Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 30, 2005
Brendan Boyle

"They are not interested, our comrades, completely not," he told the Sunday Times.

Skweyiya is driving a campaign to find, register and fund hundreds of thousands of child-headed households - children shunned by communities who are afraid of the virus that killed their parents.

He hopes, within 18 months, to know how many orphans there are and where they live. So far, 300000 children from about 100000 families have been signed up for aid, but Skweyiya estimates there are at least a million child-headed households.

"Traditionally, there should be no orphans in any African community. But we must accept the reality that there have been a lot of changes. Unemployment and general poverty is making people reluctant to bear the burden of looking after children that are not necessarily their own children.

"Many of our people don't believe that can happen in an African society - that there could be a child who heads a home and that the relatives don't come forward. But I want to tell you very, very plainly: It does happen," he said.

Over the past month, Skweyiya has visited several provinces to encourage families to take advantage of the R540-a-month foster care grant available for each child they take into their care.

In deep rural areas, the stigma of Aids means that orphan families, many headed by children as young as 10 or 11, are often shunned by family and neighbours.

"People are scared even of touching them . .. The neighbours will just peep through the windows and sometimes they put food in a plastic bag and they tie it at the gate so that the children can come and fetch it," he said.

Skweyiya said local councillors, who should be leading the effort to help such children, were nowhere to be seen because the children didn't represent votes.

Echoing President Thabo Mbeki's recent criticism of greedy ANC members, who see council seats as a ticket to wealth, Skweyiya said: "The councillors are not as generous as they ought to be. Definitely, they are not. They have been forced to accept the question of the elderly people because they have the vote.

"But there is nothing that drives them to know exactly how many children are living in each and every house, how many are orphaned or vulnerable. They are not doing that."

Skweyiya's department is trying to create incentives for relatives and neighbours to take responsibility for orphans.

But since the government took the job of registering births and deaths from local magistrates, there is little capacity to manage the administration of grants. It generally takes at least six months to go through the registration process.

Furthermore, many children become vulnerable to unscrupulous adults who practise "grant-farming". They sign up to support children simply to obtain grants.

Skweyiya said that some of the programmes being implemented or planned to assist Aids orphans included: the opening of state-funded drop-in centres, where orphans could find a meal and company; the recruitment of retired nurses to look after the health of child-headed families; and the appointment of an additional 7000 social workers over the next three years.

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ST051010