30 kids rescued in Mpumalanga

2008-01-16 09:09

Thabisile Khoza

Malalane - Thirty Mozambican children were rescued in Mpumalanga's KaMaqhekeza township near Malalane over the festive season.

Vusi Ndukuya, an anti-child trafficking officer at the Amazing Grace Children's Centre in Malalane, said the children included seven boys aged 10 to 16 who were smuggled from Mozambique.

He said he was doing research for the UK-based Save the Children organisation when he found the boys working as hawkers at the KaMaqhekeza taxi rank.

"Their handler is also Mozambican. He smuggled them into the country and they stayed with him at his home in KaMaqhekeza," he said.

One of the boys, aged 14, said his brother-in-law had "given" him to the man after pretending they were going to Johannesburg to find his father.

Instead, he found himself working for a stranger, selling airtime, cigarettes, facecloths and other items at the KaMaqhekeza taxi rank.

He said he and the six other boys get paid R60 for every R260 worth of goods they sell.

Ndukuya said the boys were taken to the Amazing Grace centre and plans were being made to return them to their families in Mozambique.

He said he also found other children working at the KaMaqhekeza, as well as Sibayeni taxi rank. They had either been kidnapped from their villages along the border or run away from home, only to be enslaved by South Africans who put them to work as hawkers or domestic servants.

Over the past four years, Ndukuya has saved an estimated 100 children who were smuggled across both the Mozambican and Swaziland borders into the Nkomazi area, which is made up of 152 impoverished villages.

Ndukuya, who lives in Driekoppies, near the Swaziland border, said his worst case was in 2006 when a father kidnapped his 12-year-old daughter in Swaziland and smuggled her into South Africa and sexually abused her.

Her teacher grew suspicious when the girl's school performance dropped and confronted the child, who told her what was happening to her at home.

Ndukuya has attended workshops organised by the Children's Rights Centre in Durban and done studies in forced migration through Wits University.

He is also doing a BA degree in International Relations through Wits.

In 2006 and 2007 he helped produce a TV documentary about child labour for SABC 1. Last year, he also helped produce a documentary for SABC 3's ZSpecial Assignment.

He organised a children's rights exhibition in Nelspruit last October, which was followed by a roadshow in Nkomazi to raise awareness about child pornography.

Wits University then asked him to do research into children who don't have proper documents like passports and identity books.

Last year, Ndukuya received the provincial Premier's Excellence Award in the category for community and volunteer work and a R10 000 cheque, which he has ploughed into his research and work.

- African Eye