South Africa’s cheap booze and lax attitudes let children suffer, highlighting the urgent need to curb alcohol access and educate parents.
South Africa’s national motto, as we have learned from bitter experience, should be: It’s not my fault.
To the myriad ways our people have used it to excuse criminal, immoral or degenerate behaviour must now be added a new one: parents have to be told that giving booze to a three year old is not acceptable parenting.
That’s at least what Mgwebi Msiya, spokesperson of the Eastern Cape Liquor Board, suggested, along with his expected condemnation of the incident where kids were captured on video drinking beer at a Christmas Day “celebration” in his province.
He said while strong action should be taken against the parents involved, “something needs to be done to empower parents with proper parenting skills”.
In other words, it’s not entirely their fault because they were not empowered with the “proper parenting skills”.
If there are parents out there who don’t think there is anything wrong with this sort of conduct, we would like to suggest that, in lieu of said “education”, society might be better served if they were sterilised so they can’t have any more children.
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That might sound extreme – but this awful cameo is a mere reflection of the slow implosion of morality in our country.
Children are, most would be aware, more vulnerable to the effects of booze than adults, because not only are they smaller in stature, their brains and minds are not yet developed and they are mentally vulnerable.
Again, the way the adults behaved – looking on and laughing at the “entertainment” – goes way beyond the harmless. It is nothing less than child abuse.
Booze is so easy to come by and – compared to many other countries – is still so laughably cheap that it continues to wreak havoc in our lives.
Maybe we need to deal with that before “educating” parents who shouldn’t need educating.
