Why todays parents cannot stop teens from engaging in ‘tabia mbaya’

A spike in the number of teenage pregnancies is sending everyone’s knickers in a twist, never mind that the menace is as old as humanity.

As usual, Kenyans are blaming everyone. We have blamed teachers, we have scolded parents, we have rebuked law enforcement agencies, we have bashed the church and we have condemned Satan, that innocent guy, for working in cahoots with rapists and paedophiles to impregnate school girls.

Teachers have been accused of dereliction of duty for failing to inject discipline in the wayward kids.

What’s more, those same teachers are blamed for being part of the gang scavenging on school girls, with 32 fired by TSC this year for engaging in tabia mbaya with children.  

The reality is children spend more time with teachers than they do with parents. Teachers impart knowledge, guide and counsel and offer many life lessons to children. They are, in a sense, surrogate parents.

Nothing is more immoral, therefore, than these guardians turning into sex pests and defiling their own daughters. It is not only criminal and immoral; it cheapens the noble profession.

Parents, too, have also received their fair share of the blame. Many have said, and I align myself fully with their thoughts, that too many Kenyans are absentee parents. They don’t spend as much time with their kids as they do with their Mpango wa Kandos or on social media flirting with strangers.

Today’s parents don’t inspect their kids’ books and report cards and those who do lack the precision and keenness of a suspicious wife going through her cheating husband’s messages or WhatsApp looking for pieces of evidence to nail the pervert.

But let’s be honest. Where will parents get time to spend with their children? It’s practically impossible. This is why.

Parents wake up at ungodly hours to go and build this broken nation. This is after keeping vigil all night fighting cold war on opposite sides of the Wall of China on their beds. When the economy is in the bin, it is virtually impossible to love thy spouse the way you love thyself.

 On their way to work, the tired souls spend hours in the jam burning fuel and ogling at absentminded pedestrians. From work, they tangatanga from one pub in the local to another ‘removing stress’ before staggering home.

Life is even harder for the rural folk who spend hours coaxing tired soils to produce maize that no one will buy because cartels have already imported toxic grain from Mexico. Others tend to coffee, scrawny cows or just brew chang’aa.

It is back breaking but thankless work. Such parents barely survive and in many circumstances, it is a relief when their teen daughters run off with mtu wa boda.

One mouth less to feed. I can bet my ancestral home that such parents wouldn’t know whether teachers, deadlocked hoodlums, distant or close cousins, boda boda guys, bouncers, DJs, university students - anyone - are preying on their daughters until the bulge pops up.

In most cases, parents only realise their daughters were pregnant when a new born baby starts screaming in the pit latrine.  

What’s to be done? The answer lies in our national parks. Hyenas - and sex pests are fisis of the highest order - will never be caught dead chasing the strongest zebra in the park. They will pick a baby, a sick one, an injured one, one that strays from the herd, and give chase.

Similarly, sex pests strike when they notice a certain vulnerability among their victims. Poverty, the need to be loved and appreciated, libido (yes, some teenagers, just like some adults, are genuinely randier than their mates) are obvious red flags.

It would help if experts established these vulnerabilities, profiled abusers and slapped the info in the school syllabus to help teenage girls sniff a sex pest from a mile away.     

November is the hustle month and we are all about youngins making their money, and we need your help. Do you know of any young person in school/campus who is running a hustle that absolutely deserves to be celebrated? Drop us an email on: standardonline@standardmedia.co.ke