Few would argue with the statement from Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, the Deputy Minister of Social Development, that the rights of children are absolute. Upholding these rights is the standard against which we should judge any child-focused initiatives. So, using that measure, how is the government doing?
The answer is dismaying. While the legislative framework is excellent, policies are for the most part enabling, and our social welfare structures contain many experts and staff committed to the needs of children, but government has largely failed to uphold many of children’s constitutional rights since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. These rights include the rights to basic nutrition and education; to social services; to family or parental care, or to appropriate alternative care when removed from the family environment; and to be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation. Nor can government argue that it is making decisions in children’s best interests.
Examples abound, including the catastrophic closure of the National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) without contingency planning for feeding 9 million vulnerable children during lockdown, shutting schools and Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres with no real plan to keep children learning during lockdown, its failure to prepare for the timeous reopening of ECDs, and a lack of provision and resources to protect children from violence. There was also the refusal to re-register Child and Youth Care Centres in Gauteng which meant that abused and abandoned children had to be turned away, a bureaucratic shutdown which has left hundreds of children eligible for family care stuck in institutions, and its unconscionable denial of the problem of abandonment.
It’s now common knowledge that when lockdown started, government failed to grasp the effect that it would have on the vulnerable. Minister of Social Development Lindiwe Zulu admitted that she hadn’t anticipated that the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic would be so crippling for the poor.
If the minister is to be believed, the result of the pandemic was unforeseeable. A common refrain in the minister’s speeches is that we are in uncharted waters and that no one could have anticipated this outcome. Zulu has also said that Covid-19 had exposed the deeper challenge the country was still facing to take better care of the poor, which is undoubtedly true.
Also true is that globally, governments have been left scrambling. But while uncertainty and structural inequality have exacerbated the crisis, the minister and her counterpart, Angie Motshekga, have left vulnerable children staring into the abyss because of circumstances that, if not preventable, could certainly have been mitigated were it not for some crucial government failings.
Contrary to government’s claim, social development’s spectacular failure to care for children’s rights during the pandemic is not crisis-related. The challenges facing children were common knowledge prior to lockdown and the argument that “no one could have known” is deceptive.
From the outset of the crisis, the National Coronavirus Command Council produced daily predictions about the impact and spread of the disease. Had the council contained social scientists, models could have included the impact of measures on the poor and vulnerable. It’s an oversight that’s now being addressed. On 13 July 2020, Zulu
style="font-weight: 400;">announced that the Intersectoral Ministerial Advisory Committee would ask “behavioural scientists, practitioners, academics and researchers in the humanities, and social sciences for their contribution towards establishing socially sustainable solutions to challenges that accompany Covid-19”. It’s commendable, but surely four months too late.
Nonetheless, as is typical in the social welfare space, advocacy groups and academics did the work on government’s behalf. Before lockdown began, Equal Education warned Motshekga that there would be a dramatic increase in child hunger if the minister closed the NSNP. By the first week of April 2020, the Children’s Institute had produced a position paper on the lockdown’s probable economic impact on children, along with the recommendation that Treasury increase the Child Care Grant to mitigate the risk. In the same month, the ECD sector did a massive survey to explore the effect of the closure of ECD centres on children and the sector.
Also in April 2020, advocacy groups warned of an increase in violence against children during the lockdown and alerted government to the lack of state social workers available to remove children in danger, and the need for “visible social workers” to mitigate abuse. By the beginning of Level 4, baby homes and child and youth care centres were cautioning about an increase in abandonment during lockdown and a lack of available places in homes to care for abandoned, abused and neglected children, and those who would have to be left without family care because of Covid-19 related deaths.
Government can’t say it didn’t know. And yet, it only responded to one of these studies, the recommendation to increase the Child Support Grant, and then, only in part. After the R300 per child top-up in May 2020, a caveat which made the increase for the months of June to October R500 “per caregiver”, effectively diluted the relief impact of these measures on some of the most marginalised children.
Given that research commissioned by the department established that children who received the grant “had better cognitive development, stayed at school longer, had better height in relation to age” compared to children that did not receive it, and were “less likely to partake in transactional sex”, the R230-million per month “saving” that this represents seems rather penny wise, pound foolish.
Watering down the impact of grant relief, coupled with the closure of the NSNP, was a devastating blow to children’s food security.
No one in government took responsibility for ensuring that 9 million children did not go hungry during lockdown. In mid-March 2020, Motshekga stipulated that communities would be responsible for feeding children during lockdown. Nonetheless, one of the key defences presented by the education department during Equal Education and Section 27’s court case to get the NSNP reinstated was that it could not manage the logistics of the programme during lockdown, and had passed the responsibility for feeding to the social development department. In practice, both failed to act, compounding the violation of children’s rights.
The least the education department could have done was to give social development the names and contact details of all learners in the NSNP, or they could have requested that it worked with school principals to get the content. This was a strategy employed by some NPOs, including Symphonia for SA, who used their relationships with the principals of 1,300 schools to run a “food for hungry children” campaign for the approximately 1 million children in these schools.
If the department of basic education (DBE) had provided such details, the department of social development (DSD) could have started lockdown with the details of 9 million learners in need (plus the children in ECDs receiving subsidies, whose details it should also have). It could have used its preferred “knock and drop” approach to feed children on that list instead of scrambling to identify people requiring food. But that didn’t happen, at least not in any coordinated fashion.
At the end of April 2020, Zulu said the two departments were still discussing how to “address the gap created by the suspension of the [school and ECD] feeding programmes” and in June 2020, the acting director-general for Social Development, Linton Mchunu admitted that distribution of food for school children and the ECD facilities was a challenge, and “food was just provided to households in need, but the households where children were at ECDs needed to be identified”.
In other words, only weeks before the DBE asserted in court that social development was providing food for school children on its behalf, the DSD admitted that it had not been able to make a comprehensive plan to feed children while they were out of school and ECDs. Small wonder that court submissions included harrowing stories of child hunger.
In her 17 July judgment ordering the DBE to reopen the NSNP, Judge Potterill said that in response to unprecedented levels of hunger, what is needed is “the justice of eating”, a “benevolent state, prepared to do more, not less, to alleviate the hunger amongst each and every person living in this country. Anything else is shameful.” She continued that by keeping the programme closed, the minister and her MECs were in breach of their constitutional and statutory duties (a duty denied by the minister). Moreover, the judgment states that its suspension resulted in the removal of children’s “pre-existing” right to basic nutrition which was a “deliberate retrogressive measure”.
Evidence of the outcome is already available. According to the recently released NIDS-CRAM study, hunger has doubled since lockdown began: “1-in-7 [families] reported that a child had gone hungry in the last seven days,” and only 18% of families “reported accessing support for food from government”. To quote Potterill: “Hunger is not an issue of charity, but one of justice… a more undignified scenario than starvation of a child is unimaginable.”
During her 13 July 2020 address, Zulu spoke about the need for the department to