Poverty turns the school run into a game of Russian roulette

On my morning walk today, I passed a young child of about 10 years old, neatly dressed in school uniform, his Vaselined face gleaming in the morning sun as he waited for his school transport.

Two thoughts immediately crossed my mind: that he was waiting alone, perhaps wondering whether he was safe, and the tragic accident in Vanderbijlpark the previous week in which 14 learners were killed while travelling to school in a scholar transport vehicle.

My thoughts turned to my own schooling and how, when I lived in Gqeberha with my grandparents, they had a trusted family friend who had a minibus and would collect us children because my grandparents didn’t have a car. I don’t ever remember feeling squashed and packed like a sardine, and the transport was safe and reliable.

When I then went back to live with my parents at the age of 10, they would drop my brothers and me off at school every morning up until matric. Our schools were always close enough that we could either walk there and back, or they would give us a lift.

But the reality for the majority of South African children, particularly poor black children, is that their transport is not as safe and trustworthy, and each day starts and ends like a game of Russian roulette.

These children’s parents do not have cars to ferry their children to and from school, and sometimes even those who do, do not have the time to do so. Parents sometimes leave their homes before 5am because of the distances they have to travel to work, and get back home at 6pm, well after schools have closed, and hope that their children will be safely home by the time they arrive. This means that engaging the services of scholar transport is the only means they have to get their children to school and back.

But beyond arguments about whether the children’s taxi driver, the truck driver, the transport association or the Department of Transport is to blame lies something even more disturbing: the degraded value of life. Every day, parents are forced to roll the dice, hoping their children do not become road death statistics.

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child because of a societal system that allows the suffocation of the poor for profit. But what is important is what sustainable action is taken as those 14 little coffins are buried.

We have an obligation as a society to ­agitate for accelerated spatial planning ­programmes that allow poor people to live closer to their places of work and schools so that parents are not forced to make impossible decisions about their children’s wellbeing. We have to ensure that law enforcement is applied consistently and fairly for the preservation of these precious lives.

This tragedy, and the tears of the learners’ parents, cannot be for nought. We have a moral imperative to do better by our children. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.