My route to work takes me past the bottom-end of Hillbrow in Johannesburg. Every morning a very disturbing sight awaits me: on an island in the middle of a busy intersection, a group of wretched children begs from motorists while sniffing from glue-filled containers.
Two things always strike me. One is what future these children, already the walking-dead, have in store for them. The other is that there is a police station a little further along the road, visible from where these children waste themselves.
Our law dictates that if parents fail to care for their children, then the responsibility falls to the state. And yet here stands a bunch of kids, some not more than 10 years old, in full sight of a law enforcement agency — and hundreds of motorists and pedestrians passing by — and no one ensures they are fed and schooled.
Is it a case of us all seeing these young humans as nothing more than the ‘collateral damage” of our heartless urban centres? If so, it’s the kind of myopia that makes our laws and Constitution slip into the realms of the invisible.
Some comfort can be taken from recent initiatives, like that of the Department of Labour, to protect the rights of children. In a report commissioned by this department, 36% of South African children were found to be involved in labour. Representative Snuki Zikalala recently stated that: ‘Our attitude as the labour department is a zero-tolerance approach to child labour.”
Unscrupulous employers are doubtless partly responsible, and efforts to eradicate this practise for their labour deserves praise.
But when you consider some of the logistics, you’ve got to wonder how meaningful these pledges are. For one example, Kenny Fick, CEO of the labour department in Gauteng South, recently told the Human Rights Commission that with the 200 inspectors available to him: ‘if we wanted to visit every place once, it would take us three years to get through every business and farm in our area.”
And, in fact, shouldn’t the real focus of this ‘zero-tolerance approach” be on the civil service and it’s pathetic record of getting grants out to the thousands of needy who qualify for state support? After all, the underlying reason for children labouring in the first place is the fact that it’s the only way to keep their daily bread coming.
A report by the International Labour Organisation last year painted a sordid picture of worldwide child abuse: some 179-million youngsters are thought to be involved in illicit activities, ranging from prostitution to drug trafficking.
But just because the whole world is failing its children doesn’t let us off the hook. ‘Zero tolerance” really means making sure a lot more people are doing their jobs fantastically well — from educators and social workers to labour department officials and back again.