Cameras are important in school buses as they help to keep children safe.
This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper, Tanzania on December 6, 2022.
It is barely a week since we heard of the act of sexual abuse that was carried out by student transport staff (alias ‘driver and conductor’) of one school in Dar es Salaam. The manner in which the incident is said to have happened brings fear, anxiety, and goosebumps as it is reflects pitiable savagery and cruelty on the part of those trusted service providers.
The fact that being trusted to undertake responsibilities without being watched has repeatedly proved not to work necessitates the need to bring in a way of 'watching' and keeping record of the movements of service providers who work directly with children in their respective facilities.
Having cameras in school buses is not a new practice, and is not impossible. It is done elsewhere, and it has proved to be a great help. For clarity, the Minister of Community Development, Gender, Women and Special Groups, Dr Dorothy Gwajima endorsed the suggestion of the District Commissioner of Kinondoni, Godwin Gondwe, to install cameras in school buses to keep children safe and reduce possibilities of abuse. Cameras serve as preventative measure as well as source of evidence in event of allegations of abuse or misconduct. They also help to discourage negative peer interactions among the students.
However, going through the comment sections in the popular news pages in social media, we have a few opinions to discuss at depth. In terms of classification, there are positive thoughtful comments, attack, mockery and abusive comments, prophecy-like disappointment comments, and more than a handful of jokes and ridiculous comments that mean nothing than wasting people’s productive time.
On the positive plane, a commenter said, that will be a good move, and will help keep children safe when teachers and parents are not with them. Another opined differently, that the incidence is not enough reason to generalize all school buses staffs, and also not sufficing for an expensive decision that will have an economic impact on all schools that own buses. Another commenter suggested that stringent law and enforcement will help to maintain professional margins and discipline.
We glean from another commenter that when an adult has an evil thought, they will always find a way of doing what they want. S/he proposes more education on the part of service providers to treat children as people, with dignity and respect. Another proposes risk assessment on different circumstances regarding the movements of children in the school and all its facilities. They say there is a lot of laxity on the part of the government, which only come out after incidences have occurred.
A number of commenters expressed their worries, distrusts and doubts about cameras and electronics in general, if at all they can be of help. They cite past incidences of security cameras themselves being stolen; but also (political) incidences where CCTV cameras could not just give the help they were supposed to give.
They said, we had speed limiters installed in buses all across the country in view of reducing accidents, but they were of no help because people knew how to 'fix' them. We had complex NIDA registration toolkits with computers, cameras, etc. which made the process too complicated, time wasting, and awfully unreliable as weighed against the old-style paperwork system.
The sad reality is that for whatever reasons we have many of those government-owned electronics: computers, cameras, etc. in private individuals' custody, with many using them for private work and business, e.g. stationeries.
On the other hand, the gender debate was hot. Many proposed that school buses need to have female matrons. In support of Dr Gwajima's suggestion many endorsed that there will be no additional costs to the schools as it is just a gender balance of personnel. Some commenters proposed that men should be asked to completely hand over that job to women. This is because in several occasions the male gender has proved to be a disappointment in safeguarding children.
A few sarcastic comments: One said it is a great opportunity as s/he is going to open a CCTV camera shop. Another said we will have very ‘spoilt’ old men in the future. Another one who crowned it all said s/he has nothing to say, so s/he is going to count from 1 to 1,000, and s/he actually enumerated those numbers in the comment. Such a misdirected youthful vigour!
To sum up, we need more education on child protection, more strict enforcement, and more openness in our children so that possibilities of abuse, be it verbal, physical, financial, psychological, or sexual, can be curbed, and abuse prevented in plenty of time. Online social media comments are not representative of opinions of Tanzanians, but they certainly are a micro-representation of the thoughts out there.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation. He writes from East Ayrshire, Scotland - UK.
