ENDANGERED SPECIES by Mwangi Gituro

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The vulnerability of the girl child is a common subject. Several organizations and bodies have been formed to alleviate this vulnerability and fight for the rightful place in the society for the girl child. Her case is perpetuated into womanhood by bodies fighting for women rights and gender equality. Women have come a long way in this and as a result, we have the performance of girl schools improving tremendously, we have women becoming financially independent and the media is flooded with women clinching a first everyday. The consistent fight to bring the womenfolk at per with their male counterparts is finally paying off. Women are no longer seen as objects to be brought up and married off to go and submit to their husbands will.

Having said that, the question begets; at whose expense is all this happening? Allow me to explain first before you dismiss me as yet another male chauvinist. I have no problem whatsoever in the bid to strengthen the left hand. What I don’t agree to is to strengthen it by cutting off the right one. Since time in memorial, the boy child has been cultured to fend for and formulate his own morals. While the girl was and still is placed under scrutiny round the clock. The boy child only comes to mind during meal times.

In the times gone by, this worked for the boy would grow into a man, establish his own boma and live by his own rules. The girl would also eventually be married of and she had to live by the man’s rules hence the need to nurture and train her carefully during her upbringing. The society had plenty of room for a man to become a jerk and nobody could judge him. A woman had no space to deviate from the norm.

The boy child of the twenty first century is faced with tremendous challenges which unless properly guided find it difficult to change. Ours is a flooded river of choices and unless somebody throws to us life jackets, we can easily drown. The technology of our time is allowing us no breathing space. By the time it hits a parent that their child could have started watching porn, the boy is in his second or third year of porn magazine, tapes or websites depending on the accessibility of these media. The day that you turn and almost die of cardiac arrest that your son could have had his first sexual encounter that week, well, I’ve got news for you, the dude’s almost turning pro in the trade.

The boy child is left with the flexibility of defining his destiny and most of that the parent gets to know about him is purely accidental. Mothers refuse to accept the fact that their sons are growing and one is always mama’s lil’ boy until the day she stumbles on unused condoms in your room or the police calls home and reports that you were caught smoking bhang or worse. Dead drunk teenagers sneak into their houses and make for their rooms without their parents picking the slightest clue. God knows how many times our mothers have nursed our hangovers mistaking them for sickness. But woe unto this girl child who goes and gets we a baby. The mother notices it the next morning and hell breaks loose.

Neglect is costing us the boy child. Thousands of homes are struggling with irresponsible fathers whose duties have narrowed down to child bearing, cheap liquor consumption and roaring in the compound. Chang’aa dens are littered with youths who have no ideas where their next meal will come from but they do know who will fill their next glass of chang’aa: an entrepreneuring mamaa. And who can blame her? MYW has taught her all means of surviving.

Almost every case of families living below the poverty line can be traced to men failing in their duties as fathers and husbands. This is further traced back to the boy child being forgotten and neglected. We need organizations to champion for the rights of the boy child and parents should play a greater role in moulding their male children as well as they do the girl. The technology of today is dumping everything to us and without proper guidance it is easier to choose that which is destructive to us than that which is good. I am for the idea of strengthening both hands harmoniously instead of bringing the left hand to be as good as the right then cutting the right off altogether. Until this is done, men will continue to be a burden in families living below the poverty line as more and more women wade through and join those living above the line. This explains why there is emerging a crop of highly successful women who are opting to be single parents by choice. Up there, the man still reigns supreme and the woman may still be trying to reach him but down the ladder, man lost the battle a decade ago when Maendeleo ya Wanawake became the next big thing since sliced bread.

In war ravaged countries, the boy child is being intoxicated with bhang then made to fight wars that he knows nothing about. The traditional upbringing of the boy child has made him even more vulnerable to the agents of destruction that are available. Parents sleep in peace not knowing where their son is the whole night (but sure that he will turn up the following morning) but they would not find sleep until their daughter who is attending a friend’s birthday bash next door returns. While the boy child enjoys this freedom in his youth, it catches up with him as life starts getting more serious. When one can no longer keep away from the chang’aa dens or stop smoking marijuana, that’s when one wishes he had not gotten into that world altogether. The unaccountable mode of living sets in. This is more evident with men living below the poverty line than with their upper counterparts who always have their affluent parents bailing them out.

I think the worst that can maybe happen to a girl is prostitution. For a boy, there is a whole world of evil to swim in including thuggery, drug peddling, conmanship, alcoholism and so on. It is difficult to start slapping contention rules on the boy child but parents, the government and the NGOs need to come up with policies and means of nurturing the boy child into responsible adulthood. After all, MYW org will agree with me that empowering the woman has brought in a new dimension of life in the household where the woman is now labouring like a donkey to put bread on the table while the man of the house (for those who have not eloped with young girls to start a new family) sits all day like a retard in a chang’aa den. Protection of the boy child hence would not only help him reclaim his responsibilities in adulthood but also offload some of the burdens now placed on women. To all thee affirmative action crusaders, draw your protective shields and get to work for there is a new endangered species in town and its name is the boy child.

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