Pubdate: Thu, 26 Jun 2003
Source: Kenya Times (Kenya)
Copyright: 2003 Kenya Times Media Trust
Contact:  http://www.kentimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2936
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

CHECK DRUGS MENACE IN KENYAN SCHOOLS

THE news about over 400,000 pupils being hooked to drugs is as shocking as 
it is distressing and the question which immediately comes to mind must be 
what steps as individuals, as parents, school authorities and as the larger 
society are being taken to rescue these children from the distressful 
situation.

All children need guidance, counselling and direction. As parents we 
provide for these youngsters and indeed some parents are quite generous if 
not outrightly indulgent in this respect. Such parents may confuse being 
generous to a child to showing care and love to a child. Do parents take as 
keen an interest as they ought to in the movements and liaisons of their 
children?

And who are these monsters who are so greedy, so depraved that they have no 
qualms selling harmful substances to children, including those in primary 
school? Where we make a slip, the drug traffickers set in and up in smoke 
goes young potential.

 From the on going headteachers' meeting in Mombasa, it has emerged that 
there is also the question of how much teachers in whose company children 
spend as much time if not more than with parents are a desirable role model 
to them. Parents have increasingly a adopted an escapist attitude, assuming 
that it is up to the teacher to ensure that they mould our children to 
specification.

Our psychiatrists pin the blame squarely on those who want teachers to act 
as foster parents thereby abandoning their God-ordained responsibility. And 
although it was not mentioned during the meeting, the truth is that most 
parents are too immersed in work and after that away from home at the 
expense of their families.

Some keen observers will recall recent furore caused when television 
cameras caught a rugby fan indulging in alcoholic beverage and at the same 
time extending the same stuff to his clearly underage child. This may have 
been considered an isolated incident but it nonetheless constituted a 
stinging indictment at the laissez faire attitude parenting has taken in 
some instances.

If a child is introduced to the drugs by their own parents, how will 
teachers refrain them from consuming alcohol or other drugs?

We as a nation, as individuals must re-examine our resolve to keep 
particularly the impressionable away from harms way. Parents and the 
society at large should individually and collectively ask if what we want 
to raise as a nation of misfits and criminally inclined people who want to 
take refuge in drugs and other harmful substances.

As Mr Joseph Kaguthi, the National Co-odinator of the National Agency for 
the Campaign Against Drug Abuse (Nacada) never tires of advising that this 
is a war which can not be tackled from one front. The government needs to 
unleash everything in its arsenal to deal most stridently and 
uncompromisingly with the drug merchants. And parents and society must each 
in their own way feel convinced that Kenyan children will only live to 
realise their potential if they are kept off drugs.

But all the instruments and institutions of law enforcement must put no 
less than their best efforts as part of a winning team. People arrested for 
drug peddling must feel the overwhelming enthusiasm of the prosecutors and 
the judicial process for their stock in trade is no less life-endangering 
than those who maliciously maim.

Although many of us have always known that the problem of drugs is a male 
issue, it is intriguing to learn that of the 400,000 pupils engaged in 
drugs, 160,000 are girls.
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MAP posted-by: Jackl