Kudos to the provincial health department for releasing the latest Eastern Cape child malnutrition mortality statistics.
The systematic loss of children to severe acute malnutrition (SAM) is reflected in a death toll too traumatic to contemplate.
It may feel like an unspeakable horror, but it is time for everyone to speak out.
For now, this is what we know — 323 children have died in provincial hospitals from SAM since April 2021 — 116 in 2021/2022; 98 in 2022/2023 and 109 in 2023/2024.
Experts suggest this is an undercount.
The provincial government is showing urgency in response to the “recommendations” from the SA Human Rights Commission (HRC) — basically, orders — which is to be welcomed.
However, it is up to the public and its watchdogs, including the media, to keep track of these official plans and programmes.
Are they reaching those who desperately need the support, the children and their guardians?
While the government gears up for action, it is time to give a hearty hand of applause to people who cannot bear to wait for the cogs of bureaucracy to turn.
These people just get up and get going. They feed children because it is the humane thing to do.
We should support all individuals and organisations who feed and save little lives, from HungerSA and Gift of the Givers to food banks and community organisations.
Yet, even in this dreadful scenario, there is a deeper abyss into which Dr Eileen Carter, the SA Human Rights Commission’s Eastern Cape provincial manager, has peered.
It is the system itself which has somehow managed to short-change the most vulnerable of society, children from birth to five years old who are not yet in the National School Nutrition Programme or fed in day care.
As this newspaper reported, if these children receive a child support grant, R530 is R266 less than the R796 “extreme” food poverty line — which is the minimum of food needed by a person to simply stay alive.
The Treasury says its fiscal capacity is ‘limited’, but the SAHRC says when it comes to children, Section 28(1)(c) of the Bill of Rights gives no such room for limitations.
The crisis of the toddlers is a volcanic core of horror.
Until those grants, regardless of social ills and problems with implementation, start to reach this already low amount, a constitutional and human rights crisis will not stop burning through the fabric of life in the province.
The Treasury says its fiscal capacity is “limited”, but the SAHRC says when it comes to children, Section 28(1)(c) of the Bill of Rights gives no such room for limitations.
In fact, the commission says the money is actually in the government coffers — every year it gets returned by the millions in unspent budgets of local and district municipalities.
Why are these funds not immediately redirected to feeding children?
This brand of disassociated, Kafkaesque cruelty is not envisaged in the constitution.
Indeed, here is the real message from the constitution: Just feed the children.
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