A quiet leader - Nokuphumla Pakamile

It is a bright, sunny Thursday afternoon and we’re meeting up with Nokuphumla ‘Ma Phumla’ Pakamile, mother, wife, guardian, teacher, student, gardener, singer, and dancer.  It is after school, and Phumla is down in her garden behind the classroom block picking iMifino, an indigenous and edible ‘weed’, which she will add to the supper she prepares at home tonight.  She is accompanied by Gloria Kumalo, a fellow teacher, and they are talking about how the children have been progressing with their navigational skills on the brand new computers that have just been donated to their school.  They laugh as they refer to how both their students and their own children are growing up as ‘Digital Natives’ in a world of technology, with its sleek hyper-speed cell-phone and internet communications, and how very differently their own and older generations of ‘Digital Immigrants’ are experiencing the world.

For those of you who have met and worked with Phumla, you need no introduction.  We are talking to Ma Phumla today because we think that personalities such as hers deserve more attention.  We are talking about people who are sensitive to the needs of others, who have just a human-full of compassion but are able to stretch it as far as they need to because they have found within themselves the will and the self-love to empower this natural urge, and that this is what truly makes a difference in our world.

Phumla adding mulch to the plants in her garden, with Gloria behind her, and the buildings of Chintsa East Primary School in the background

Phumla started working at Chintsa East Primary School in 1998 (the original school was established in1972, and the new and existing building went up in 1996).  Before that she was teaching at an informal school that was housed in a shack.  It was during this time, round about 2010, that she made the decision to start doing short Early Childhood Development (ECD) courses.  In the same year she started studying her National Professional Diploma in Education (NPDE), which she manages to work on each Saturday through the University of Fort Hare, East London campus.  She will complete the diploma this year.  While she studies she is teaching at Chintsa East Primary as a Grade R Practitioner.  On completion of her studies she wants to become a full-time teacher.

She started learning about Permaculture in 2003, joining up her school garden with others in the surrounding area to form a cluster of functional, learning environments in which to further the aims of permacultural principles.  She shows us the soil in her garden, saying “This beautiful earth was once a mixture of clay mixed with weak sand.  It was very unforgiving.  We have worked hard in the garden to rehabilitate the soil.”  In 2008 she did a one-year sustainable living course in East London, graduating at Rhodes university, and gives full credit to Laura Conde (of WESSA) for introducing her to the course: “She put me closer to nature!”  She is an ambassador for eco-schools (http://wessa.org.za/what-we-do/eco-schools.htm ) and keeps the garden we are standing in, as well as a garden just a hundred meters away, known as the ‘Biogas’ garden, because it is fed by water that runs out of the BIOGAS system located on the west side of the grounds, off the school’s toilet block (this system is also designed to feed the school’s kitchens, where the ovens are fired up by the methane gas by-product).

But all of this is only the ‘professional’ side of Phumla.  She has been married for 20 years and has 5 children, and this is the beginning of her colourful life story.  Her mornings are taken up by her teaching, but her afternoons are filled, not only with her studies, but with looking after her own children, as well as the children who can not go home directly after school because there is no one at home for them to be or play with: Phumla has also opened up her home to a number of children both from within her own extended family and without, who have either a very disruptive or dysfunctional home situation, or who, due to some other unforeseen circumstances, simply have no home at all.  So she has quite a large home now, and her charge is to cook for all these mouths as well as to see to all their individual needs, as a mother can only do.  Her home has now come to be known as a ‘safe house’ for these children, but Phumla says, “I love them and they love me but it is not easy as we live right next door to a shebeen.  It is very noisy, very destructive.” 

In the Biogas garden, Phumla and Gloria work as they talk to Kate & Shaun

And her children are doing well!  Her youngest, Awonke (9), is in Grade 3 at the new African Angels Independent School, a bright spark of a boy who loves reading and is already full of self-confidence and an eagerness to engage with others and with his world; Neziswa (14), is in Grade 9 at Bylett’s School, is a flyhalf on the local girls’ rugby team, and until last year she was the only girl on the Unstressed Surf School program; then there is Sandile (16), who also plays rugby at school, and soccer with the local team too.  He is also a promising surfer and a student with the Unstressed Surf School, and he has recently started doing weightlifting too; and lastly there is Tina (19), an I.T. student at CTI.  Tina is the adventurous one: she’s the #10 on the girls’ rugby team (the same team as her sister) and has won numerous awards for eco-challenges.  She is also very musical, like her mother, and she wants to get into sports science or sports management.  Phumla’s eldest son, Sthembiso (29) lives around the bay and works in Chintsa Bay Restaurant.

So Phumla has her hands full, what with teaching and being a mother to all these outgoing young people!  She tells us, “If I get some time to myself I like to read a biography, or some Xhosa stories, and I also keep some Mills & Boon books around for an easy read.”  But the rest of the time she is directly involved in her community, serving as both a councilling ear to the many issues and grievances of her village as well as on the committee of Friends of Chintsa.   She runs the weekly Garden Club held at the school’s ‘Biogas garden’, helps to manage the Surf School on weekends, and she is also partly involved in the girls’s rugby team.  She also does Zumba once a week.  How does she do it all?

She says it all has to do with responsibility, and also that the children love her so much.  When we asked her what her biggest challenges are, and what her vision is for herself, her family, her school and her community, she replied “One of the issues that concerns me is the lack of appreciation from some of the members of the community for property and projects that find their way into their village.  That, and a lack of funds.”  She wants to see her village become a place for responsible citizens, and her school growing with more effective leadership, teachers, and learners.  “I can definitely do with more teachers, and more buildings to expand the school,” she says.

WHERE AM I FROM? A poem by Phumla 

  

I am from Nonqaba Tubby Pati, a Xhosa girl from  Macleantown village

I from waking up early, go to the veld fetch iNzinziniba herb to make tea

for my brothers and sisters,

I am from milking the goats and making tea in the morning

I from making tea for my aunties and uncles before going to school in the

morning.

I am from dolls made from mealie-cob and old materials,

I am from the doll’s house made of mud and stones,

I am from a village, houses made of mud, wood and thatched roofs,

I am from a village without electricity, but the moon and the stars are lights.

I am from mealie-fields, planting, weeding with a hoe and harvest.

I am from a traditional family wearing traditional clothes I am from a traditional family wearing traditional clothes,

I am from tradition, women wear long traditional dresses, smear

their bodies with yellow or red clay,

I am from going and collecting cows and goats from the veld every evening

I am feeding the chickens, pigs and dogs every day.

I am from eating cooked mealies, samp and beans, African salad, and amarhewu

I am from eating traditional imifino picked from the garden

I am from always welcoming the traveler and giving him something to eat and water

I am from listening to the elders when talking to me,

I am from respecting people older than me and not call them

by their names rather call them ‘bhuti, sisi, mama , or tata’,

I am from the family values where you greet everyone you

meet on the road even if you don’t know who she/he is.

I am from respecting God, not calling him by his name but rather calling him Jehova

I am from collecting firewood and water from the dam

I am from ‘you are not allowed to choose your own husband—your elders will choose for you.’

I am from breaking that law and choosing my own husband.

I am from growing up without my dad and not even knowing him.

I am from growing up without staying with my mom but with my aunties and uncles.

I am from going to school in a far away village, barefoot sometimes

I am from a family believing in ancestral spirits, from dancing and singing for these spirits

I am from the slaughtering of the goats, sheep and cows in respect for the dead.

I am from Xhosa beer, called umqombothi, drank only on special occasions.

I am part of my family and ancestors and they are also part of me.

I am Nokuphumla Pakamile         

___________

Her message to all of you: “Stand up for your community.  Never give up.  Keep up the good work!”  And to children she has this to say: “Focus on your studies at school today so that you can be a responsible citizen tomorrow!”  How often do we meet people, indeed women, of this calibre?  Ma Phumla, we salute you!

For more on Phumla's incredible life journey please read this blog

Social responsibility and the importance of NPOs

Part 2 – The role and importance of NPOs

This week I attended my very first ‘village council’ meeting.  I joined out of curiosity: what really goes on, what is really discussed, and what is accomplished by these individuals among us who volunteer their time to community issues?  What are those issues?  I was pleasantly surprised!  Having grown up in a family that is largely suspicious of anything veering towards politics, I have remained, for most of my life, part of the indifferent (and sometimes ignorant) segment of the public which, in the previous blog post, I referred to as those who perhaps consider many of the more challenging aspects of the organisation of society better left to those who are more ‘capable’ or ‘knowledgeable’. 

But what I had always failed to take into account was that this was not merely a case of indifference or ignorance - many of us do care and are concerned about our world, our environment and the social problems facing us, and we do our own research and keep abreast of events happening around us.  Rather, this is a case of lack of know-how to act upon what it is we do care about: what public platforms exist for us to express our needs; how do we identify the areas that are most in need of attention and to whom do we address them?  Once they have been heard by the relevant ‘powers that be’, just how much can we expect from these powers, and how do we know that these needs are being properly recognised by them?

Social revolutions, both violent and non-violent, have been a mainstay of human history.  Where there has been repression or injustice there has always been a group or a movement that has risen to meet the dominating authority in a challenge to re-balance the scales of power.  And perhaps it is universal, the sense that each generation feels its own weight in time – the relative awareness that what is happening in one’s own time has the greatest bearing on the future, that we are always standing on the edge of history –but it cannot be denied that some of the most perplexing challenges in society have come about in very recent times, and mostly due to the rapid industrialization of our world. 

The divide between rich and poor has never been so grossly incalculable, and the very natural environment upon which our industrial ‘progress’, or ‘development’, relies has never before been so pushed to its limits.  No records exist of a previous human society that began signing treaties in efforts to decrease carbon footprints and reduce global warming.  Never before has so much wildlife conservation activism been born to address the horrors of the fast-disappearing wilderness and fragile ecosystems of our planet.  Never before have we humans been so determined to define our rights to life and freedom, and to seek out the terms of our own survival on this same planet.  And until now I don’t think that these issues have ever stood head to head on the global scale in which they do today.

 

And so, even though my council meeting dwelt upon issues that only affect the small community in which I live, as I sat there listening and taking notes it occurred to me that this experience was beautifully synchronous with my last two weeks’ attempt to explore how we, the public - The People – are truly standing up to the challenge of picking up the responsibility that we like to claim as our Democratic Right, how we are changing the question, “how much power do we really have?” into “what can we do with the power that we do have?”  Enter stage: the Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) as one of the answers to dealing with these mounting global problems. 

The NPO has its origins in the formation of the NGO, or non-governmental organisation, a term which received official recognition when the United Nations was first formed in 1945, but which has been documented as having its beginnings as far back as the time of the first anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements of the early 1800s.  There is much to be said about the development of NPOs worldwide in relation to the various challenges each nation state has faced in its own growth and change, however the focus of this post is on the role and importance the NPO has in current history, specifically with regards to the ‘developing world’, and in particular, our dear South African Republic.  

The non-profit sector of South Africa plays its most significant role in helping the government to fulfill its constitutional mandate in “the entrenchment of socio-economic rights that aim at improving the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person” (South African Bill of Rights).  Without the presence of this non-profit sector these rights would simply be completely out of reach for most South Africans, the majority of which live in impoverished circumstances. 

In a nutshell, NPOs play the following positive roles:

• providing goods and services, especially meeting needs which have not hitherto been met by either the government or by the private sector;
• assisting the government achieve its development objectives, in particular through contributing skills for which NPOs have comparative advantage, such as public information, education and communications campaigns, or providing information about the situations and needs of particularly vulnerable groups;
• helping citizens to voice their aspirations, concerns and alternatives for consideration by policy makers, thereby giving substance to governments' policies regarding freedoms of association and speech;
• helping to enhance the accountability and transparency of government and local government programs and of officials.

The citizenship of any country looks to its government to provide all or most of its basic needs, but the government is by no means omniscient, and faces its own limitations in addressing these needs.  To illustrate this point, let’s take the private industry as just an example: although it is easy enough to crack down on an advertiser who guarantees his product will grow hair in a week, it is much more difficult to measure whether a nursing home provides the solicitous care that relatives of helpless patients hope they are purchasing. And the more difficult it is to gauge whether an organization is supplying what consumers want, the more expensive and unsatisfactory monitoring becomes. It is easier, then, for government simply to control what the company does with its profits, on the assumption that without a profit motive, there will be little or no incentive to cut corners at the expense of poorly informed consumers. 

So when governments face the needs of the public, its drawbacks become all the more apparent.  Because it relies on the political process, it responds to the needs of the majority.  Although the majority may see the need for, say, national defence, public health, medical research, and zoos, they may not see the need for as much of these collective goods as some people would like to supply. NPOs are therefore the means by which citizens who want more of some collective good or service -whether they be schools, town halls or shelters for the homeless - can supply that need. NPOs are outlets for altruism and furnish trustworthy alternatives to profit-oriented provision of services and goods that are difficult to measure.

In the South African context, then, the NPO plays a pivotal role in helping the government address the needs of the majority, which is desperately in need of the basic services such as housing, health works, water and sanitation, a functional educational system, employment opportunities, empowerment of women, and food security, to name but a few.  The social (and environmental) challenges that face the government of this country can sometimes seem thoroughly insurmountable, especially when one takes into account the widespread tolerance of corruption from within the government itself.  So the flexibility of the NPO to work in ways that often bypass the very need for government’s influence, input or otherwise, is more and more frequently becoming a means of proper service delivery, albeit on a much smaller scale.  NPOs are one of the few vehicles that exist in South Africa to direct to the community resources that the government does not have or cannot collect.

Also, NPOs in our country play an important role in highlighting issues that might pass unnoticed by the local authorities, and in helping them to solve problems by using their human resources, local data and their organizational capacity, even monitoring their activities, these NPOs can offer tangible solutions to the community problems more efficiently and involving less costs than the public administrations in areas such as social work or management of social welfare institutions.  To this end NPOs in South Africa provide these essential ingredients:

• working with and encouraging the officials and the government agencies to accept some variants of solving problems;
• educating and informing the public of the rights provided by law and the increase of their awareness of these aspects; 
• actively participating in adjusting the official programs to the needs of the community, expressing the public opinion and taking into account the specific conditions of the area;
• aiding, informing and co-operating with official agencies;
• influencing the local development policies of national and international institutions;
• supporting the governments and donours to develop more effective development strategy through, for e.g. strengthening the institutions, increasing the level of professional qualification of their personnel, and training their staff in order to acquire a good management capacity.

I will finish this post with an excerpt from a speech delivered by our president, Jacob Zuma, at a NPO summit held on 16 August last year.  In it he directly addresses and praises these organisations for the valuable service they provide:

“In recognition of the invaluable contribution of the NPO sector to South Africa’s economic and social well-being, government enacted the Non-Profit Organisations Act in 1997 to create an enabling environment and align them with the Constitution of the Republic.

At that time, there was an estimated 10 000 registered organisations in both the formal and informal NPO sector.

There are now about 100 000 organisations in the NPO sector and more than 85 000 are registered in terms of the NPO Act.

The registration figures are highly impressive, given that except for welfare organisations seeking direct support from the Department of Social Development, registration under the NPO Act is voluntary.

It is the culture of transparency and respect for funders that the NPOs have opted to register and do everything above board. We acknowledge this sound management practice.

As government we appreciate the work of the NPOs as they complement our work and at times reach communities quicker as some are based within communities.

Many NPOs do valuable work in the field of child protection, prevention of women abuse, legal aid provision, food security provision, victim empowerment and a host of others.

We recall the invaluable support we received from NPOs as government during the drafting of the Children’s Act of 2005. It was remarkable that government and NPOs could work together so well on a piece of legislation, and in the end, the product is supported and implemented by all. There are lessons for all of us in the work that was done then, over 10 years.” (please read the full speech here)

Give people a platform and they will JUMP!

________________________________

The reader is encouraged to find out more about the history of NPOs as well as how the roles and functions of these differ globally according to how each of the nation states they serve fall into either of the two broader categories of industrialized, developed ‘Global North’, or developing ‘Global South’.

If you have a council in your area and you are interested in what takes place in these meetings, if you are concerned with what is happening in your village, town or county, I would recommend you take the step and go and find out.  There is a public platform within these groups that offers understanding, discussion and debate, and highly constructive problem-solving.

All views expressed are the author’s own, and do not necessarily

reflect those of Friends of Chintsa

References:

• SANGOnet website http://www.ngopulse.org/article/south-african-npo-crisis-time-join-hands
• Salamon, L. and Anheier, H. (1998) The Emerging Sector Revisited: a summary. Institute of Policy Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, found at http://web.worldbank.org
• Weisbrod, B.A.(1988)  The Non-profit Economy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
• Ciucescu, N (2003) The Role Of Non-Profit Organizations In Today’s Society, University of Bacau, Romania
• Address by His Excellency, President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma on the occasion of the Non-Profit Organisations (NPO) Summit, in Boksburg,16 Aug 2012, found at: http://www.info.gov.za/speech/DynamicAction?pageid=461&sid=29882&tid=80104
• Doyle, T. and McEachern, D. (2008) Environment and Politics, Routledge, London & New York (third edition)