Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Most South Africans await two critical announcements on October 26 amid high inflation and rising interest rates.
First is Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s tabling of the Medium Term Budget Policy Statement in Parliament and whether it will be bold enough to address the urgent needs of children in need of early childhood development (ECD) services.
Second is the release of the Crop Estimates Committee’s intentions-to plant data, in which we expect farmers to increase their plantings of summer crops. This will be in line with increased plantings of winter crops, notably wheat, barley and canola, for the 2022/23 season to take advantage of good rainfall and higher prices.
The looming concern is that there is a depressed mood in the ECD sector as trickling information from sector networks indicates that, unless the government timeously expands the provision of subsidies, fewer practitioners will be available in 2023 to run centres.
Moreover, even those who continue will look after fewer children.
ECD practitioners tell their peers that increasing poverty, unemployment and inadequate government support have created new problems for forecasters in the sector.
Not only are parents struggling to enrol and consistently send their children to ECD centres, but they are also changing places of residence more frequently than they used to. This is attributed to job-seeking activities, making it difficult for ECD centres to maintain enrolment figures and provide services to the neediest and most vulnerable children.
Notably, officials in the Department of Social Development tend to wait for definitive evidence that economic hardships will strike vulnerable individuals before approving subsidies for ECD centres attending to fluctuating numbers of enrolled children. And by then, it is too late for many people.
Is there anything the mini-budget can do to assist ECD centres and the vulnerable communities they serve? In this mini-budget, the expectations are high that the minister will announce an increase in the current government subsidy to ECD facilities to ensure that the services reach the most deserving children.
Early in the year, I wrote about the growing buzz from ECD sector practitioners and researchers to the effect that the government, which has been trying to cut corners by demanding unrealistic application criteria for ECD subsidies, including during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, is braking too hard.
Since then, the buzz has intensified.
And I’m increasingly convinced that the government is getting behind the curve in funding the ECD sector despite a disappointing inflation report and a depressed national tax revenue base.
I would now argue that we are just starting to see the effects of the erosion of the coronavirus pandemic on household and community support systems the ECD sector has relied on for many years.
In the past three years, the sudden death of a large number of retired professionals responsible for starting and operating ECD centres has left a considerable gap in communities.
These ECD practitioners had the resilience to keep safe hundreds of thousands of children from households unable to afford to pay fees while waiting for approval of government subsidies. The worsening poverty and crime have resulted in the closure of ECD centres, as criminal syndicates also target the centres for extortion by demanding protection fees.
And the risks a less-money-for-children policy poses to social stability and the national economy, in general, are looming larger.
Part of the problem is that the government has not done over the years what it is supposed to do urgently for ECD – one of which is that schools in impoverished areas should be part of the National Schools Nutrition Programme, which is meant to provide daily nutritious meals to pupils in the most disadvantaged areas, but is failing because of corruption and maladministration.
Now take the threat of unavailable and inaccessible ECD services triggered by poverty and the effects of the pandemic. The denial of the level of care required in the first 1 000 days of a child’s life from pregnancy onwards, malnutrition, exposure to violence and injuries, insufficient attention to mental health needs and, as a result, children with long-term health conditions.
But at some point, confidence in the ability of the government to fulfil election promises will crack, and voting partners might start to move away from political parties to independent candidates. Communities might get nervous and demand system change instead of holding on to promises of a gradual process of addressing these concerns.
The human development setback effects are devilishly hard to model for both political scientists and economists. This is why some feared disinvestments in human development dissipate harmlessly.
And some budget misappropriation for items such as the school nutrition programme turns into soft landings. Or the reverse.
For human development investments and budget allocation decisions, conditions matter if we are to achieve the desired goals. An underspending on a human development item does not change future political weather, but budgetary neglect during vulnerable moments does change the future of society.
The decline in ECD investment reduces the economy’s productive capacity and social cohesion. Children who miss out on adequate care in the first 1 000 days of their lives in an era of budgetary neglect can permanently be knocked out of the productive workforce and carry these life experiences for years.
A budgetary underspend on ECD services does not leave children’s toys stacked up in a corner like yachts on shore.
Still, the damage can be more severe and widely spread than the attention-grabbing headlines coming out of political grandstanding.
Again, I cannot offer any certainty about what is coming in this mini-budget.
But we do not want the government to neglect the children and their families and refuse to act on warnings of a socio-economic storm until all the uncertainty is gone.
By then, it will be too late to avoid the worst. Hang on to your hat.
Nyembezi is a human rights activist and policy analyst
Cape Times