Johannesburg - In May 1995, at the launch of the Children’s Fund that bears his name to this day, our founding father, president Nelson Mandela, uttered the now immortal phrase: There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.
Much has been achieved in the last 29 years, but there is still so much more to do – especially around the protection and nurture of children. Children remain among the most vulnerable in our society. Youth unemployment is at catastrophic levels, state education (despite the hundreds of millions spent on it every year) is an abject failure. But an even greater concern is the welfare of our children.
This is not a new problem; it was one which concerned Mandela. It is one which we thought plumbed never to be repeated depths in Upington in 2001 when nine-month-old Baby Tshepang was raped by her teenage mother’s ex-boyfriend. Tragically, this week something worse happened. An eight-day old baby was raped and murdered by her father in Carletonville.
There are no words to describe the depravity.
As horrifying though is the thought that this could have been averted. The baby’s parents had lost custody of their other children because of their neglect of them. How could the new born, the most vulnerable of them all, be allowed to be placed in danger? It’s another failure (albeit only affecting an individual life) in a litany of recent government failures. This week, Parliament passed the National Health Insurance Bill without a real plan, creating a catastrophic risk for services that actually do work.
We have to protect that which works and fix the broken. Most importantly, we must never lose sight of Mandela’s maxim; how we treat our children is the true picture of our soul.
And that picture is not pretty.