Here’s why we should keep teenage boys and their bu-snakes in school

There is much to admire in the new Education Ministry guidelines about teenage pregnancy. For instance, rather than banish pregnant schoolgirls, the new measures encourage schools to provide counselling, care and support and re-admit learners when their babies turn six months.

Keeping girls in school is one of the most useful ways to improve society. Girls who leave school early tend to have many babies and often lack the means to take care of them. Thus girls born to teenage mothers are more likely to become teenage mothers and continue the cycle of poverty. 

The reverse is true; girls staying longer in school have fewer babies and often have the skills and money to take better care of them, including keeping them in school, thus breaking the cycle. 

There are, however, at least two problems with the new guidelines. The first is that they are designed to treat the symptom, not cure the disease: The attendance of unsafe sexual congress by teenagers who, in Ugandan speak, “have not yet reached themselves”. 

This isn’t a new problem, and neither is it easy to fix. The political economy in many rural poor settings is such that the onset of puberty in girls merely unlocks value, upgrading them from mere suppliers of labour on family enterprises, to producers of surplus labour (children begetting children) or capital (bride price).

In fact, when the law on defilement was tightened many years ago, rather than reduce the practice, it turned some cunning peasants into extorting mafioso: Young teenage girls would be sent to “pass in front of” village tycoons who, on getting entangled, would then be forced to marry the lass or pay a hefty fine for window-shopping, or loitering with intent. 

The alternative – a year in jail before bail, or life in jail if convicted – was hard to countenance.

Teenage hormones are hard to control and children nowadays live in a world of over-sexualised film, music and culture. They do not have to wait, sweaty palms trembling in excitement, for older friends and relatives to hand down suspiciously damp magazines with models in suggestive poses sans apparel. The solution is to give them more information, not less.

As soon as babies are old enough to crawl around the house, we teach them that if they go around sticking things into electrical sockets they might be shocked. 

With one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the world, shouldn’t we tell teenagers that if they go around sticking their things willy-nilly they might be shocked? And while people have been known to invoke the Lord’s name in the commission of evil and at the most ungodly of times, this advice should be on the basis of science, not mores.

The second problem with the guidelines is the proposal for boys who impregnant girls to be sent away from school for the duration of the pregnancy and until the young mother is fit enough to return. 

I don’t know if it is just me, but I find the idea of a randy young man, who’s just discovered a loaded gun between his legs, being let loose on some sleepy village for 18 months. If he was able to beat the eagle-eyed surveillance in school settings to point an unsuspecting girl into the general direction of the devil’s metropolis, imagine what he will get up to unmoored?

It reminds one of the story, well told over the years, of India under British rule. There were too many cobras slithering around and a cash reward was offered for every dead snake presented. It worked well for a while, but it did not take long for a Patel here and a Rajesh there to spot a business opportunity and start breeding the damn things. 

When the breeding scam was discovered and the cash reward system abandoned, our friends suddenly found themselves possessed of a lot of dead stock, but of a variety that was very alive, venomous and vexatious. 

So the breeders released their baskets of snakes and, overnight, undid everything the original scheme had intended, leaving India with a large population of cobras to this very day.

If you want to stop boys from going around sowing their wild teenage oats, start by keeping them and their bu snakes in school!

Mr Daniel Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. [email protected] | @Kalinaki