Visualise this: you are only 15 years old and your day starts with you waking up before the sun rises, your bathing water is prepared by the fireplace and you brace yourself for a vaskom session. You trudge in your torn shoes to school, your grade 10 books are heavy on your back but you still have to carry a bucket with you because you need somewhere to sit, otherwise, a brick will do. In a classroom that has broken windows, you get a full appreciation of every winter season for three years now.
This is not a fable but the story and reality of schoolchildren in the Nyamande Secondary School in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga.
Another hopeful soul, Cebisa from rural Eastern Cape, has to wake up extremely early to trek for up to 10km to her village school that does not have proper desks, has limited teacher capacity and study material. On days when it rains her mother who has to take a taxi to town to her humble job drapes them and their schoolbags, which probably have holes, in black plastic bags. There is no scholar transport or umalume to drop her off at school. During the school short break, they buy snacks with their R2 pocket money or watch others eat while they wait for the lunch break where they will share sugar beans and pap. If they are lucky, the school tap will have water to wash down the only meal they had that day.
Just last week in North West teaching and learning at Solomon Lion Primary and Mmadikete Lion Secondary School was interrupted and learners had to add 40 minutes to their school walk after a bridge collapsed following heavy rains. It may sound wild, but this is the life in rural South Africa.
One thing is for sure and that is we are sitting on a ticking time bomb as a result of government failure at every turn
Meanwhile, poverty porn is at an all-time high as children in the Eastern Cape have to carry the burden of the government’s inefficiencies on their backs after unconventional wheelie desks-cum-schoolbags were donated to their school. As if the hideous foldable desks are not enough embarrassment, the children are encouraged to carry them home for homework space.
The black child is its saviour and provider. From a young age, many black children will have to learn how to survive and make a plan to get an education. It used to be that black people could get poor quality education with limitations, during apartheid South Africa. Now that access to quality education is a basic right for all South Africans, the challenge is no longer the quality but rather fair and equal access to education for everyone, especially the poor who can only hope to leave their poverty situation through education.
The struggle does not end for this child who will pass matric against all odds only to have to fight for survival yet again in tertiary. Just this year students from underprivileged backgrounds were on a hunger strike at Wits, in protest against exclusion. Theirs are not the only stories of fighting the system, delays in NSFAS payments and fights with landlords and admissions offices regarding overpayments, which are not of their own doing or control.
We have come to embrace government failures so much that we fight the battles that should be championed by our government institutions almost at will. When a bridge collapses and emergency and municipal services are unavailable, we carry the burden of making a plan to get to and from school. When gun violence breaks out in gang wars, we are charged with our safety because our government security forces are missing in action.
When universities are oversubscribed and NSFAS fails to pay for deserving students, causing them to lose out on opportunities to be further educated, it is the child who must sleep in the corridors, vulnerable and desperate to wake up and fight for a place in these institutions. Where is our government in all this? They have abdicated their responsibility to the poor of South Africa.
Yet every year we are told that departments return allocated funds back to the Treasury because they failed to use them. We also hear of large-scale wasteful and fruitless expenditure, while the needs of South Africans go unfulfilled and the infrastructure and service remain poor.
In light of recent events that have thrust South Africa into the spotlight, whether justifiable or not, the government of the day needs to ask itself some serious questions because more and more South Africans are feeling disenfranchised in some way, like the unemployed frustrated and forgotten youth of our country.
One thing is for sure: we are sitting on a ticking time bomb as a result of government failure at every turn. It is disappointing that new brooms in critical departments such as basic education and public works have not made any strides in fundamental changes that will improve the lives of ordinary South Africans.
Changes that are visible and measurable, not just plans and talk shops that are and have been more of the same, even when government was run by a single party. I suppose we should ask ourselves as a society at the end of the day, what is the benefit of having a multiparty coalition as a government if nothing changes? I’m sure that millions of black children hailing from rural areas see no benefit and remain alone and forgotten.
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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