Ubuntu must be lived reality

DISPATCH readers were horrified by this week’s stories about the three toddlers aged from 18 months to six years found abandoned beside the N2.

As we report in today’s Big Read, the children have been taken into care and are being medicated to overcome the physical effects of persistent neglect. Police are hunting for the mother, who faces criminal charges.

We report also that the plight of these three children is not unique in our country or our region. Around five children die of neglect and abuse every day and in East London alone an average of one a day is rescued from potentially fatal neglect.

The traditional culture of Africa, which said it takes a village to raise a child, has not translated well to the informal settlements where millions wallow at the wrong end of this country’s appalling and widening wealth gap.

Nothing can excuse the actions of the mother who allegedly took the state’s child support grant, abandoned her small children and went off on a prolonged Christmas party.

But few who have not been there would be able to imagine the hopeless misery of her life in a tin shack, the relentless despair of caring alone for three children when you have hardly anything to give them and the reality of knowing that apart from the few hours of oblivion that a drink might buy, you have no prospect ever of escaping.

Democracy has taken the harshest edge of this sort of poverty. The state pays R280 a month to support 11.3 million children of destitute parents, of whom 2.8 million are in the Eastern Cape.

The grant brings R18-billion a year into the province. Along with water services, electrification and housing support, the money should help the poorest South Africans first to survive and, if combined with social support, to begin to lift themselves out of absolute poverty.

If we could make the education system reflect the massive investment that goes into schools every year, we could hope to equip these children with the skills to lead lives richer in every way than those of their parents.

If the government would act on the ANC’s acknowledgement that socalled cadre deployment has undermined many services, we might see state institutions start to perform as they ought.

But for now, ours is largely a selfhelp society and the only people children such as the N2 toddlers can turn to is their neighbours – people like Nikki Witbooi who has opened her own home to the abandoned children next door and made them her own.

We talk a lot about ubuntu. We should be grateful that some don’t just talk about it, they practice it.