DO WE CARE ABOUT CHILDREN?

“WHOSE child am I going to be tonight? Whose bin am I going to eat out of tonight? Whose dogs are going to be my friends tonight? These are lyrics from one of the late Lucky Dube’s songs.

These lyrics came to my mind as I thought about the situation of children in the country. I know there are non-governmental organisations and institutions that work on children issues but it seems like there is a missing link.

As a country we are prone to ratify international treaties and conventions or even passing laws but we are very slow in implementing our obligations on the documents. We are signatories to good international documents on children.

We also have Section 29 of the Constitution and the cherry on top of the cake is the Children Protection and Welfare Act (CPWA) of 2012. If we can implement the provisions of these documents, our country would be heaven on earth for the Swazi child. That it took force for our government to make good the provisions of Section 29(6) of the Constitution speaks a lot about what it thinks of the Swazi child.

That government was forced to implement Section 29(6) and pay for primary education is not enough. I am sure studies were carried out and it was discovered that children were not enjoying the fruits of the free primary education programme that government was forced to implement, and it was therefore imperative to provide food in schools. What a great move by our government if only it was properly and faithfully done.

It pains me to say instead of government making sure it kept up with the great move it decided to starve the children and not deliver the food thus making them not to enjoy the free education. But what they prioritise is urgently getting loans to build a hotel that will not benefit the country.

The CPWA is a good law that seeks to make children enjoy growing up and prepare them to be better people in future. In my opinion though, government is not taking proper care of the provisions of the Act.

The Act provides for what is to happen if there are violations of the Act. It gives a lot of work on what the police have to do when there are some violations of the Act. The problem is that government failed to provide the human resource. But here I think it is the police institution that needs to cater for the human resource.

I do not think we need so many police for OSSU. Some of them should be deployed to the domestic unit of the police service. The domestic unit should be well equipped because it would not assist anyone to go to the unit and be told it does not have a car to use in taking care of these cases.

The police are to work with the social welfare department which seems to be understaffed.  The assessments that have to be done by the social workers require them to travel far to compile reports. With the few cases that I have followed this work tends to take too long and the child is affected. As it takes a long time there is a problem with where the child should be kept pending the compilation of the report. The Act provides for halfway houses where the child should be kept and the State has to provide for same. The question is how many do we have?
When are we to build them because the money for the hotel that will benefit a few would build enough of them?
Section 20(3) of the Constitution provides that to discriminate means to give different treatment to different persons attributable only or mainly to their respective descriptions by or disability.
In my opinion we discriminate against children with disabilities. This is because we are giving them different treatment attributable to their disability. We tend to lean towards having special schools for children living with disabilities. This is discriminating them based on their disabilities.
We have policies that provide that a child has to travel a certain distance from home to school but this is not the case for children with disabilities. They are supposed to leave their homes and stay in faraway places. We are also robbing them a chance to interact and know their counterparts living without disabilities. What kind of a society would it be if people were to accept each other without discrimination?
The child age is the right time to develop such a culture. If only we could have a society with a government that caters for the future of the country more than the luxuries of today, a country that will be educated and inclusive. I hope our government will make good of the promises we make in the documents we sign and the laws we pass. We could sing a different tune from that of the late Luck Dube.

     

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