Economics of the boy child: A response to Chief Justice

**Boys playing football on a beach in Accra, Ghana.** [File, Standard]

“What’s wrong with the boy child,” the Chief Justice of the Republic of Kenya asked during the 18th anniversary of Starehe Girls Centre.

She pointed out the problems of the girl child such as early pregnancy, early marriage, and monthly period. The boy child should be thriving, without such problems.

Let me try to objectively respond to the problem of the boy child using my insights working with the youth and in two continents.

First, I asked the same question the Chief Justice asked more than 20 years ago as a student in the USA Deep South.

I noted almost all my African-American classmates were women. I noted that in that school, most of the professors and administrators were also women. It was a cultural shock.

The shortage of ‘quality men’ was so high that when I smiled at one lady, my classmates quickly assumed I was in love.

Online sources indicate that currently, around 65 per cent of the students in that university are female. The question I asked 20 years ago is still relevant: Where are men or boy child?

I was told they were in jail. One classmate even requested me to accompany her to visit a brother who was in jail in Grenada, Mississippi. I should have taken the offer.

My sojourn in Mississippi gave me a chance to live in the ghetto and got insights into the American society, away from movies.

Why were men in jail in the Deep South? Crime. But why crime? I hypothesised it was about the legacy of slavery where men were threatened, degraded, till they learnt to be helpless. Today, there is no slavery but mental subjugation still lingers although subtle.

I recall seeing a young man lying on the ground face down as the girlfriend and the policemen watched over him. That was long before George Floyd.

Crime becomes one option to express oneself and show ‘manhood’ and at times joining the gangs. This is common in the inner city, where job opportunities are rare. Without skills, this becomes a vicious cycle. Crime involves drugs, alcohol abuse or violence.

Does it surprise you that the region most affected by boy child problem has a legacy of Mau Mau, where men are subjugated through detention and other forms of humiliation?

They are still subjugated emotionally, labeled as prone to violence. Add the fact that men now have to share land with their sisters including the married ones. See the emotional violence?

The passing of the old order has made ‘manhood’ less useful. No more hunting and gathering. No more war to prove your tenacity. Man’s competitive advantage has been eroded. The alternative to hunting and gathering is going to school.

The boy child is distracted in new hunting and gathering. Think of rite of passage, which has become a business with churches competing with other entities to make men out of boys. After that boys, now men, get new pressures. Girls have no such pressure, unless you are in a society where FGM is rife.

Think of the distraction from school caused by the motor bike. Once a young man owns a motorbike, his status goes up, has money, compared with struggling ‘students’. How many girls own motorbikes?

We did not give the boy child an alternative to traditional manhood. They often seek it out, through destructive behaviour like crime, drugs and alcohol. Schooling is not attractive to them, even girls are in it!

I heard that excelling in school in the Deep South is “acting white.”

Girls are orderly and excel; we are accused of favouring them. My hunch is that if we introduced more sports both in school and out of school, men would find more means to show their manhood. Watch them in sports bars!

It’s more than traditions. I have speculated that after the civil rights movement, black men in USA threatened the power balance and had to be tamed with new laws. Once you are on the wrong side of the law, you don’t talk about rite of passage, no lions to kill or neighbour to raid. Are our laws gender neutral?

Once we know the socio- cultural origins of crimes and other vices, how far do we go in mitigating the causes? How often do learned friends sit with psychologists, sociologists, psychologists or even anthropologists?

Should we make law a postgraduate degree so that lawyers first understudy society? Legal solutions are very attractive but do not get to the route cause. Learned friends can contest that.

Let’s ask loudly. Why are the issues of girl child so popular among donors? Why not equal weight on girl and boy?

Given that the boy child has lost, who is gaining from that? Beyond our well-educated girls missing “matches,” who benefits from subjugated men?

The society might seem peaceful with subjugated men, but not emotionally. A visit to USA Deep South could be contextualised by observations.

How do we help the boy child?

Boys and girls go through the same curriculum. And do the same exams. We should reduce affirmative action. If used, we should look at individual circumstances.

Two, men should nurture their boys, modernity is about new marketable skills. Jobs and entrepreneurship are new status symbols. Competition from girls is a fact, we must learn to live with it.

Three, our laws and policies must take cognizance of our history and sociocultural context. And be gender-neutral.

Fourth, we must stop blaming the victim. The boy child is a victim of forces beyond his control, some with live wires in faraway capitals. What can we borrow from our traditions to help the boy child?

Finally, the suffering of the boy child is shared by the whole country. Unproductive men in jail or frustrated by the society are a loss to the society.

Our future efforts to improve the society should be about the child, not its gender.