OUR KIDS ARE STARVING
Two million children in the Eastern Cape have inadequate nutrition, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, physical protection and sanitation
Two out of three Eastern Cape children are hungry, or worse, starving.
Child poverty, said an alarmed social development MEC Siphokazi Mani-lusithi, was spreading like wildfire.
A Dispatch investigation found that poverty blighted their every move, from their torn, threadbare clothes to their squalid, overcrowded homes.
They live with the gnawing insecurity that there might be no food in the house that night.
Many of the children we spoke to broke down as their harrowing stories emerged.
Mani-lusithi added new factors to the underlying cause of unemployment — drought and other ecosystemic disasters, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns.
A Stats SA Living Conditions Survey found that two million out of 2.9m Eastern Cape children suffer a lack of basic human needs — no proper nutrition, inadequate clothing, no dignified shelter, restricted access to education and healthcare, little physical protection, no sign of development and indecent sanitation.
In July, Stats SA announced that a staggering 78.7% of Eastern Cape children were found to be “multidimensionally poor ”— meaning every aspect of their lives was shot through with poverty and deprivation. The province was ranked the second poorest after Limpopo.
Nationally, 62.1% of children were found to be “multidimensionally poor”, meaning the Eastern Cape is 16.6 percentage points worse off than the national statistic.
The Stats SA survey was conducted in 2015, but released only in July last year.
If anything, the situation has worsened, a Dispatch investigation found.
Mani-lusithi said child poverty in the province was a huge “challenge”. She said despite all efforts by the government and its partners, child poverty had intensified significantly in the Eastern Cape every year over the past decade.
“It is spreading across the province, engulfing more households because of disasters such as Covid-19, drought and other climatic disasters that affect communities year in and year out,” she said.
The Living Conditions Survey found that the burden of raising the province’s children was being loaded onto the shoulders of elderly women. Most of the province’s children are being raised by their grandmothers — even though the children’s parents are still alive.
The gogos keep it all going on their social grants. It is an epic battle for survival, the Dispatch found.
The Dispatch, in a week-long investigation, visited Buffalo City Metro, OR Tambo, Alfred Nzo and Joe Gqabi districts. The stats do not lie: we discovered that our children live in a shocking, heartbreaking state.
Children told us how bad it feels to go to school on an empty stomach, to walk barefoot on rough township terrain strewn with deadly live wires, broken glass and bits of wire, and how burdensome it is to have to go out and find hard, poorly paid manual labour, any odd jobs, knowing that the money had to feed the whole family.
If ever there was cash left over, they needed to buy their own school uniforms.
We were stunned to find out how simply staying alive was a dangerous, difficult experience for children.
The roof above their heads, the walls about them are crumbling and cracking, and at school it is the same.
The basic infrastructure of human existence appears about to collapse, and much of it is not fit for human habitation, let alone for children to be there.
A frighteneing part of an Eastern Cape child’s day is simply going out to relieve themselves. Pit toilets threaten to take them down to a horrible death, and squatting in the bush amid prying eyes is humiliating, risky and unhealthy.
With homes vacated by parents hunting for jobs, there are many barely in their teens who suddenly become the adult in the family, raising young siblings orphaned by poverty, violence or disease.
In a sea of social dysfunctionality and dissolution, grandparents find it hard to keep the youths from engaging in delinquent and harmful behaviour.
The Dispatch team saw children as young as six roaming around at night in Buffalo City’s Duncan Village, Scenery Park, Nompumelelo and Mzamomhle. It was way after bedtime.
There is also the dark issue of depravity: children are being violated — both psychologically and physically abused, beaten, raped or molested.
Some adults did not fare well in our visits.
Street kids in Mthatha told the Dispatch they had run away from home because of maltreatment from parents or relatives who were drunk, drugged or suffering from a range of socioeconomic malaises.
Many kids said their only goal in the day was just to survive.
A 16-year-old Mzamomhle, Gonubie boy alleged he had been raped by a man he knew, who then threatened to rape his younger siblings should the teen report this violation to the police.
SA Stats said their survey found that the majority of children hit by poverty were black, living in rural areas.
According to the report, households with many children demonstrate high levels of multidimensional poverty compared to households with no or few children.
The Dispatch spoke to three siblings in a remote village in Port St Johns who said they had dropped out of school because one had fallen pregnant, another had quit after suffering anxiety and the youngest was too humiliated by his torn clothes, with a school uniform way beyond his reach.
The oldest, 17, dropped out of Grade 6 last year.
Her 14-year-old sister fell out of the school system in Grade 1 when she was only six.
Their brother, who is 12, dropped out in Grade 5 at the age of 11.
In a shocking backstory, they said their unemployed mother, who is 36 years old, dropped out in Grade 1.
A 59-year-old Lusikisiki granny who cares for seven grandchildren aged four to 16, said her life was painful and terrifying.
The family of nine was crammed into a tottering oneroom mud home. The walls are so badly cracked that all life inside is easily visible from the outside.
Teen depression appeared to be setting in. “I am tired of living this life,” said her 13-year-old granddaughter.
Yet, amid the bleakness there were stories of heroic determination, with children and some adults talking about how they would not give up.
They were gritty and stoic in their commitment to survive and overcome a callous social system which seemed to throw one disappointment after another at them.
They spoke of wanting to fight the odds and win for their families.
But from what the Dispatch team saw, it might take more than steely will to beat the system.
UDM president, MP and former head of the Transkei government Bantu Holomisa laid into the ANC government for abandoning and brutalising children.
Even when he took over Transkei as an Anc-supporting president of the nominally independent state, he said food security was one of the strengths of the Transkei.
“We used to have the Transkei Agricultural Corporation, which would plough for all the villages, at least to deal with poverty and hunger,” he said.
Holomisa said manufacturing was dead under the ANC government.
“If they would just resuscitate industry and agriculture that would bring more job opportunities,” he said.