There are many things that go wrong in society. In the end, we ask clinical psychologists to explain what appears, on the face of it, petty and irrational crime but, at another level, our complex being.
As people we do horrible things to one another. We unleash mass shootings and, at times, turn our guns and knives on people we are supposed to love, including family members.
Psychologists often argue the macabre and eye-popping behaviour that manifests late in people’s lives is a result of many things that went wrong much earlier in their lives. Absent parenting and wayward parenting often top the list of root-cause analyses behind criminal conduct.
Earlier this week, TimesLIVE reported on an eight-year-old who was caught with a packet of dagga at a primary school in Phoenix, north of Durban. A security company that attended to this dramatic scene said the grade three pupil said he shared the drug with others in the school.
“He explained that he was given the packet of cannabis by his uncle,” said Prem Balram, a director of the security firm Reaction Unit SA.
So many questions come to mind: what was the uncle thinking when he gave a child drugs? Could it be that the uncle was, himself, given drugs when he was young and therefore sees nothing wrong with his behaviour? When a security company is summoned to school premises because of an eight-year-old who is subjected to searches and questioning, what is the impact on his young brains? What support is there at home? Is the father absent? Where was he when the uncle gave his son drugs to take to school? Should the primary school now search eight-year-olds like potential drug peddlers?
If you move away from KwaZulu-Natal to Gauteng, you find other children in grades R to 7 who fell ill after eating space cookies — muffins laced with dagga — at Pulamadibogo in Soshanguve, north of Pretoria.
Two street vendors (Amukelani Nyalungu, 19, and Ofentse Maluleka, 21), fully aware that their product is laced with drugs, wilfully accepted the children’s coins knowing a sickly experiment on the 87 children’s young and fragile bodies was under way. We may never know why adults would act in such a irrational, criminal manner.
We are failing future generations. If we say, as we often do, that the future of the world is in the hands of our youth, we certainly are actively sabotaging it.
We can only hope that they will explain to the courts — hopefully on a day they had not taken the space cookies — why they would put children on drugs. Or are they small town drug lords growing their own timber? The questions abound.
So shocked were the children’s bodies that they developed stomach cramps, nausea and were vomiting. It is befitting that Nyalungu and Maluleka were charged with attempted murder. They deserve to face the full wrath of the law.
We may ask psychologists to explain what the impact of Nyalungu and Maluleka’s actions are on these children, or to investigate the pair’s own childhood, just as we wonder if there are similarities between them and the unnamed uncle from Phoenix.
But what is clear, is that we are failing future generations. If we say, as we often do, that the future of the world is in the hands of our youth, we certainly are actively sabotaging it. Former president Nelson Mandela told us: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” At this rate, we need a national soul-searching exercise to help exorcise the demon making us destroy our children.
The National Institute of Health says the illicit substance responsible for the admission of South Africans at drug treatment centres has cannabis, or dagga, at the helm with 16.9%, methamphetamine (Tik) at 12.8%, crack-cocaine 9.6% and heroin/opiates 9.2%. Cannabis is certainly a big problem in the country.
Whatever the motivation is for feeding young people drugs, nothing good will come of it. As a country, we should not simply be satisfied with the arrests of street vendors but demand authorities review policy regime regulating how the war against illicit substances is being won or lost. The police too must ensure our streets are rid not only of runners but also kingpins.
When we fail to do the above, our children are not just failed by their crooked uncles and street vendors, but policymakers, police and the rest of us. Drugs are anathema for our being and much more on the underdeveloped bodies of our children.
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