It takes a government to destroy a child’s future

They say it takes a community to raise a child, and I say it takes the government to destroy that child’s future.

When I was growing up, a township was something we saw illustrated in our workbooks or got a glimpse of from the back seats of our parents’ cars. I never dreamed that one day I would be walking in township streets and speaking to locals without being robbed, killed and raped, which we were warned as children would happen if we ventured there.

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Many things we were taught by the previous generation when we were growing up were not as they seemed. The reality is that nothing much has changed. Townships are still underdeveloped, under-resourced and overlooked three decades into democracy.

Recently, I visited a township close to Laudium following a devastating fire that claimed the lives of five children who clung onto each other while their little bodies burned beyond recognition in a shack. The fire brigade struggled to reach the shack deep in the township and would have had to take a narrow and unlevelled dirt road to get to it.

While walking among the shacks, the illegally connected electricity cables jump out as the possible cause of the next tragedy waiting to happen. The street corners are covered in rubbish – just another sign of the lack of service delivery in these areas.

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Many townships have no proper roads, and some areas lack electricity and sanitation because the trucks cannot enter informal settlements. The townships and informal settlements do not have lawns and trees, which are commonly seen in the suburbs.

Children in townships and informal settlements play in boxes on the sidewalks and on red ground instead of lawns.

Itireleng Primary School is the perfect example of this. Hundreds of children are packed into container classrooms and have to take turns playing outside at break time.

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Instead of asking why the government wasted millions of rands on building Itireleng Primary School, which has stood abandoned and unused since before the Covid pandemic, people accepted the situation as just another tender gone wrong.

But it wasn’t – and despite the plan to build a school meant to improve the lives of hundreds of children, the pupils are still being taught in container classrooms; they have no grass to play on and only portable toilets to use. It is concerning that this is the norm of townships and informal settlements 30 years into democracy.

Who is spending millions of rands to develop townships, roads, sanitation and schools, and why are they driving luxury BMWs while most people do not have basic services or human rights?

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Over and over, we have witnessed the top dogs sidestepping the so-called long arm of the law despite being caught with their fingers in the cookie jar.

In South Africa, a perpetrator can go to jail for subjecting one person to murder, theft or gender-based violence, but people who have destroyed hundreds and thousands of people are excused and are not held accountable for their sins against humanity.

The buck was passed to the municipality for not signing off on the building plans of a multi-million-rand school project. The building was left to fall apart, and the children had to learn in cramped container classes.

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Then, an application is made for more funds to tender out to new contractors.