The pillar we forgot to build: A National Development Plan must include the father

The dung has to be fresh or it will not hold. I learnt that at seven, squatting beside an old woman in kwaNkabini with a bucket between us, working cow dung and river clay into a paste with my hands while she checked it with hers. We were plastering the wall of our hut. It kept the scorpions out, she said, and the floor warm in winter, and it made a wall look cared for. Above us, driven into the floor at the centre of the room, stood the pole every rondavel is built around, black with years of smoke. I never once looked at it. You do not think about the thing that is holding up the roof. You think about the walls, because the walls are what you can reach – and what shows.Decades later I read the National Development Plan, all 489 pages of it. It has chapters on the economy, infrastructure, health, education, safety, the capable state, social cohesion. Somewhere in that architecture, a child appears. Chapter 9 promises her two years of quality early childhood development before school: it costs the centres, counts the practitioners, sketches the curriculum. At noon the centre closes, and a grandmother is waiting at the gate. In 489 pages, the plan never asks the question standing next to her: where is this child's father?I read the plan the way my training taught me to read anything that asks for money: start with the outcomes, then trace backwards to the mechanism meant to produce them. The outcomes are all present – a child ready to learn, a young man who never picks up a knife, a society that trusts itself. The mechanisms are departments, programmes, budget votes. And standing between the two, unnamed on every page, is the largest single fact about South African childhood. Stats SA’s General Household Survey for 2025, released in May, found that fewer than a third of children (31.4%) live with both parents, 45.9% with their mothers only, 4.2% with their fathers only, and nearly one in five (18.5%) with neither. Put plainly: about 64% of South African children – two in three – do not live with their biological fathers. If two in three of our children went to school hungry, no development plan would dare stay silent about food. Two in three are growing up without their fathers at home, and the plan for their future does not consider it worth a chapter, a target, or a sentence of diagnosis.The pole I never looked at has a name: insika. It is not decorative. Build the walls, thatch the roof, plaster the floor, hang the door – if the nsika is missing, the whole thing sags, cracks, and eventually comes down on the people inside. Insika yomuzi, the pillar of the homestead, is what isiZulu calls the person who carries the family. The NDP is a drawing of a house with the nsika left off. It specifies the roof, the plumbing, the wiring, the finishes. Then, when cracks appear in the classrooms, the police stations and the labour market, it proposes better plaster. It never asks whether something structural was absent from the design.Other planners do not make this omission. I take no instruction from Beijing, but when China’s planners concluded that the family had become a binding constraint on the national future, they responded with policy instruments: a three-child policy, childcare subsidies, housing preferences for young families, legislation on family education. Intrusive, certainly. Not incoherent. They treat the household as the place where the nation is actually produced. Our plan treats it as weather: real, everywhere, and nobody’s responsibility.Watch what the omission does to the NDP’s own arithmetic. Its bet on early childhood development is its most defensible commitment; the evidence is unambiguous. But the studies behind that evidence did not measure centres alone. The programmes behind it – from Perry Preschool in Michigan to the Jamaican home-visiting study – did not work on the child alone; they worked through the home, and the gains that lasted into adulthood were the ones the household carried forward. The state can build the classroom, train the practitioner, fund the meal. At noon the child goes home. The plan has drawn one half of the structure in extraordinary detail and left the half that carries the weight off the page.The gap becomes a contradiction in Chapter 12, on safety. The diagnosis is honest – violence has social drivers – and then every intervention is supply-side: professionalise the police, build detective capacity, deploy community forums. The chapter needs the economy chapter’s 11 million jobs to drain the pool of young men available to violence; the economy chapter needs safety before investors will fund those jobs. Each is the other’s prerequisite, and the plan never says which comes first. By the time the crack appears in a police docket, it will spend billions repairing it. It is strangely incurious about where the crack first formed.I must be precise here, because loose sentences on this ground have been used to shame the women who raised this country alone. A house does not fall the day the insika is missing. Somebody carries what the absent person should have helped to carry, for years, and the roof stays up. Most children raised without fathers become peaceful, generous, taxpaying adults; I am one, and I have watched the women who held up our roofs do it on one salary and no thanks. It is Women’s Month as I write this. The country will spend it honouring those women, and I would not begrudge them a syllable – but there is a difference between honouring someone’s strength and planning permanently to depend on it. The defensible claim is narrower: presence is protective. Father involvement is associated with better outcomes across several of the domains the NDP is trying to improve – school readiness, school completion, youth violence, teenage pregnancy. And involvement, not biology, is the operative word: three in four South African children live with an adult man in the household – an uncle, a grandfather, a mother’s partner – and the men already in the house are as much a policy resource as the men who left it. Nor is a father who lives elsewhere necessarily an absent one; the census counts beds, not attention. The plan wants the outcomes of formation while declining to plan for formation. That is not a hard trade-off bravely made. It is a choice declined, and renamed a vision.I know the house I am describing because I grew up in it. My father was a polygamist. He was somewhere, always, and seldom with us; he believed raising children was women’s work, and the village had an idiom ready to excuse him – indoda ayibuzwa ukuthi ivelaphi, you do not ask a man where he has been. My mother taught 350km away in Nkandla, home only in the school holidays, looking after other people’s children so she could feed her own. Fathers were an endangered species in kwaNkabini. Nobody in that house was wicked. Custom excused my father, poverty posted my mother, and behind both stood the machine that arranged it all: migrant labour, built precisely to separate men from their children, with my village one of the places it warehoused the families. A democratic state is rightly shy of moralising about family forms it helped to break. But shyness is not neutrality. A state that removed fathers by policy cannot now claim that fathers sit beyond policy. The old state planned the family with terrible precision. The least the new one owes is to plan the repair as seriously.There is a fashionable objection to all this, and it is half right: the NDP’s defect is not any particular silence but its refusal to be silent about anything – 14 chapters, hundreds of aspirations, a plan built to please everyone. Choose five things and do them. I agree, but not for the usual reason. The problem with a plan that includes everything is not that nobody can remember it; it is that nobody can ever be wrong against it. Every allocation calls itself aligned, so none can be called a departure. A plan that names no losers cannot be audited. The NDP was arranged, structurally, never to disappoint anyone – a different and worse thing than pleasing everyone. But if you may choose only five interventions, you do not begin with the paint. You ask what is carrying the building. Judged that way, involved fatherhood does not fall off the shortlist; it climbs it. It sits upstream of school readiness, school completion, youth violence, teenage pregnancy, and the hours a mother can sell in the labour market. And unlike energy, logistics or a capable state, each of which repairs this generation’s inheritance, a father present is compounding: it improves the next generation’s start while you are still fixing this one’s. Only a plan willing to choose could afford to take it seriously.What would the missing chapter contain? Not exhortation – no billboards, no campaign, no presidential speeches about fathers, which is what happens when a priority is announced rather than built. Instruments. Paternity leave that treats a father as infrastructure rather than courtesy. A maintenance system fast enough to protect the child, fair enough to reflect what a father can actually pay, and designed so that he meets his children somewhere other than a courtroom. Clinics and schools that address fathers as parents rather than visitors – the antenatal class that expects him, the report card addressed to him, the ward that lets him stay the first night. Home-visiting programmes alongside the centres, cheaper, reaching the hours that matter, built to draw fathers in rather than assume them gone. And one target, measured, published and audited like any number in the plan: the share of children growing up with an involved father, rising year on year, with a name attached to its delivery. What a nation refuses to measure, it has decided to survive rather than solve.The NDP expires in 2030 and will miss many of its defining targets. There will be a successor; there always is. Before we admire its architecture, ask the simpler question: what is carrying the building? A nation is not raised by line departments. It is raised at home.The old woman with the bucket in my first paragraph has a name. She was Jolo – Gogo, of the Majola clan – who could not have children of her own and raised my mother, then Musa, my sisters and me, in that homestead below the Mafunze mountains while the people who should have stood beside her were posted elsewhere by the economy and by custom. Nobody in that homestead needed the word to know who the pillar was. She was the nsika. I plastered walls beside her for years and never looked up, and she held up a roof that was drawn without her – and she was not the only one; there is a Jolo at every gate in this country at noon. The next national plan will still close its centres at midday and hand the child back across the fence. Before it does, it should at least have the courage to ask who is missing beside her. DM