launch of the Provincial Child Rights Advisory Council, Cape Town
17 August 2007
Thank you very much Dr Lionel Louw. I want to welcome, acknowledge and greet
Shadia Kamau for being amongst us here in Cape Town today.
I think that it comes from this generation of leadership in United Nations,
which is beginning to understand what the world requires. But more importantly,
what Africa requires. We have never had so many hands on interest from agencies
of the United Nations. In your case, from United Nations Children's Fund
(Unicef), a colleague Jonathan Lucas from the United Nations office of drugs
and crime. I think that they are making it possible for us, in this case on the
front of children, and on the other hand on the front of drug abuse, not to
make our own mistakes. They are ensuring that we do not repeat mistakes that
have been made elsewhere. That is the value of having them here.
I think that your presence here is a practical presence, an assuring
presence that we are indeed doing what we are meant to do. You are also
assuring us that we are not a unique situation in the Western Cape, Cape Town
and South Africa. Your presence is giving us an indication that we are facing a
challenges that others are facing and that we can learn from others and more
importantly we can also teach others.
The second point that your presence communicates, is that what appears
overwhelming to us, can indeed be overcome. It may not be tomorrow, it may not
be the next day, but it can indeed be overcome. You give us hope, a universal
hope that we are where others have been and we are probably where others are
still going to be. We can only continue in co-operation with all that you
represent across the world, so that we can begin to significantly overcome our
challenges in the Western Cape.
I also want to thank our representative from the presidency for being here.
I think that we have an overwhelming interest from the presidency to try and
understand what the state of affairs is in the Western Cape despite the nature
of its politics. Images of political fluidity, mayors becoming premiers,
premiers becoming mayors and all of those related issues still happen, yet
something is going right. Yet we are achieving things, yet we are fighting
battles and winning battles. Nothing appears to be insurmountable.
Marble, you must give the President one message: tell the President that the
Western Cape is getting things right. Tell the President that people in the
Western Cape are getting things right because they have no time to become too
cosy with the Premier or with the Mayor for they will be gone very soon.
The President must be told that people and organisations in the Western Cape
are learning to depend on themselves and move forward in partnership with
government but often not permanently close to government. And maybe some of the
other problems across the country are that people may be too state oriented in
the centre. They rely too much on the state to solve their problems and they
demoralise and disempowered themselves from the processes of resolving the
problems.
What we are institutionalising today, the provincial child's right advisory
council is the way in which organisations such as those represent here, take
out insurance policies against the fluidity of government. There is a sense of
permanence through the institutionalisation of this advisory council. You are
being empowerment and given a great responsibility in the process to keep
government on the right track. You are saying that the driver of the train may
change, but we will set the tracks, to ensure that government will always
maintain its obligation towards its children.
I have tried to encourage this institutionalising relationship towards
government, emphasising that it is not a lottery, does not depend on who is in
office, whoever is in office must inherit it. This is the second major
achievement in this week in terms of institutionalising relationships between
government and organisations that contribute significantly to the development
of our province. On Tuesday, we launched the Western Cape Religious Leaders
Forum, where all major religions came together, forming themselves into an
organisation and more importantly, on the one hand fulfilling the obligation to
the new challenges of the Western Cape.
This forum will fulfil a second role, which is that of maintaining the
relevance of religion to the emerging generations of South Africans. Because
they know that if they move to ground level, then the churches and the mosques
will not only remain to be the refuge for old people. What I think we have come
to do today, is to add another chapter in the institutionalisation of
government's relationship with people. Often when you institutionalise, you
face the challenge of whether this is co-option and the basis of compliance and
buy in. I want to say to you, that there is never an easy relationship between
government and organised civil society in the Western Cape such as those you
represent in the journey towards the realisation off children's rights.
There is always a critical element that sets up a dialectical relationship
between us. To a large extent, government has learned, I have certainly learnt,
that you cannot choose who you want to speak to. You cannot choose the most
compliant and you cannot choose the most dependent and you cannot choose the
most comfortable. Your answers probably lie in those who are most trouble some.
That is not an invitation to become trouble some. But, that is probably in the
zone of critical independent interaction. It is probably where you are going to
get the real dialectic, bringing the real answers to what we require. It is on
the basis of this trajectory that I think we launch today's program.
Some may think that the launch of an advisory council on the rights of
children could be just another in jeopardy of relationships. What we say to you
from the front and as government and I, as Premier invite you to become this
advisory council, we are saying to you that we do not have all the answers. We
are saying to you, that the problem is bigger than what we can manage. We are
saying to you that we cannot do it alone; we are saying to you that we need
your help. We are saying to you, we need partnership with you if we are going
to solve the challenges that we face, particularly in the Western Cape.
It is an invitation for you to challenge us, but also, for us to challenge
you in return. You must challenge us on how we use our money, where we
prioritise our resources, whether we have the right programs, whether the
projects work. We must also be able to challenge how much of your money goes to
institution maintenance and how much to programs on the ground. If we can be
honest on these kinds of issues, then we have something close to a
marriage.
We all have our own responsibilities but that does not mean that we have the
right to do it alone. Government today therefore says to you, we recognise that
we do not have the right to go it alone and not do what we want, outside of our
partnership with you. That I think, is the overall significance of what we have
come to do here today.
We live in a world that crushes spirits, which destroys children's souls,
makes them old before their time, exposes them to things that must come in
time, which removes from them their innocence. We must therefore do much more
than accept the responsibility to protect children. We must exceed this
obligation and make concerted efforts to change the lived circumstances of our
children. That is the mission that we must embody. That is the hymn that we all
have to sing, within that, different instruments, different voices. But there
has to be a coherent approach to this matter.
This council creates the platform for us to be coherent in dealing with this
problem. The statistics tell us that our children face physical assault,
murder, common assault, assault with intentions to do bodily harm. And in year
2000 alone, across the country 37 000 children experienced these attacks.
The second most common crimes committed against children are sexual assault.
This category includes rape, sodomy, indecent assault and other sexual
offences. In 2000, reported sexual crimes against children numbered 25 578.
Some 25 percent of non-natural deaths of children younger than 18 years
between January and June 1999 were homicides. Nearly half of the homicides were
the result of a firearm and a further third was perpetrated with a sharp
object. Homicide victims were predominantly male, black and on average 15 years
old.
I was horrified when I went back to the school that I taught in 1985, when I
attended one of the anniversaries in school, only to find that of the children
in my class, a class of 22 that seven had died before the age of 21
brutally.
Now you can imagine what is happening on the Cape Flats, with statistics
showing that how many children were murdered in the Western Cape for the
preceding financial year. Hundred and five children have been murdered and out
of the 77 cases that were investigated, 12 were murdered in their own homes and
only 12 were murdered by strangers. That speaks to a culture of violence and
brutality. There is brutality and there is violence but it is not
accidental.
These statistics tell us, that those whom children love and trust and look
up to for care, are the very ones who betray that love, that trust and that
care. Whether it is a neighbour, whether it is a parent, whether it is a
boyfriend of a parent, whether it is someone who lives in the house, whether it
is a friend, whether it is a friend of the siblings or whatever the case may
be.
That is what we have to challenge each other on. Government,
non-governmental organisations and civil society cannot do business as usual.
Because business as usual is often just the normal things we do, get the social
workers in, get the office opened, and get the Toyota, the computer, cell phone
and all that we need to set up the office infrastructure. Here the challenge is
that there is a breakdown in the social fabric that ought to hold us together.
We have to be able to challenge each other about the paradigm that we are
currently functioning in. Because this paradigm is not about the external
enemy, the paradigm is about the enemy within.
Values of morality are first and foremost nurtured and instilled in the
home. Since parents are the custodians of these values, how do we then teach
parents to parent? You must have a license to drive a car, but you need no
license to be a parent. The point that I am making is just how deep our problem
is. What do we do in child headed households where children themselves are
parents? What do we do about child trafficking? There is a market of perverted
people across the worlds, who want to lay their hands on our children. They
think that, because our children are poor, they have the right to take them
away. What do we do? About drug and gang lords who make our children dependent
on Tik? Who makes our children sell their bodies for Tik that is what is
happening and it cannot be business as usual.
So this is not a watchdog arrangement that we are setting up here. If you
have come here to be each others watchdogs, you are in the wrong place. If you
are coming here to lobby each other for more money, then you are in the wrong
place. Let us develop the program and let us fund the program and then let us
see who can best do the work. Let us also allow the specialists amongst us to
do what needs to be done. Where you need partnerships let establish those
partnerships but let us all be part of this orchestra. That I think is the
challenge that comes out today because now the paradigm has shifted
completely.
This is not a place for outdated practices. We need the most creative
people. We are going to need people to liberate themselves from old thinking
patterns. We need you, as we build houses, for example, to be able to
problematic things such as, how is it that sexualised adults share a room with
innocent children? We are not living in ideal situations. We need to ensure
that as government we do not exacerbate conditions for abuse to sprout, by
means of unintended consequences such as overcrowding in the type of housing we
provide our people.
Has anyone developed a methodology of researching and finding solutions for
the reality of structural features of poverty environments that raise the risk
of abuse? We said we would like to freeze the innocence of our children and
keep it with them, but when we are having this overcrowding that we have in
which sexualised adults co-habit with innocent children then we have sexualised
children.
The way in which our people need to take in strange lodgers due to poverty
is a problem. When they go off to work, we can only imagine what goes on when
strange lodgers co-exist in houses with un-sexualised teenagers. So it is
business unusual and these are the things that we need to advice each other on
and to develop methodologies and marketing strategies on as well as
interventionist programs in order to deal effectively with these kinds of
problems.
I am feeling a lot more encouraged, but where we work together, we can have
results in the shortest possible period of time. I am very happy that, Dr
Gilbert Lawrence our head of Community Safety is with us. Because yesterday, we
were able to announce the first quarter results since we made sustained
co-ordinated and empowered interventions in the 15 most vulnerable areas in the
Western Cape. Now if we can achieve results such as those I will briefly share
with you now, on that front, imagine if we are able to focus on the collected
resources amongst us to make a difference in specific areas. The temptation is
always to spread our resources, with greater activity but without impact and
focus.
Focusing police resources and the rest of government resources,
non-government organisation resources in those 15 areas, 56 drug outlets for
example have been closed, five Tik factories has been closed and 2 096 arrests
has been made of those who are dealing with drugs or owning drug outlets, for
example. We have been able to seize 3 400 grams of Tik, 260 000 grams of dagga,
481 ecstasy tablets and 305 heroin tablets, arresting in the process, 72 high
fliers and that is in the first three months of this program.
I want to say to you that, what you come here today for, the rights of the
children are not separate from these realities that I am speaking to you about.
It is addicted individuals who are perpetrators of crimes against children.
That enemy within is often the enemy who in their sober state, would love the
child, but in an alcoholic or a Tik state, would harm the child. These are not
separate battles, so you insert yourself within an even bigger paradigm
concerning the social problems at community level. That is what I think
government is putting at your disposal. The ability to influence the way in
which all of us do things and the resource base from which to draw in order to
implement programmes and effect greater impact.
What are we doing on the level of Early Childhood Development (ECD)? Our
expanded public works program does not only have to be about the building of
roads and working with bricks. The best EPWP will be young people who are
caring enough and educated enough to take care of our children and we pay them
a stipend to look after our children and give them a good start in life,
knowledge about drug addiction and its effects. So we have to be able to
intervene in concrete programs like ECD and others to ensure effective early
intervention for the good of our children.
In conclusion, I really want to thank all of you, for being here for the
past two days, for sharing your expertise, for being willing to enter into this
critical partnership with us, I look forward to your work having an impact
within our social dialogue directorate.
I look forward to constructive interactions with you whether it is on the
front of women in dialogue, the religious forum, the youth commission and now
the office of the rights of the child and related matters that we can be
advised on by you. I think we are slowly and systematically building up a full
institutional armoury in order for us to collectively and coherently meet the
challenges of the Western Cape. That is where you fit in, that is the bigger
picture which you are a part of. We thank you very much for being part of this
program, for committing to it and for entering into this partnership, and I am
sure that you know by now who will be the advisory committee, so I am looking
into that, that is work in progress but I certainly look forward to success at
the level of child right's as we are beginning to be more successful on the
fight of drugs and gangsterism in the Western Cape.
Thank you very much.
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
17 August 2007
