Mandela left a legacy of elevating welfare of young to highest priority
Former president and his wife, Graca Machel, championed cause through Unicef even after stepping down
In celebrating the centenary of his birth we must recall, in this jarring age of antimodernist fake news, that Nelson Mandela’s priority was the fate and welfare of children. One of his first acts as president was to establish an interministerial committee on young people at risk. He charged the committee with the task of transforming, as he framed it, “the child and youth care system”. About 50,000-80,000 young people were in some form of foster care, and the committee was to ensure they were well looked after through the application of what Mandela called “family preservation and new foster-care approaches”.
Announced a month later as a priority in Mandela’s first, May 24 1994, state of the nation address — fast by any standard — he reported to the nation on International Children’s Day (June 1) that his government had set in motion mechanisms to implement the following programmes for children:
● Free medical care in state hospitals and clinics for those younger than six years old;
● Nutritional feeding schemes for qualifying primary schools;
● Emptying jails of minors and provision of alternative care centres; and ● Free, quality education. Under urgent consideration too were programmes to deal with the problem of street children. Mandela wanted to work with municipal governments to provide immediate relief and, in the longer term, “finally eradicate their plight”. Legislation against child abuse and child labour were also on the cards, he said.
Mandela understood that the government could not tackle these tasks alone, particularly given the scale required to take care of 50,00080,000 foster children — and this before the HIV and AIDS epidemic confronted SA. “Together government, nongovernmental organisations, the private sector, communities and individuals must act together to boost community-based forms of foster care, which include an understanding of the child and his or her family,” he said.
What made children the highest priority for Mandela was the recognition that apartheid, and the migrant labour system that predated it, had systematically ripped black families apart. A succession of segregationist governments deliberately underinvested in the education and welfare of black (understood inclusively) children.
At the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund on May 8 1995, he recounted how “we come from a past in which the lives of our children were devastated in countless ways. It would be no exaggeration to speak of a national abuse of a generation by a society which it should have been able to trust.” On another occasion he repeated the theme, saying, “I view it personally as one of the greatest tragedies of our nation’s history that young people who would otherwise have been developing their talents to the full and making a valuable contribution to society, are, by dint primarily of the system of apartheid, living a life of hermits and outcasts.”
At the launch of the Children’s Fund in New York on October 23 1995, in the presence of his newly appointed US board of directors and with many thanks conveyed to Denzel Washington for his substantial pledge to the New York-based fund, Mandela spoke about the “wrong done to our youth”, whose lives “have been devastated by apartheid”. Our children “were robbed of their right to a decent education, adequate healthcare, stable family lives — and sometimes their entire childhood”, he later remarked at the official opening of Cape Town’s Unicef-inspired SOS Children’s Village on May 25 1996.
Mandela launched a National Programme of Action for Children in 1996 to give concrete expression to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which SA had ratified in 1995, as he did to affirm the call made at the 1990 World Summit for Children to give them the first call on society’s resources, to land the national programme in the budget required that work be done to recast municipal, provincial and national budgets to drive a child-centred focus. The budget effort was undertaken by the Treasury and the Reconstruction and Development Programme office. The latter also did pioneering statistical and policy preparation work.
As executive director of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for SA at the time, I worked with the former vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Mamphela Ramphele, and the economist Warren Krafchik to develop a children’s budget for the parliamentary committee’s oversight use, with the support of visionary grants from the Ford Foundation, which at the time had a worldwide programme of using budget transparency initiatives to exact greater accountability from governments in delivering on their commitments to justice for vulnerable groups such as children, women and marginalised communities.
Mandela set the example and pledged a third of his presidential salary to the children’s fund. He thought about children as a sociological issue with profound moral dimensions for, as he put it, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children”. Never parochial about any concern, he worried about children globally and extended “solidarity with children throughout the world whose lives are ravaged by the scourges of hunger, war and ignorance”.
After he stepped down as president, Mandela and his wife, Graca Machel, a powerful children’s rights activist with hard liberationist credentials in her own right, joined the then executive director of Unicef, Carol Bellamy, and announced their “commitment to work closely with her and her respected organisation on a cause we hold most dear to our hearts — the rights of children and adolescents of this world to live safe from violence and exploitation, free of poverty and discrimination and to grow healthy and strong”.
Mandela loved children. His birthday parties were always children’s parties. He once reminded a small group of us that for two decades he and his comrades never once heard the sound of children, an unimaginable form of deprivation for anyone to experience. One of his closest friends, confidant and fellow Robben Island prisoner Ahmed Kathrada, described the layers of sound that “drifted around and into the cells: peacock calls, rowdy seagulls, motor-vehicle engines and rusted exhaust pipes belching into the sea air and the crunching of boots on the stones outside. Keys clanging locks open. And closed. Even the crashing of waves against the dock in the evenings. But never the laughter of children.”
Children have the same moral standing as adults in the right of life. But they lack legal authority to act in their own interests and therefore depend on adults to do so on their behalf. Mandela was rare in taking that injunction seriously as president and leaving a legacy embodied in the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and the children’s hospital built in his name, which we as a nation should embrace as a light upon the world.