President Cyril Ramaphosa downplayed children's rights in his yearly selection of his apex priorities, as the face of ECD that the previous governments always presented to the nation has been one that aspires to be more muscular while also looking meaner.
Image: Ayanda Ndamane/ Independent Newspapers
Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
SHORTLY after the delegates convened for the Basic Education Lekgotla at the Birchwood Hotel, Ekurhuleni, on February 27, President Cyril Ramaphosa turned up in the plenary hall, put on his sombre voice and confessed: “The minister is absolutely right when she says we should have started 30 years ago with Early Childhood Development, and if there is any mistake that we have made as a nation and as a government, it is this one... Thirty years ago, we were blindsided. We should have realised that to get this country to be important, on a much higher plane of development, we should have started ECD then.”
One of the more startling blindsiding has been to Ramaphosa himself, as he promised to be a developmental-orientated president, to emphasise investments in the nutritional, cognitive, and socio-emotional development of young children by focusing on the first 1000-day window period of opportunity from pregnancy to 24 months, which is a critical period in the development of a child.
That is what “change”, his commonly used one-word first and second-term election speeches, was supposed to be about. He downplayed children's rights in his yearly selection of his apex priorities, as the face of ECD that the previous governments always presented to the nation has been one that aspires to be more muscular while also looking meaner.
Muscular is necessary in the scary environment of deepening poverty, hunger, inequality, and unemployment.
Meaner is a myopic mistake that has rendered our nation poorer as younger generations miss out on the foundational support and services essential to making them productive citizens.
South Africans have long expected bold action consistent with the approach in the government’s 2001 Education White Paper 5, expressed as follows: The primary responsibility for the care and upbringing of young children belongs to parents and families.
However, because of the inequality in income distribution and because ECD is a public good whose benefits spill over from individual parents to society, the Department sees it as the state’s responsibility to subsidise and assure the quality of ECD services.
Ramaphosa’s central definition today is as an intergenerationally focused president who is promising to spend more under the theme, “Strengthening foundations for learning for a resilient future fit education system”, in areas directed towards strengthening ECD for improved learning in later years by providing support and development programmes to equip educators with skills, pedagogy, and methodology that will help them nurture young and growing minds.
The meagre financial investment in ECD gives a flintier profile to his leadership, but not in a way that either supporters or opponents anticipated will bring change during these uncertain times of government austerity.
Most people do not quarrel with his argument that “the first generation to grow up with the internet, Gen Z, are already in their thirties” and that “Generation Alpha, the first fully digital generation, are now in high school” however a lot of them, including various professionals within the basic education sector, are wriggling uncomfortably about the disproportionate burden shouldered by community members forced to provide informal ECD services for their children while locked out by unrealistic strict rules and regulations for accessing government subsidy.
They are justified to observe that Ramaphosa often underestimates the consequences for many children left in the hands of untrained caregivers and children mentored by television, smartphones, peers, and the internet because of the lack of ECD education services exacerbated by the divide between formality and informality.
While he forecasted that “the babies born this year are the start of Generation Beta, and will begin school in 2030,” he was unconvincing on how “these Generation Beta children will be mastering the use of AI tools for schoolwork, problem-solving and life advice before they even reach high school” under the current informal ECD settings.
They have long taken to wondering what manner of government this is. The coverage of quality ECD services is uneven. ECD programmes must expand, with government support, to reach all vulnerable children, including children with disabilities.
The short explanation for this pondering is two words: formality and informality because the planning and legal apparatus of the state has the power to determine the difference between job opportunities and decent jobs, to determine what is informal economic activity and what is not, and to determine which forms of informality will thrive and which will disappear, including determining the flows of labour to the local industries that constitute life at the bottom of the urban economy - including ECD services, spaza shops, and shebeens.
On both sides of the ideological divide, government leaders are learning the costs of virtue signalling neglect of ECD policies sneaked without cost-benefit analyses. Governmental fiddling with complex socio-economic processes is often injurious to many people, but it is always instructive.
Many people’s political preferences solidify during their teens and 20s; so do other tastes and behaviours, such as clothing, musical preferences and even spending habits. Most famously, Depression babies, who grew up in the 1930s, saved more money and resources as adults, and there is some evidence that corporate managers born in the ’30s were unusually reluctant to take on loans.
Perhaps the 18-to-25-year-old cohort whose youths were thrown into upheaval by the absence of affordable quality ECD services, inadequate social grants, poor nutrition, abuse and neglect, HIV epidemic, and COVID-19 pandemic will adopt a set of sociopolitical assumptions that form a new sort of ideology that does not quite have a name yet.
New ideologies are messy to describe and messier still to name. But in a few years, as we implement the National Development Plan Vision 2030 for South Africa, what we have grown accustomed to calling Generation Z may reveal itself to contain a subgroup: Generation C, HIV-affected, COVID-affected and, for now, strikingly apathetic and conservative.
For this micro-generation of young people in South Africa and throughout Africa, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have blended: diminishing trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about neglect in their households and communities, and a preference for social media influence over parental guidance.
If more people understood ways supposed “equipping our young people with the skills for a changing world” can carom in unexpected ways under lack of political will and corruption, with unintended consequences, advocates of such measures might collaborate to redouble efforts to make human rights real for children.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst researcher and human rights activist
Related Topics: