I was having one of those earnest village conversations where people sit close, faces only feet apart and where one squeezes the other’s knee to make a point.
This man was telling me how one of his drug-crazed siblings took a hammer and bashed the head of one of their parents and a three-year-old child.
The villagers set upon the sibling and killed them, and so this poor fellow was in the ICU tending to those fighting for their lives and finally having to organise three funerals in a matter of days.
I looked into his bleak, dry eyes and it was not pain in them. It was something much worse—of flying well above the maximum service altitude, living with the ever-present certainty of completely losing lift.
Outside of politics and religion, rarely do you see people animated by an issue as much as they are by the fate of Kenyan youth.
Those with eyes to see can see that some family names will not last beyond the current generation. In a matter of decades, some communities will reach a point of no return and, eventually, Kenya will nose-dive and crash.
The fruit of Kenya’s youth has abandoned clean living and chosen, instead, an indolent, red-eyed meaningless existence of drugs and violence.
There are categories of this phenomenon: There are those who are drinking themselves to an early grave, topped up with muguka and cannabis. Kenya is a sea of cheap, poisonous liquor whose spread is oiled by corruption.
And the cream of rural Kenyan youth is wallowing in this modern-day hemp. It kills their bodies, but it first kills their future.
In my travels around, one morning I found what looked like a body on the roadside. I stopped, shocked. He was unconscious, of course, with no sign of breathing. Sometimes in the night, he had lost his shoes, socks and shirt.
“He is not dead,” I was told. “He is out.” Nobody seemed too concerned; it is normal for a 22-year-old to drink himself to oblivion.
The second category is the one suffering from what I think of as “he-doesn’t-seem-interested-in-anything” syndrome.
Children born into wealth, educated in the most expensive schools locally and abroad, return to the country with (average) academic papers, move back into their rooms and follow their mothers around well into their thirties, even forties.
Expensively coiffured pets
Everything they have has been done for them or bought for them by either their father or mother. They are, at risk of being harsh, expensively coiffured pets.
They will do nothing to extend their parents’ estates; as a matter of fact, the parents will have to craft convoluted trusts to ensure the wealth is not drained out of them by hungrier types in a couple of weeks.
I don’t know whether those who do not want to do anything can be fixed and given a purpose. Those who are trapped in drugs are also getting into violence, as perpetrators or victims. Young men in their mid-20s are scarred; they look like retired pugilists. They are already old and weak by their 30s.
Communities should rebuild the cocoon of discipline where teachers, aunties, uncles, older siblings, neighbours, and every adult takes part in enforcing discipline and teaching the young.
Our experiment of “mami” and “baba” , where the child is untouchable and unscoldable, is destroying our families and our nation. The idea of a punishment-free childhood is a silly fantasy.
We should stop trying to give our children everything and attempting to create a stress-free environment for them. It is not good for them—at all.
I may not necessarily have practised what I am preaching but a certain level of hardship toughens people. And it may well be that it is not love, but tough love, that moulds good children.
Governors should rescue these young people. They should put their foot down and control these drugs—spearhead drug busts and just take some of these brews off the market by force if need be.
They should have the power to introduce compulsory community service for unemployed drunks where they can spend two years in rehabilitation, retraining and being prepared for life. And if they come out and go back to brews, they are rounded up and taken right back.
Lastly, we should reintroduce compulsory pre-university military service. Let students learn teamwork, purpose, sacrifice, service, and patriotism; let them network and form lifelong bonds of comradeship and identity.
Those who do not seem to have a purpose can stay on in the military and fight, rather than lie on the sofa and share bread with the family dogs.
I read about a country which has some of the best education in the world but where children do not encounter an exam until well into their teens.
They are graded by teachers in early childhood. It takes fairness, commitment and discipline to get to that point of professionalism.
We need the same commitment in raising the next generation. Otherwise, staring into each other’s tortured souls will be an everyday occurrence.
