Online Reporter
Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
THE discourse in this Saturday’s column is about a trend rampaging across worrying lips and trembling hearts of concerned citizens calling on the supreme law of the land to intervene and serve the lot of the Zimbabwean girl child faced with a bleak future.
We are talking about Gallivanters brandishing their reproductive organs in their hands and roving about in our space as gardeners brandishing hose pipes rove to and fro vegetable beds for the veggies to grow and provide good nutrition to families for their nutrition and better health.
But unlike vegetable gardeners, Gallivanters do not provide the Zimbabwean girl child nutritional education with skills for both her own growth and that of our motherland developmentally in accord with our Government’s mantra:
“Ilizwe lakhiwa ngabanikazi balo/nyika inovakwa nevene vayo/ a country is developed by its owners”.
Right now, Zimbabweans have their hands on the wheel, as it were, to become an upper-middle-class society by the year 2030 and only an education-skilled development agenda will guarantee achievement of that feat.
We are talking here about boys and girls acquiring skills through equal opportunities educationally, but something that is not possible with Gallivanters felling teenage girls from their educational pursuits as deforesters recklessly fell trees for firewood to sell.
But unlike reckless deforesters, Gallivanters do not impregnate teenage girls in order to marry them, but instead move on felling and abandoning their teenage victims.
Local radio has in recent days been alive with concerned citizens, both men and women, decrying the fate of teenage girls being impregnated and deprived of their educational pursuit and with that their role in providing our motherland a brave new future developmentally alongside the boy child who has the future of his motherland in his hand if not hooked to the drug and substance abuse now a serious menace in this country.
It is said that male relatives and even some errant male teachers are guilty of luring teenage girls to their demise by promising the girls the sky, as it were, moneywise or other lucrative gifts with some errant male teachers promising the girls good grades.
The outcry by all concerned must surely persuade the powers that be to intervene in the best possible ways to protect the girl child from male sexual beasts, with grandmothers, aunts, and even mothers of teenage girls educating the innocent poor souls about the dangers of sex before marriage to both their health and future educationally, developmentally et cetera.
Zimbabwe, as current chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) surely is in the right position to fight teenage pregnancies both at home and in the region as it should the scourge of drug and substance abuse with some of the drugs reportedly entering our region from East Africa and wreaking havoc among youths who must be the bearers of the new future for SADC countries.
To recap on the discourse, let us agree (yes, you and me) that for our nation to be all smiles zooming into 2030 a skills-driven national development agenda involving men and women is imperative otherwise we shall all bemoan a reversed bromide of our desire for successive brave new futures.
