Angels’ death cannot be blamed on mothers alone

But before people get sickeningly righteous and call for ropes to lynch these two very young mothers who indeed exercised tragically bad judgment, people should check themselves and be sure that the target of their outrage is the right one.

If you are salivating to get a legal rope and hang those young mothers, then you need to get one for the fathers of those babies too. They are equally guilty of neglect. Where were they when those angels were dying in the flames? Maybe they were at the shebeen too?

If fathers have parental rights over children they produce, then they have parental responsibilities for them as well. Laying criminal charges only against the two young mothers of these little lost angels is one-sided, sexist retribution based on a shock response.

Arresting these young mothers before they can bury their babies properly (if they can afford to do so) and charging them with a violation of the criminal code may be warranted, but it is not an institutional remedy to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Angels should not die in fires. To reach that goal, we have to dig deep and ask ourselves hard questions.

There are concrete legal and social roles for fathers in Namibian law and society. To get your extended birth certificate, you must provide your father’s birth certificate. To qualify for the NSFAF loans or bursaries an applicant must also provide information and a signature of the birth father.

If a child is adopted, the birth father’s consent is required. To take a minor child out of the country, the consent of the birth father is required. These are legal tools in Namibia to grant authority to fathers. Where then are the legal tools to punish fathers when they abdicate their responsibilities to their children? Fathers cannot have it both ways; you cannot have rights and benefits of fatherhood without also having responsibilities and obligations.

When supporting the legal ‘hanging’ of these two mothers, you may also need to get a rope for all of us too.

Why are our citizens living in such poverty and depression that shack fires are a monthly, if not weekly occurrence throughout our country, particularly on cold winter nights? Each time any of us remain inactive, detached, purposefully ignorant in the face of corruption, waste of resources, misappropriation of funds, or embezzlement, we place ourselves as candidates for the same ‘rope’ of blame we want to put around the necks of those two young mothers.

When we don’t give to those in need we earn a bit of that ‘rope’ of blame. Churches, beneficiary organisations and loving individuals who care for the elderly, disabled, mentally ill, sex workers or ‘street kids’, need help. They consistently need encouragement, money and supplies. How many of us advocate on their behalf, urge our politicians to create grant funds or donate our own money towards their work?

Society shares some of the blame when angels die in shack fires. When will we do better at addressing low academic performance, unemployment and low wages? Drug abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence are the partners of poverty and they are the fire that is really destroying our people. How many of us look the other way as our sons, nephews and brothers beat their wives and partners or have multiple children from random relationships?

How many women have relations with married men or manipulate men for personal financial gain? How many of us care about the poor children across Namibia who are being molested, left cold, unfed, unmonitored, unwashed, unloved and unmotivated? Is it any less of a potential tragedy when adults leave children locked in a car so they can go and gamble all night in casinos? We cannot heap our collective social outrage on these young mothers without also looking at ourselves for the root causes.

Concerted political will can move mountains as can faith. As a voting public, we can decide that no more angels should die in fires. We can demand that well-planned, effective laws and regulations should be enacted in this regard. But, there is no determined, unified social will to force the politicians to prioritise anti-poverty programmes. And, most people in our society are not prepared to sacrifice or defer their personal priorities to move towards that goal.

So instead, society prepares to hang 20-year-old mothers as if that is the solution to the problem and then leaves the hanging tree deluded into thinking that the shack fire tragedy won’t happen again.



* Jackie is the Managing Director of AE Consultants (www.africatourconsult.com).