He cups his tiny six-year-old hands respectfully as he moves from one car to the next. His face, full of expectation, he confidently asks for money, no matter how scant the coins.
It’s late in the afternoon when Mthatha roads are crammed with traffic.
Some motorists ignore the tiny human next to their cars while others, touched by his sight, put a few coins in his hands.
He has little regard for the moving cars on busy Nelson Mandela Drive.
He’s already high on shoe glue or benzene, and, according to Eastern Cape health experts, busy dying from an addiction to lethal chemicals in these industrial products.
This is the life of one child from grotesquely impoverished Bongweni village, among the worst in Mthatha.
In a better world, this little person would be having the time of his life at big school.
Instead, he is imprisoned in the ever-burgeoning ranks of three million hungry-to-starving, officially “multidimensionally poor” Eastern Cape children.
These children seem to gather next to the Plaza shopping mall where they spend their pickings on food and their tragic addiction.
He was only four when he joined a gang of neighbourhood preteen glue sniffers on their way to bayomokola, slang for hustling for money in the city.
His first drug was benzene, a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum.
Within two years he graduated to sniffing shoe glue — and smoking cigarettes, damaging his young lungs.
On Thursday, the Dispatch found him with six other members of his little gang, aged six to 17.
They were sharing amagwinya (vetkoek) they had just bought.
He says he lives with his mother, grandfather and siblings in the village, and while there is food at home, he comes to town to beg for money to buy cooking oil, margarine, sugar and salt for his family.
“They [the family] know I sniff glue so I don’t have to hide myself when I get home.
“I sometimes sniff it in front of them and they don’t do anything,” he cheerfully claims.
His friends, however, told the Dispatch the youngster’s mother was also heavily hooked on “tsufu” — crystal methamphetamine (meth).
The entire crew had quit school, the Dispatch was told.
An 11-year-old boy says he left in Grade 1 even though he harbours hopes of finishing his schooling one day, as do his friends.
But the six-year-old disagrees. School is “too boring”. In a shocking statement, he says he likes it better on the streets.
We are all hooked on this [glue]. We buy it for R15 from shops. When you sniff it, you immediately get high
“We are all hooked on this [glue],” the oldest child says.
“We buy it for R15 from shops. When you sniff it, you immediately get high.”
After a day of drugging and begging, the gang walk 10km home to Bongweni.
Eastern Cape health department medical services director Dr Mtandeki Xamlashe warned that chemicals in glue and benzine were highly toxic, affecting the brain, body muscles and heart — sometimes with fatal consequences.
King Sabata Dalindyebo local municipality spokesperson Sonwabo Mampoza said there were nine service centres that housed Mthatha street children, as well as soup kitchens run by local stakeholders.
Eluxolweni Shelter board chair Nompumelelo Ntlombeni said they had previously used their own social worker to convince street children to stay at the shelter.
Some were reconnected with their parents and others convinced to go back to school.
However, the government told them they could only use social development social workers to try to get children off the streets.
The social development spokesperson in the OR Tambo district, Nomasakhe Nonxuba, said her department had service centres where social workers placed street children and tried to reunite them with their families.
The department did not have shelters to accommodate them.
She also blamed the children.
“Some leave in the mornings pretending to go to school, but then change clothes and instead go back on the streets.”
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