Police are investigating a case of attempted murder and the possibility of adding further charges against an unknown mother whose newborn baby boy was discovered buried in a Methodist Church building site in the Dikeni village of Cala. Rev Zandisile Mngcita of Methodist Church circuit 324 visited the newborn at Indwe hospital on Monday and indicated he was open to adopting the child if his family could not be traced.
When Methodist Church steward Mbuyiselo Manyonga set off to find the source of the muffled cries he heard while preparing for Sunday service, he thought there was a cat in distress. However, what he found buried in a shallow grave inside an incomplete building next to the church was not someone’s pet, but a newborn baby boy.
Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane announced during his State of the Province speech that R60m would be allocated to fighting severe acute malnutrition.
More than one in four people in the province is food insecure. This was one of the harrowing figures released recently by the province’s MEC for social development, Bukiwe Fanta, in the Eastern Cape legislature.
The Eastern Cape social development department has started distributing sanitary dignity packs to almost 84,000 underprivileged pupils in a multimillion-rand project set to continue for the duration of the financial year.