Less talk, a little more action
News that nine-year-old-girls are accessing birth control while ten-year-olds are giving birth, left us in awe and utterly speechless. To further compound this shocking news, we hear that 16-year-olds are ready to give birth to their second child.
In the Kavango alone, 83 girls under the age of 15 fell pregnant in one year.
These are just some of the figures that came out of public hearings conducted throughout the country by the National Assembly's Standing Committee on Human Resources and Community Development.
That the girl child in Namibia is in trouble is a given. Poverty is omnipresent, coupled with abuse, too much access to social evils like drunkenness and violence, and of course, sex.
Blessers are said to include senior public officials and members of the police and/or army. And these children are minors… but no one reports these matters.
Is it because we do not care or is it because we accept this to be the norm?
The children of these children too, will be illiterate and unemployable, like their mothers who, no doubt, will be single mothers without any form of support. They will, if they manage at all, raise their children to be as poor as them with a future as non-existent as their own. And those children, will repeat the cycle as will theirs and theirs, ad infinitum. So essentially, in many – if not most - of our rural areas, we are perpetuating poverty and readying ourselves for generations that will rely on government hand-outs, rain so that they may plant small vegetable gardens for food to eat, owners of makeshift shacks without running water or toilets in any form and without adequate education or medical care. The future, if this is the foundation, is very bleak indeed and this news should be far more than a wake-up call to our government.
Ironically, just this week, President Hage Geingob received the African Gender Award. The award, to reward him for his efforts towards the promotion and protection of women's rights in Namibia.
People, we need to stop having workshops and making speeches about women and children and how we need to protect them. We need to start doing. And we need to start doing immediately.
In the Kavango alone, 83 girls under the age of 15 fell pregnant in one year.
These are just some of the figures that came out of public hearings conducted throughout the country by the National Assembly's Standing Committee on Human Resources and Community Development.
That the girl child in Namibia is in trouble is a given. Poverty is omnipresent, coupled with abuse, too much access to social evils like drunkenness and violence, and of course, sex.
Blessers are said to include senior public officials and members of the police and/or army. And these children are minors… but no one reports these matters.
Is it because we do not care or is it because we accept this to be the norm?
The children of these children too, will be illiterate and unemployable, like their mothers who, no doubt, will be single mothers without any form of support. They will, if they manage at all, raise their children to be as poor as them with a future as non-existent as their own. And those children, will repeat the cycle as will theirs and theirs, ad infinitum. So essentially, in many – if not most - of our rural areas, we are perpetuating poverty and readying ourselves for generations that will rely on government hand-outs, rain so that they may plant small vegetable gardens for food to eat, owners of makeshift shacks without running water or toilets in any form and without adequate education or medical care. The future, if this is the foundation, is very bleak indeed and this news should be far more than a wake-up call to our government.
Ironically, just this week, President Hage Geingob received the African Gender Award. The award, to reward him for his efforts towards the promotion and protection of women's rights in Namibia.
People, we need to stop having workshops and making speeches about women and children and how we need to protect them. We need to start doing. And we need to start doing immediately.
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Namibian Sun
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