It’s heart-wrenching to lose someone who led a true cause, especially since it involved ensuring poor people have access to basic food.
More so when we live in a world where those who have the power to change things show little or no regard for vulnerable sections of our society.
Gladstone Sandi Baai was a true fighter for the rights of the poor.
Before his death, which came suddenly on Wednesday morning, Baai, a commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), was leading the fight to promote and protect the right to access to food in the country.
“The right to food is not only inextricably linked to human dignity but goes to the core of human survival,” Baai told United Nations-affiliated human-rights institutions recently.
“The stark reality is that many people in South Africa, and in particular those who are vulnerable, such as children, the elderly, persons with disabilities, the rural poor and women do not have sufficient food and are hungry and starving.”
Baai was born in 1942 in the rural areas of Bizana, Pondoland, in the Eastern Cape. He knew what it felt like to go to bed hungry and wanted to change that. And it’s no surprise that through his work at the SAHRC, he had organised a dialogue on the right to food, which he was scheduled to host later this year.
As I write this, the World Food Programme tells us that one in seven people in the world go hungry tonight and 60% of them are women. Commissioner Baai made it his life mission to do his bit to reverse this unfortunate phenomenon. He was a true soldier who was ready to take on the government on many issues.
It’s sad that like many others before him, this human-rights ambassador left before much of what he fought for: including access to food by children living in the rural areas, access to water by the people of Mpumalanga, access to quality education by learners in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, has still not been realised.
Baai will rest in peace knowing that he won part of the war, it’s upon us to continue the battle against hunger and poverty.
Bobby Godsell says not a hectare of irrigated land has been added in SA since 1982. Yet the Transkei has over 200 rivers none of which have been dammed in the 150 years that this Homeland has existed?
WHEN are we going to develop the Homelands, with their prime farmland, into VIABLE farming?
Vavi and Cosatu spent their time moaning about black farm workers on white farms. Why are there no black farm workers working on black farms in the former British Tribal Homelands all over Southern Africa? Why do they have no farms either?
The only Black farmers that farmed Western style that I know about were the Fingo, whose land was taken away and who were told they were Xhosa, during apartheid. They had black farm workers and did not in fact even pay them in cash but in goods (ref: “A Life’s Mosaic”)
@Beddy, all over black Africa the black men don’t believe in farming and this includes SA. I know a black American woman that married a man she met while attending the university in the US. When she went back to Africa, she was shocked that the men didn’t work on the farms and her mother-in law told her it was her duty to work on the farm. She asked her in law why the men weren’t working on the farm and she was told it was against their culture. The UN can pass any resolution they want, the people in a said country has to get out and work to produce the food. In most African countries, food production has been put on the back burner, by most African governments.
And I didn’t even know of him or about his good work…do hope there are others inspired to take up where he left off.
And if Sterling and Lyndall have hit on an issue, how do we reverse the situation or give women the power to do it themselves, beyond subsistence farming?
Sterling
Black Bantu Men have NEVER farmed – their culture prohibits men from farming, because growing things is “womens work” and would reduce a man’s potency. Once a boy has been initiated, he can’t even help his mother in the farmer’s wife’s kitchen!
@Beddy, many blacks from overseas have gone to Africa and came back in shock at the culture difference in Africa. I was told that when the African women grow the crops, the African men take the crops and sell them but, they keep the money. Why nobody in the Women league talk about this form of slavery going on in Africa?
@Beddy, I might want to add that in Ethiopia the men do all of the farming and the men in Ghana are good farmers. What a lot of black South Africans don’t know that a white farmer in SA is considered a prize and the government of many African countries are giving them land to setup farms in their countries. (AA) In Nigeria, the whites farmers from SA have setup soy bean farming in that country and Nigeria is no longer importing them. Many white farmers in SA owned two and three farms all over Africa.
Sterling
There are over 3000 tribes and 1000 languages in Africa, and only about half of them are Bantu.
Our Southern African Blacks are all Bantu, all speak languages derived from Ur-Bantu, and all follow the same “women farm-men tend the cattle” culture.