What if I told you some parents take the child grants they get from the government for their children and spend it on alcohol, clothes, paying debts, while their children don’t even get a cent?

I was watching television the other night and I saw this on a show that usually talks about these kinds of topics. They interviewed a six-year-old boy whose mother lives in Johannesburg while he lives with his grandparents in the Eastern Cape. The sad part about this story (or the part, in fact, that really makes me angry) is that the boy isn’t living with people who can afford to raise him. His grandmother even told the news reporter that sometimes she goes to bed hungry, because she takes whatever food she has and gives it to him so that he doesn’t have to go to bed hungry. It was clear, at the time of the TV interview, that she was sick. Hell, even her husband seemed to be suffering from the difficulties of old-age.

Where or how does the boy’s mother fit into all of this, you ask?

Well, one thing I can immediately tell you is that she doesn’t. She is far away in the land of gold (Gauteng) and doesn’t even send a cent for the support of her son.

And it gets worse.

It turned out that for years she’s kept the card used to withdraw the boy’s child grant to herself and dropped the phone whenever the grandparents called to ask her about it. The boy also speaks about how she not only spent his money on supporting herself, she also abused him and took whatever money his father sent and wasted it too.

If you think that’s the worst story we’ve heard about how government money is used, you’ll have to think again. This is only the smallest part of the problem.

If you’re a Twitter person then I’m sure you’ve seen the hash tags (#Nkandla and #PayBackTheMoney). And if you’re a TV news or newspaper person, I’m still pretty sure that you’ve seen pictures and videos of our president’s home and how his neighbour lives in a small, shabby-looking mud house with a rusty roof. Thuli Madonsela, the public protector, has had her say about how our president is supposed to pay back at least some of the money, because the government was wrong in making some of the upgrades it made to his house. The government, in response, has had its own fair share of announcements about how Thuli Madonsela cannot legally force the president to pay back the money. They have also claimed how all the upgrades weren’t a waste, saying rather that the president needed them for his safety. In doing all of this, of course, they were ignoring the fact that our constitution allows the Public Protector to act the way she did. It seems that they are merely trying to cover up yet another scandal rather than addressing the real issue.

The real issue, in case you’re wondering, is how some people continue to use government money meant to help poor South Africans, in selfish and corrupt ways. And the really sad fact in all of this, or so they say, is that many young people don’t care. We watch all of this happening on the news, see the hash tags on Twitter and the posts on Facebook, but we don’t want to find out how to make our government do the right thing (or hold them accountable, as some say). And, even when we know what to do, we don’t do it. According to reports, it gets worse than this, because these young people also influence others into not caring about politics and money.

The question is – do you care? And, if you do, do you care enough to take action and do something?

#ChatBack: So I ask you, then, do you care about how the government uses money or how your neighbours, for that matter, use their social grants? Would you be willing to take action if you found that they were using it in a corrupt way?

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