Night care symptom of nation failing its children

The recent exposé on the rise of night-time childcare – better known as night care – should trouble every citizen who believes in the dignity, safety and promise of our children. The article details how, in densely populated urban areas like Matsapha, children as young as three are being packed into cramped, single-room flats overnight, sometimes, watched by a single adult, responsible for a dozen little bodies. Parents pay as little as E20 for the service, often because they cannot afford anything else.

However, beneath the shock of these images lies a deeper truth – one that speaks more loudly than any headline: Night care is not the crisis. It is the symptom. What we are witnessing is the inevitable unraveling that happens when a society neglects its poorest families, fails to regulate childcare and turns a blind eye to the quiet desperation of those working jobs that do not respect parenting realities.

The story makes it painfully clear that night care is not an alternative chosen out of convenience. It is chosen out of survival. Many of these parents, especially single mothers, work night shifts in factories, security posts and hospitality, and some resort to sex work because the economy has offered them no safer, dignified alternative. They cannot take their children with them. They cannot leave them alone. So, they do what poor people have done for generations in this country: They patch up the holes left by policy failure with whatever they can find. Also, too often, ‘whatever they can find’ is profoundly unsafe.

Some of the night care centres uncovered by this publication operate with no licensing, no fire safety compliance, no sanitation guarantees and no meaningful adult-to-child ratio. The article makes mention of caregivers leaving children in the hands of older children, while they themselves step out during the night. That detail alone should stop us in our tracks.

What does it say about us – about our government, our communities, our value system – that we have normalised this level of risk for children, who had the misfortune of being born into poverty?

This is where my opinion comes in bluntly: Eswatini has a childcare double standard rooted in class. Middle-and upper-income families would never tolerate this. If news broke that a private preschool in Ezulwini or Mbabane West left toddlers alone at night while the caregiver ran errands, outrage would erupt. Phones would ring, ministries would descend, licences would be suspended and talk radio would be buzzing for weeks.

However, when the children are from the flats in Matsapha, from informal settlements, from mothers scraping by-suddenly the nation becomes mute. Suddenly the silence becomes policy.

Night care is not just a childcare issue -it is a mirror. What it reflects is uncomfortable. It shows us women forced into nocturnal economic survival, children paying the cost of financial precarity and a government whose regulatory systems still seem designed for the Eswatini of 1980, not the real demographic and economic landscape of today.

What we need is not condemnation of struggling parents. We need compassion paired with structural change.

Firstly, nighttime childcare must be formally recognised and regulated. We cannot keep pretending that all parenting happens during daylight hours. Factories run at night. Bars operate at night. Security firms deploy guards at night. Poverty works around the clock and the childcare system must reflect that reality.

Secondly, Eswatini must confront, rather than stigmatise, the uncomfortable link between poverty and sex work highlighted in the article. Many mothers working at night are not doing so because they want to – they are doing so because the economy has left them vulnerable. Judging them does nothing to keep their children safe. Offering support services, safer economic pathways and affordable childcare does.

Thirdly, we need community-based, State-supported night childcare centres that operate under clear standards. If we can invest in national events, major roads, or new government complexes, we can certainly invest in protecting children’s lives.

Finally, we as citizens must stop normalising child endangerment, simply because it is happening among the poor. Poverty should never reduce a child’s worth. Yet, again and again, it does.

The Times of Eswatini has sounded the alarm. Now the rest of us must decide whether we treat this issue as just another troubling story or as the wake-up call it truly is. Our children cannot speak for themselves, especially at night. So, we must speak for them.