Mandela Day: Honour Madiba, save our children

Help save a child this Mandela Day. Even though he walked his own “long road to freedom”, Nelson Mandela wanted to free South Africa’s children from poverty, sickness and abuse – and now his charitable foundation is making “walking the extra mile so vulnerable children do not have to” the rallying point for this year’s Mandela Day.

Mandela Day on Monday, calls on people to offer 67 minutes of their time, or resources, to help others in need in honour of the 67 years “Madiba” spent fighting for justice, equality and human rights for all.

The interim chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Dr Stanley Maphosa, said in the two-and-a-half years of crisis and disruptions caused by Covid and economic problems, children and young people in SA were overlooked and unheard, even though they were also deeply affected.

As the nonprofit organisation launched the Children’s Fun Walk as part of its 27th Annual Children’s Celebration on Saturday, Maphosa said it wanted to help amplify the voices of children and youth to speak out for themselves and challenge the status quo, especially policy changes, interventions and policy engagement, because not only are they the future, they are also the present.

“Children today still have the needs they had during the time of former president Mandela and those needs are seemingly growing, despite the efforts government made to address children’s issues. Those needs are still high for children.”

The fun walk, which will be celebrating the impact the fund has had over the years in areas relating to children’s issues, will also celebrate the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital’s five years of existence “as the only dedicated children’s hospital in Gauteng”.

“Our focus areas are on child health, child mortality, child protection and safety, the vulnerability of children to violence,” Maphosa told The Citizen. “The third area is around economic resilience and poverty around children and the last one is around the empowerment and the development of youth between the ages of 18 to 22.” He said it was officially time to bring the voices of the children to the spaces where decisions were being made.

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“And we want to do this through the Nelson Mandela children’s parliament, which has run for 10 years now, as we gather children from all the provinces.

“They speak around the issues of children, including the employment of children.

“We have also developed what we call the children’s manifesto, which guides their discussions at those levels.

“We have been mobilising children to participate in entrepreneurship through our programme, which we call Efeng Bacha, which gives young people entrepreneurial skills and then challenges them to go back to their communities and implement the lessons there.”

Dr Wilhelm Verwoerd, senior researcher in historical trauma and transformation at Stellenbosch University, also called on South Africans to remember the significance of the day and how it came about, which was “what our former president Mandela gave his life for”.

“The bottom line is, I think, especially for South Africans who look like me, tend to have a short memory. We tend to focus on what has happened since 1994, but underestimate and avoid the deep historical roots of inequalities and the violence,” he said.

“Think of all the years that Mandela struggled; all the years that he spent in prison and never gave up.

“So that’s that long, lifelong commitment to deep, meaningful political and socioeconomic change – and that is, for me, what Mandela Day is about.”