keep the child alive. She has most likely run out of options and has been forced to resort to desperate measures.
Yes, many will say that the mother is also guilty of some kind of neglect, for surely no child should be subjected to such treatment. After all, they should be playing within a safe environment, and they should be fed, clothed and happy.
No matter the mother’s situation, the reality is that the rights of children are enshrined in the Constitution of this country. Yet such rights have been trampled upon and the guilty parties are those behind South Africa’s decay.
Children are the collateral damage of the games adults play, which ultimately destroy their innocence.
Many of these mothers are not even from South Africa. They fled their homelands, only to become trapped in the mouth of a monster.
We may say that surely some social worker has seen the plight of these children. Yet nothing is being done to rescue them.
Since the development of precision-guided munitions, military forces often claim to have gone to great lengths to minimise collateral damage. Sadly, this is not true for South Africa, because the looting continues, as does the suffering.
How desperately SA needs a moral reawakening. For as long as adults with their dark motives keep playing games for their amusement, the children of tomorrow will continue to be left discarded by the roadside.
