Expulsion of girls from school over pregnancy is immoral

News of the expulsion of eight girls from Moi Girls-Kapsowar Secondary school in Uasin-Gishu County hit me like a brick on the head. These girls have been banned from class and barred from doing final exams.

There are forms of discipline that can send the message home loud and clear without abolishing a young woman’s future. If barring teenagers from accessing the most basic needs such as education doesn’t epitomize prejudice, someone better sit me down and clearly explain to me what prejudice really is.

According to The Kenya Population Situation Report of 2013, Kenyan girls are becoming moms at very early ages. As if 103 in every 1000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 being pregnant is not ill enough, the report showed that 26% of Kenyan girls get married before the age of 18 years. That is a quarter of the women population and the trend is going up. Has that pit sunk in your stomach already? Good, because the numbers are rising.

Look, I know you’re tired of hearing the comprehensive sex education topic, the whole teenagers are engaging in sex stuff, that it is time to consider alternatives, like contraceptives for our teenagers. I know… we’re such a morally upright society and sex is still a preserve of over thirty-year-old married couples. Our kids are “keeping” themselves pure for “the one”, girls at least. Boys don’t have to bother with their virginity or lack of it because this is strictly the woman’s business to mind, however absurd that sounds.

I know we don’t need sex education in schools or possible solutions as for when the urges may rise because, God forbid, our kids will engage in sex, and turn the society into the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. We must keep burying our heads in the sand about the topic “sex”. Don’t we still “buy” kids from the market? Our teenagers don’t have raging hormones that lead them to have sex with their peers; some aren’t taken advantage of by guardians or teachers in other instances. They are all pure. That’s why we have to edit and ban condom infomercials or media shows which remotely suggest that people are “doing it”. We are such a religious nation, guided only by spiritual and African cultural dogma free of any blemish from secularism or libertarianism.

We are raising the thoroughbred of kids even as the so called “leaders” on all fronts perpetuate hatred amongst communities, steal billions of taxpayers’ money among other ills and get away with it. Our kids certainly don’t get to watch this drama, horror or mystery excuse of news at primetime in our living rooms.

They rarely see us, they don’t read messages on our phones send to and from our “mpango wa kando” and they don’t wonder why we feel buried alive in our own homes.

Must we expel eight teenage girls from school, discontinue their studies and subject them to the responsibilities that most adults can’t simultaneously execute and remain sane to teach them a lesson? What do we care about the consequent stigma, depression and the likely complications or deaths of these girls? While all this is going on, the “fathers” of those unborn babies roam freely and go on with their lives like they were never in the same room with these young women in the first place. Kenyans, why are we like this?