By Joan Murungi
A video that went viral on social media showing a one Queen Kafta and three other girls battering a 15-year-old girl (Pretty Nicole) over a man is something that got everyone concerned for the past few weeks.
Former member of the Pan African Parliament from Uganda Miria Matembe is one of those that watched the video and she is surprised that people are blaming Pretty Nicole’s mother for her daughter’s behaviour of getting into relationships at a young age.
“They say bahana ogwine. That proverb is so powerful and it means that you can only counsel someone who is counsel-able. If a person you are counselling has no ethical values and has no heart for behaving ethically with integrity, you are wasting your time counseling them,” Matembe said during an exclusive interview with The Kampala Sun on January 27.
According to her, the level of moral decay and ethical values of this country has made young girls engage in acts of this nature.
This is so because the level of materialism and greed for money has erased the human values in our lives. This globalisation that has ended into modern technology and social media has made people experience things at a time they shouldn’t have.
“This has caused a lot of damage and there is no check to stop that kind of thing. In Uganda, evil is at play. It has prevailed over godly values because of materialism which is driven by self-centeredness and greed. After watching that video, I noticed that people were blaming mothers, but when I was growing up, I never had time to sit down with my mother. She was always busy working, but since the system was filled with moral, ethical values and proverbs, she would say something and it would mean a lot to you,“ Matembe revealed.
While growing up, Matembe didn’t know what it meant to get pregnant because there was no exposure to such information. She is shocked that in this day and era, young girl know how people get pregnant.
“At 13, I did not know these things until I studied introduction to biology. That is how I got to know that getting pregnant is by choice. But now, girls at the age of two years know how to get pregnant.”
Matembe narrated a story of when she was moving around the village with her mother back in the day. They bypassed a swamp that was filled with animal skeletons and thorns. Her mother told her that if you ever get pregnant, never return home but instead, throw yourself in that swamp.
That swamp is something that kept her from misbehaving until she eventually got married. There is no advice that her mother gave her. Also, the power of proverbs always used did it all.
“Children now know a lot of than we do. There must now be a different way of nurturing. When we, parents, stopped being terrorists, we have not replaced it with another kind of nurturing, which could shield our children from the danger of the world. I don’t know whom to blame,” Matembe said.
