Govt is to blame for kids’ deaths at dumpsite

Four children died after eating something at a dump this past weekend. The police haven’t released the autopsy results yet but, in the meantime, it’s generally accepted that whatever they ate killed them.

And government blamed it on the local community.

A municipal spokesperson said that illegal dumping was the problem – not the fact that there are no skips or rubbish collection services in that part of the Eastern Cape township where most people from the surrounding informal settlements are currently being relocated – and where these children met their deaths.

It’s callous. They were children. The youngest was three.

Their families are members of the same community the municipality would hold responsible. And they are in the throes of what must be the most all-consuming pain right now.

A quote by American photographer David LaChapelle reads: “There’s nothing that symbolises loss or grief more than a mother losing her child.”

The municipality’s stance calls to mind the Limpopo department of education’s handling of the case of five-year-old Michael Komape, who drowned in a pit toilet at one of its schools in 2014.

In the recent Constitutional Court judgment against the department – and in favour of Komape’s family – the court slammed the “insensitive” way in which the department had conducted itself.

Moreover, were the autopsy results of the four children who died this past weekend to confirm popular suspicions, the municipality would have to accept – at the very least – some responsibility for what was, at its core, a result of failed service delivery.

It would be an extreme result, yes. But it would be exactly what the protests that sweep through the country year after year try to fight against: government not living up to its promises and leaving the poorest of the poor out in the cold without even the very basics – condemning them to a cycle of poverty and desperation.

This time last year, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the National School of Government was introducing “a suite of compulsory courses, covering areas like ethics and anti-corruption, senior management and supply chain management, and deployment of managers to the coal face to strengthen service delivery”.

It was, indeed, launched in May, at which time government said all public servants would have to be “reoriented in understanding the role of the government mandate, and more importantly, a role that every government employee needs to take up in realising government aspirations as outlined in the National Development Plan”.

The National Development Plan talks extensively about improving service delivery.

There isn’t any easily accessible information around how many of our civil servants have, to date, undergone this “reorientating” but it’s clearly not enough if failed service delivery did indeed have a hand in the deaths of four children.

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