Let’s uphold family, Christian values

There is need to uphold family and Christian values in the country for the sake of our young ones. The upbringing and socialisation of a big part of our young population is influenced by the stability of the two important institutions in the case of Uganda. For example, more than 78 per cent of us are practicing Christians and yet we are deeply corrupt, why?

We must pay attention to how our nation’s young people are brought up and socialised. I believe that a nation that ignores or omits building a solid foundation for its young people also misses her very foundations of statesmanship. Young people can be easily made statesmen with the right ideology/leadership in the church and family. The young ones are easy to inspire and redirect if they are inspired by their leaders’ exemplary lives.

Something has terribly gone wrong with families, which no longer espouse pro-national/community values or even give respect to the institution of the family. Love and hard work is central in this yet we seem to prefer greed and wastage. A typical African child is being taught about how to quickly escape from poverty. Not enough time is committed to acquiring practical skills for sustenance of life, identification of opportunities and finding simple solutions for the challenges the young people face.

Parents contribute a lot to keeping their children lazy in the name of protection, education, better living and keeping appearances. Church has not helped either with a lot of time spent on grooming the spirit and much less on work. What is work anyway?
Consequently, our children have limited patience and yet they lack the know-how. They spend time looking out for already set tables and no hustle encounters mostly resorting to vanity projects.

This has narrowed their view of development, opportunity and reduced their participation in real life-changing projects that require patience.
Something has gone terribly wrong with the family and the church in Uganda. Do you not think it is time for some kind of a different renaissance to help redirect us to believe in our ability to end this anguish? What are our individual roles? What are State roles? Who is not doing what?
Dr Deus Kamunyu Muhwezi, Makerere University