THE SPEAR IS MIGHTIER THAN THE PEN
Last week's national hysteria over a mediocre painting epitomised a country that is seriously broken. The hysteria was disproportionate to the more pressing issues at hand.
The ANC went bezerk about a painting that depicted Zuma as a Leninist president that cannot keep his sexual peccadilloes under control. ANC supporters marched in anger, ironically symbolised by a woman wearing an ANC T-shirt wielding her wooden AK47, paraded ad nauseum on our TV screens!
City Press stupidly apologised for publishing pictures of the painting in its paper and website, proving once again that the SPEAR is indeed mightier than the pen. While public intellectuals are waxing lyrical about this comical saga, something more urgent, picked up by the UK's Daily Mail last week, missed our gaze.
Information leaked from a recent UNICEF report reveals that over 11 million of SA's children are chronically poor; 5 million children are HIV-positive and 40% die from the HIV/AIDS pandemic annually.
Over a million children have no access to potable water and more than a million children live in households where no one is employed. In 1985, all deaths constituted 25% of births; by 2021 it will be 87% of all births. One in 5 women in their reproductive ages is HIV+ and the demographic most affected are ages between 15 - 49 years.
That is what we should be marching about. That is what the headlines should be about. That should be the reason to kick the ANC out of office. That should engage activists, NGOs and public intellectuals with an energy never seen before, but somehow freedom of speech seems to trump all other rights in the Bill of Rights.
While the section on children's rights takes up more space than all other rights, children continue to be neglected, disregarded, ignored and maltreated.
There is a solution. Hundreds of excellent prevention of mother-to-child transmission programmes (MTCPT) exist in this country. Somehow it is not reaching all mothers. Why? Because all government needs to do is to corral the services of these organisations, scale them up and support them on an ongoing basis until the problem is under control.
For example, Mothers-to-Mothers (msm), CHoiCe , Hoedspruit Training Trust and Ndlovu Care Group are administering the definitive remedies to prevent mother to child transmission but most of these organisations are supported by foreign donors.
Mothers-to-Mothers recently won the US Presidential Medal of Freedom for operating in seven African countries, in 609 sites, employing 1519 mentor mothers, and for enrolling 275 000 more HIV-positive and new mothers in the m2m programme in 2010. Yet here we are oblivious to these life-saving measures for women and children.
If I were the President, I would simply outsource this job to the NGOs mentioned above, create employment for the army of volunteers who work in the field and bring down the rate of HIV within a decade.
Government would not only profitably spend the billions that go down the drain, but more importantly, it will also save its children. Tragically, the ANC has no clue. It is simply not governing. And the old biblical adage - where there is no vision, the people perish rings truer than ever before.
Today we are sitting with Thabo Mbeki's horrendous legacy, exacerbated by an ineffectual President Zuma. Both of them are a disgrace to former President Mandela who sagely commented: "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."
Rhoda Kadalie
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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