OPINION -
Dear Mr President
Words fail to express the absolute horror at the fact that you, the leader of our country, are able to sit in your office and know that there are children who daily face hygiene standards that not even an animal has to contend with.
The advantage animals have is choice. School children have no choice.
My comments are based on a radio programme I heard about a school a journalist visited and found the most disgusting toilet conditions. This is not the first time this subject has been broached. How many more times are we to hear the same story? We now sit in an explosive situation, where personal hygiene has risen to the top of the list of preventives. Where does that place these children?
My challenge to parents is to walk into the toilets at your children’s schools unannounced to monitor the standards set for your children. Governing bodies and teachers cannot and must not throw their hands up in the air in helpless surrender to a situation created by a government of cruel, heartless, scavenging politicians who have sat back and watched and participated as our country was stripped of its dignity.
Mr President, you are the leader of this mess - you were there throughout that scavenging. You sat back and did nothing about it. When you were elected, and despite the fact that you had sat right next to Jacob Zuma, I still clung to that tiny vestige of hope that perhaps the time had come for us to turn the corner. Hang your head in shame, Mr President. Would you allow your own children to have to contend with this on a daily basis? Never.
If you do nothing else, make it your goal to have every school toilet visited within a stipulated period and dealt with. If we cannot clean the toilets, we will never cope with the corona or any other virus - we are a ticking time bomb.
Where will you find the financial resources for this? Reduce your own salary and those of the politicians who sat with Zuma and celebrated the insane corruption that has brought our country to its knees.
Take money from your own pile of cash, and those of your colleagues and deal with it. Use personnel from the ranks of a bloated bureaucracy, and deal with it.
Beverley A. Wood Durban
Daily News