Stop another Mount Ayliff
THE Eastern Cape is notorious for botched circumcisions which maim or kill the young people unfortunate enough to be affected. This has ruined the cultural standing of an age-old tradition and led to calls by government and nongovernmental groups for the procedure to be done by qualified medical practitioners instead.
While a few, small areas have pioneered this new direction there is still enormous resistance from those who believe it would dilute local culture.
What this difficult process of negotiation does not need is a seemingly unofficial intervention by people said to be government officials who use false pretences to get boys medically circumcised, as we reported yesterday. It is likely to cause harm to a delicate process that is meant to find a life-saving solution to the annual butchery of teenagers.
We are particularly alarmed that no one, including the provincial department of health, appear to know who facilitated a massive operation involving 33 boys, some as young as 10 in two villages in the Mount Ayliff area. The medical circumcisions took place at a government facility, were performed by government-employed medical practitioners yet the department says it knows nothing about it.
It is a disturbing development that calls for an urgent and open investigation which must result in those responsible being held accountable. It is very important that ordinary people are able to trust the actions of government health and education officials in particular where there is no other way of verifying the credibility what they are being asked to agree to.
We expect the health MEC, Sicelo Gqobana to personally visit the affected villages in order to reassure the community that such an incident will never happen again. His personal intervention will help put a delicate government initiative back on track and also restore some of the confidence we are certain has been lost as a result.
The provincial department of education also has work to do in this regard.
First, there must be clear guidelines governing how schools are used to mobilise pupils, their parents or their communities to participate in programmes that are driven by other departments. As our reporters found, the teachers could testify to neither the identity nor the authority of the purported officials who set this process in motion.
Second, there must be an easily accessible way in which parents and other community members can verify the status of programmes purporting to be driven by government. It is only good fortune that no children were maimed or killed in this instance, otherwise we would be writing about a serious tragedy.
The province cannot afford another circumcision scandal, and our children deserve a safe environment in which to grow up. The Mount Ayliff incident does not help.