Poverty cut short the life of a promising student

ON WEDNESDAY, I was informed that Zukisani Kram, one of the children from the Silvertown Statistics SA maths programme, had died and the cause of death was identified as TB, a distinct ailment of poverty.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, argues that “(h)uman lives are battered and diminished in all kinds of different ways, and the first task… is to acknowledge that deprivations of very different kinds have to be accommodated within a general overarching framework”.

The Nobel laureate is himself a survivor of TB.

I was starkly reminded of the quote after I was told of the sad news of Zukisani’s death on Wednesday.

Silvertown is named as such because of the silver shine from the corrugated zinc with which the dwellings are built.

It is one of the poorest townships in South Africa, characterised by high unemployment rates, especially in respect of the youth, and the lack of water and ablution facilities, among many other deprivations.

One of the demands the citizens of this shanty town made of me in 2011, in exchange for participating in the 2011 census, was corrugated iron for their houses. Another demand, albeit just as strange, was to go and collect their councillor who had since abandoned them in their biting poverty.

At the time, my retort was that I couldn’t do so, because I had neither the administrative capacity nor the policing authority to execute the demands.

But the citizens argued that they had seen me with Madiba a week ago, and therefore I had power.

Thus, the day was spent in a to-and-fro of arguments on the slippery slope of demands that accompanied the setting sun.

But one promise I knew I could make and keep for the citizens of Silvertown was that, if they provided Stats SA with a list of youth who had the necessary qualifications to enter higher learning, then the organisation would fund their education. But, first, they should be part of our field staff who would count the citizens of Silvertown.

An agreement seemed to emerge, but further twists and turns presented themselves, as the scope for beneficiaries seemed too narrow and excluded the leaders. In the morning, I had sent for census T-shirts that would flood Silvertown, and by sunset they had arrived.

I arranged for them to be handed out at the MK Hall, where the negotiations had started from daybreak, and continued door to door with the distribution.

By the next day, Silvertown was awash with yellow and the counting work had started. But this was without the matriculants, because a faction of the comrades felt the solution was insufficient and inappropriate. But we kept our training promise for the matriculants of Silvertown.

For 18 months, in preparation for their enrolment, they were taught maths by Anele Jafta, of Stats SA, and Andile Qumana.

Subsequently, they enrolled at Eastcape Midlands College in GraaffReinet, sponsored by Stats SA. And it was there that five achieved N5 and six N6 qualifications.

Zukisani, the 12th student, went on to attend Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, where he graduated with a diploma in accountancy this year. At NMMU he also received an award for being the best accounting student.

He was scheduled to be interviewed by Stats SA this week, as one of the interns for next year, but death cut his long journey in search of a better life short. The cause of death was identified as TB, a distinct ailment of poverty.

Coincidentally, with the sad news of Kram’s passing, the subject of poverty was the focus of my week.

This week, I was in Beirut, Lebanon, where we held a regional workshop on poverty reduction for the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

In particular, the discussion was on how the multidimensional poverty approach serves as a better path to understanding poverty and addressing it. Taking part in the workshop were high-level practitioners in poverty alleviation and resolution through the deployment of multidimensional poverty indices in their respective countries.

Addressing multidimensional poverty is a massive task. The aborted life journey of Zukisani Kram, taken too soon, is testimony to the work that lies ahead.

Dr Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of the Institute for Economic Justice at Wits, and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.