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.