Has Government “Dropped The Baby?”

Communities And Parents Are A Better Bet

Norman Reynolds

South Africa: A Dismal Country for Children
Vice-President Jacob Zuma has urged that the principle of "any child is my child" be revived in communities. This is the right approach to correct the poverty and poor education of at least half the children of South Africa and to protect them from the alarming incidence of abuse. It echoes the core of Ubuntu, of finding meaning through caring for each other. This injunction must be translated into the means for people to act, to take responsibility, to transform society around them.

In South Africa the people are to come first. The Preamble to our Constitution records our commitment to the attainment of social justice and the improvement of the quality of life for everyone. The Constitution declares the founding values of our society to be “human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms.”

A Desperate Need for Success as a People
Yet, although armed by the Constitution and enjoined by leaders to advance each other’s “human dignity”, as a people we are very short of success. The state can claim certain, mostly “global” successes, amidst growing controversy, but ordinary people have lost ground. The majority cannot secure the pieces they must control if they are to meet family obligations and build working communities, if they and their loved ones are to live in dignity. The historic legacy of wasted lives, once imposed but still active because of poverty and unemployment, continues to haunt national fulfilment.

What first success would people vote for that they could achieve in short order and that would meet heartfelt and strategic ambitions? How might that success open the way to more successes?

Jobs and houses might rank highest but these are longer-term issues that are beyond the quick realisation of communities. Knowing this, citizens might vote for the care, well-being and intellectual and moral growth of children as the most important goal, the litmus test of society.

If this were achieved, most other goals would follow. For instance, communal participation; acting responsibly; sharing and caring for each other; growing a confident, educated next generation; an end to women and child abuse. With that “human dignity” would flourish and long-term economic growth would be underpinned.

Children are the best starting point for social healing and national renewal.

Government must Enable Citizens and Communities
Section 28(1) of the Constitution creates the right of children to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services. Section 28 (2) goes further. It states that, “A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child”. We cannot get away with second best!

Section 28 requires the state to take steps to ensure that children’s rights are observed. Importantly, legislation and the common law impose obligations upon parents to care for their children. Civil and criminal law reinforces these obligations of parents as well as do social welfare programmes.

Last year’s Grootboom Judgement given by the Constitutional Court found that, “a child has the right to parental or family care in the first place, and the right to alternative appropriate care only where that is lacking.” Moreover, it found that, “responsibility for the well-being of children is imposed primarily on the parents or family and only alternatively on the state.” In our culture, accepting Jacob Zuma’s statement, we can read into “family” the wider family of community, of living through others.

The administrative implications of the Constitution are that the state has to “get behind” parents and communities in whatever way enhances the child and ensures that all live with dignity. What measures would make the societal imperative of Jacob Zuma operational?

Early Childhood Development, The Terrible Reality
The sad truth is that, together with growing unemployment and AIDS, far too many children face hunger, abuse, neglect and the stunting of their potential as human beings. 40% of all children “grow up in conditions of neglect and poverty”.

There are roughly a million children in each year between ages 0 and 9, or 10 million children in all. That means that there are 4 million children suffering from neglect or poverty one way or another.

Only 1 million out of 6 million under six, a mere 15%, are in some form of care group or pre-school. Many of these places, however, are poor to awful, repressive and dulling dumping grounds to which parents commit their children for long hours while they go to work.

In contrast, there are many community based pre-schools, catering to about 250,000 or 4% of children under six that are excellent and highly efficient resource wise. Local women run them with no assistance from the state but with training and back up by a number of mostly competent ECD agencies. These are funded primarily by business and foreign donors and by way of small monthly fees paid by what is a significant minority of parents. For poor families the fees are nonetheless significant.

Community-based pre-schooling is one of the few on-going and valued community level activities upon which to build communities themselves.

Some 96% of children are “out of the loop”, that is without access to a ‘proper’ pre-school. This is the big ‘growth opportunity’ that exists, community and parent based state and NGO supported pre-schools.

The Child’s Moral and Intellectual Growth
It is striking that the Constitution excludes the right of children to intellectual and moral growth. It limits itself to their physical well-being. Early Childhood Development (ECD), the formative years from birth to age six, comprises good parenting, good physical and health conditions, safety within the neighbourhood and sound, professionally supported pre-school and other services accessible to all children and all parents. It is the most important and represents the highest return possible to public investment. It is the foundation upon which to renew the whole school system.

Having stressed the all-important early years to secure a child’s overall well-being, Government, in its May 2001 White Paper on Early Childhood Development, proceeds to ignore the high investment returns flowing from attention given to all children aged 0-6.

Instead, it opts for a partial, expensive per unit and therefore highly limited ‘Reception Year’ for some children turning six to be based in Primary Schools. This is a nonsense in terms of pedagogy, investment and community development. It ignores the requirements of the Constitution for ‘dignity’, denies community efforts and undermines that vast and critical ‘volunteer-cum-community movement’ despite the new ANC call for just that, and mocks Zuma’s call for societal responsibility for all children.

The policy assumes state ‘delivery’ of a measure that increases the number of ‘expensive’ unionised teachers. Since official salaries are up to 10 times the income of community-based teachers (R6,700 compared to an average in community of R688), the potential coverage becomes severely limited. Moreover, the removal of the five year olds will knock out many community schools which are marginal financially, destroy the mixed age learning environment where, as is traditional, older children mentor younger, and threaten the favourable 19:1 child:educator ratio.

Primary schools are often sterile and hostile environments for small children. Known and dynamic alternatives are to be denied whilst also wasting resources communities desperately need. By backing community, Government could aim to raise coverage appreciably, improve the low salaries, and build efficiency and effectiveness.

Child Well-Being, the Highest Possible National Investment
This staggering national, citizen, constitutional, policy and investment failure must be corrected. Can we design a programme that does this? That represents a peoples’ first developmental success in the new South Africa? Can we ensure the Constitutional right of parents to succeed? Can we create a popular movement for the full development of the child? Can that help to realise the legal and moral responsibility of parents and of community? Can we put our feet on a ladder that can take us to “human dignity” more certainly than official empire building, ‘delivery’ or globalisation? Can the nation’s right to invest where the returns are highest be asserted?

Official support for children has been translated into a number of programmes held and budgeted for within several state or local government departments. This model creates high levels of administrative overhead and a plethora of rules and procedures. The result is that few resources arrive in the field and ordinary people find it hard to influence outcomes. More pertinent, the model makes it impossible for the community to deal with what is invariably a local set of causes / problems in a holistic and problem solving manner. The result is that parents and community are often sidelined by officials and experts and control no resources themselves when their right should be to know the available resources and how to access them.

It is clear that parents and communities, many living in poverty, have the prime responsibility for children. They have not yet been enabled to take responsibility for realising all the rights that should be accorded to children.

The state needs to alter its position. And the intellectual and moral growth of the child must be incorporated into the Constitutional rights of the child. But, how?

A Child Rights Based Programme
There is a startlingly simple model. A version is being implemented in New Zealand. Citizens successfully challenged excessive defence expenditure and called for that ‘saving’ to go to children. Government acquiesced.

South Africa has wasted years talking about co-ordination between departments. Government itself has not succeeded in this. Now various NGOs and CBOs around the country are piloting “safety net” models which seek to use moral suasion to secure state performance. However, experience suggests that no Department will allow itself to be co-ordinated by another Department or body. The only party which can co-ordinate across fields is the client, that is the community, the sum of the parents who hold the prime responsibility. This is precisely what happens when a rich person or a business buys the services they need – they co-ordinate them because they seek a certain end result and because they pay.

Pilots of “safety nets” may gain partial success for communities, a sort of Phase 1, but until communities are enabled to pay, to know the resources available, to call the tune, there will be no co-ordination and optimisation of resource use.

The resources for children from Health, Welfare, Education, Social Services, and other government budgets should be combined to create a per capita amount for each child to be assembled and managed at community level. Communities, operating within a programme framework with suitable support, set broad goals to guide the use of these known public funds. Communities decide what type of provision for early childhood development is needed and how it is best achieved. In this way, people are enabled to act and to become responsible whilst realising constitutional and local government requirements.
They will contribute considerable volunteer effort, reduce the present high overheads of salaries, rents, transport and telephones, release real resources to the field, and be accountable through now ‘professionalised’ officials who have advisory, training, veto and reporting functions. The state retreats to a “seeing the wood for the tress” support and monitoring role.

As Vice-President Zuma declared, it is proper that the care of children be located squarely within community. That is where the issue lies, where the eyes and ears of family and neighbours exist as the front line to pick up problems, and where parents and others find the support they need. For South Africans, an equal state and community partnership would be a living evocation of “Ubuntu”. For that to happen, the state must “get behind” parents and communities and stop “eating” the resources itself.

This proposal illustrates the ability of citizens and state to create “programme rights”; that is to add the right of children to intellectual and moral growth to the presently limited constitutional dispensation and to enable parents to act with dignity through locally forged community wide pacts. It also shifts the inherited administrative control paradigm to the new legal framework for developmental administration in which, at local government level, social and economic development is to be led by residents.

Finally, it juxtaposes the development of children, a peoples’ issue, against the recent arrogance of the state with regard to the Arms Deal and its tendency to spend on itself.

As the bumper sticker says, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had all the resources we needed to educate our children, and our Defence Minister had to have cake sales to raise money for arms!”