JUSTICE MALALA | Unconscionable leaders carry on regardless, ‘secure in their own comfort’

Nine years ago, five-year-old Michael Komape drowned in a pit toilet at his school in Limpopo. After numerous legal challenges by NGOs to bring those responsible to account, several courts ordered the Limpopo education department and others to eradicate pit toilets at schools. Political leaders stood at podiums and vowed this would never happen again.

Earlier this month, on March 8, four-year-old Langalam Viki fell into a pit toilet at her school in Vaalbank in the Eastern Cape. She drowned in the excrement.

As a friend said to me this weekend, it’s not rocket science to eradicate pit latrines. So, why is it that decades after the government vowed to eradicate them, these toilets still exist at schools across the country? How do we speak of a capable modern state when we cannot deliver on a basic promise such as this?

In August 2009 the brother of 22-year-old S’khumbuzo Douglas Mhlongo went to visit him in his shack in Hillcrest, KwaZulu Natal. S’khumbuzo did not answer his knock. When the brother opened the door, he was greeted by S’khumbuzo’s body hanging from the rafters. He had committed suicide, leaving a note saying he had taken his life because he had been refused an identity document by the department of home affairs. Not having an identity document meant he could not do anything meaningful with his life, he wrote.

His story was tragic. His parents had abandoned him and his siblings. He had tried to get a job but been unable to get one. Finally a pet food producer had offered him a permanent position but needed his ID. Officials at home affairs told him he was a foreigner. When he arrived with proof from his local councillor that he was indeed South African, the home affairs official tore his application in half and threw it in his face. Frustrated, he went home and hanged himself.

Two weeks ago, TimesLIVE ran a story about Layani Mkansi, a 20-year-old who achieved five distinctions in matric. But he cannot enrol at university because he does not have an identity document. His story is tragic. He was born of Mozambican parents in South Africa. They are both dead. So what should this kid do? Go to Mozambique, a country he does not know?

We can all scream until the cows come home, but a state that fails to build safe toilets for its children over decades is a failed state.

The stories above are not “just” stories in the media. They are casual and official acts of cruelty, neglect, corruption and abuse of human rights. They are not one-off acts but sustained derelictions of duty and care over decades by the state, its political leaders and the officials they lead.

We can all scream until the cows come home, but a state that fails to build safe toilets for its children over decades is a failed state. Let’s not argue about the indefensible here. As my friend said, building safe toilets is not rocket science. Why is it, in 2023 in South Africa, our leaders want to pretend that doing the very basic for our children is an act of charity and demands ingenuity? That poor child Komape should not have died in 2014. Langalam Viki should not have died in early March. Yet they have — and no-one is held responsible. Crucially, no political leader is held accountable. No-one is fired. They continue to enjoy their perks. I am reminded of Thuli Madonsela’s report into the Nkandla scandal — they are “secure in their comfort”.

When S’khumbuzo Mhlongo hanged himself in 2009, the then home affairs minister reportedly cried when she heard his story. But what has changed? Layani Mkansi tells us pretty little has changed. Are we waiting for Mkansi to take his own life before we care, before the system changes?

This is not the South Africa so many fought for. What happened to the ideal of a South Africa where respect for human rights was at the heart of all our endeavours? In the absence of the respect for human rights by our leaders, where is the anger and outrage by us, the people, the voters? By letting these so-called leaders get away with murder, we are complicit.

Last week the International Monetary Fund issued a paper advising that South Africa’s economy would not grow this year and would only improve marginally in the next three years. So, over and above the human rights abuses we inflict on the poor, we are now driving them into the desperation of deeper joblessness and hunger. Make no mistake: government corruption and incompetence affects the poor many more times than it does the affluent.

Poor economic growth will drive even more poor people to the edge.

Yet nothing will happen. Our leaders, who promise action when a child dies in a toilet and yet do nothing afterwards, will continue in their jobs. We, the people, will continue to reward them for their casual cruelty, their corruption and their incompetence.