Schools need to give kids condoms, now

We must protect them from HIV, pregnancy, writes Hlanganani Gumbi

KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature members recently embarked on their annual school oversight visits, which also marked the beginning of the 2017 academic year.

As part of the programme, all 13 districts in the province were visited by the multiparty delegation, along with senior education department officials.

The programme offers MPLs an opportunity to engage with education issues on the ground and to make appropriate changes to policy. However, it becomes a pointless exercise when it does not bring about positive change.

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Unfortunately it is also on these oversight visits that the South African Democratic Teachers' Union's ongoing grip on KwaZulu-Natal education and the devastating effects of the union's protection of bad teachers and principals can be seen.

Keeping 20 KwaZulu-Natal principals safe from being fired after their schools received a 0% matric pass rate in 2016 is a prime example.

The schools also face collapsing infrastructure.

Another big issue that crops up consistently during these visits is that of sexual activity on school grounds and the many resultant cases of teenage pregnancy.

This year I was part of the Zululand district delegation, which visited schools in Nongoma, eDumbe (Paulpietersburg) and Vryheid.

In Nongoma, Falaza High School had 13 cases where pupils had fallen pregnant during the 2016 academic year. At Kanyekanye High in eDumbe, there were more than 20. And so the trend went on, with most schools we visited in rural Zululand registering roughly 15 children on average falling pregnant each year.

In 2015, the same delegation went to a primary school in Pongola where teachers admitted that they were battling to prevent 12-year-olds from having sex.

They also told us a pupil had been impregnated by a member of the public, forcing her to temporarily drop out of school.

Naturally this is a terrifying concern given the impact on these young lives in terms of education and their futures, but also on the children that they, as children themselves, will have to raise.

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Then there are the effects on their families, many of whom still suffer the impact of apartheid and a migrant labour system. Think of the grannies relying on social grants to survive, and the parents, often in urban areas, working under difficult conditions at very low pay.

And ultimately there is the impact on the state health and child-grant system, which is already under tremendous strain.

Teenage pregnancy is undoubtedly one of the more complex matters to address, with a number of contributing factors including poverty, absent parenting, poor schooling, lack of good role models in communities and inadequate sex education, as well as patriarchy, sexism and outdated cultural pressures and norms.

Some of the schools visited did praise efforts to assist in curbing teenage pregnancy and the risk of HIV/Aids infection to children.

Campaigns by the department of social development, local NGOs, increasingly appropriate life-orientation literature in classrooms and the health department's efforts have all increased awareness, the flow of information and preventative education.

KwaZulu-Natal also has one of the most sophisticated HIV/Aids awareness programmes and this has gone a long way to ensure that treatment is received by those infected, regardless of the remoteness of areas where they reside.

Yet, with all the money, effort and complexities that are being navigated, the risk of yet another generation of young people contracting HIV/Aids is far too high.

Therefore, the DA in KwaZulu-Natal calls on the province's education and health departments to ensure that condoms are made accessible in all of the province's public schools, as they are in other public spaces like clinics.

The move would be a first for any province and we have no doubt that this would be met with some resistance and considered controversial in some quarters.

However, we must protect children. This means that once prevention has failed and pupils decide to have sex, we must ensure that they do so safely.

When adults date young children and illegally sleep with them, our job is not only to ensure that those adults are held accountable for their actions, but also to empower those children to look after their health and avoid falling pregnant.

Fact: children are having sex, even as young as 12. So the theory that providing children with condoms will only encourage them to have sex is outdated.

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Our pupils are exposed to so much through outside influences. Even excellent parents can no longer protect their kids from everything.

The question these parents and society in general must answer is: if your 12-year-old daughter has sex despite your guidance at home, do you want her to do so with or without a condom?

The answer should be clear to any caring parent, and to society.

We cannot allow culture, our own fears and a preference for preventative policies to sway us. The burden of HIV/Aids in a stigmatised society remains incredibly high.

Certainly, no child deserves to be infected with HIV/Aids for making a wrong decision - one that adults could have protected them from.

In fact, I would argue that it is a constitutional responsibility of the government to provide condoms in schools.

Protecting children from teenage pregnancy is essential for their own futures and progress. Protecting them from HIV/Aids is equally essential. It is time to move into the future and treat it as such.

• Gumbi is the DA's deputy chief whip in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature