Education minister told of cartels using pupils to traffic drugs
MANZINI – The Minister of Education and Training, Owen Nxumalo, has been informed about cartels, which are using pupils to traffic drugs in schools.
This was revealed by St Theresa’s High School Head teacher Albert Sihlongonyane yesterday. This was during the minister’s visit to the girls’ school, which is located in the city of Manzini.
The head teacher said one of the concerns that schools were faced with was the smuggling of intoxicating materials, mainly dagga, into learning institutions. He said in her school, there was a case of a pupil who was found in possession of the habit-forming drug. However, he said when they enquired where she got the dagga from and her intention for possessing it, she was reluctant to reveal anything.
Disclosed
The head teacher stated that they handed her over to the police and she disclosed where she obtained the dagga from and its intended destination.
In summary, the head teacher said there were drug dealers who were using some of the pupils to traffic the illegal herb and other drugs in schools, both in urban and rural areas. This, he said, happened even from one region to another.
Sihlongonyane mentioned that some pupils smoked the dagga, while others added it to their food during the lunch hour and got intoxicated.
He said they would subsequently notice a wayward behaviour among the pupils.
The head teacher also informed the minister that another concern in schools was alcohol.
He said at St Theresa’s High School, they were unfortunate because some liquor outlets were too close to the school. Sihlongonyane told the minister that they had learnt that some of the pupils formed relationships with employees of the liquor outlets. He said they hid the alcoholic beverages in their backpacks, and smuggled it into the school.
According to Sihlongonyane, during examinations, a pupil collected money from her schoolmates and used her connections at one of the nearby liquor outlets to buy alcoholic beverages and smuggled it into the school. He informed the minister that the pupils proceeded to help themselves to the booze after writing their last examination paper.
Sihlongonyane also brought it to the attention of the minister that in certain schools, some pupils engaged in same-sex relationships.
He highlighted that usually, this happened between pupils from lower and higher grades. For example, the head teacher pointed out that pupils in lower grades, such as Form Is, would propose love to those in higher grades, like Form Vs, because they wanted to be famous.
Again, he said, even those in higher grades, proposed love to pupils in lower grades, because they believed they would easily agree with the notion that they would be famous. According to the head teacher, in some cases, some pupils purportedly engaged in naughty activities in the bathrooms.
When they engage in these activities, said the head teacher, the pupils would have someone by the door to alert their friends who would be inside engaging in the sexual activity.
As such, he said the school had come up with a strategy to monitor the bathrooms, but without going inside.
Furthermore, he said another challenge faced by the school, was disturbance caused by pupils who had ancestral spirits (emadloti).
He said when the pupils with ancestral spirits were in a trance, they would speak in ‘tongues’ and their schoolmates would follow them as they walked around the school and some of them would even write what they were saying or doing. He said this affected the performance of the pupils.
Therefore, the head teacher said the school needed social workers who would assist them in attending to these challenges.
He added that the challenges about the pupils were not only about their behaviour at school, but even their welfare at home.
On another note, Sihlongonyane said they faced a challenge with bursaries; Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (OVC) Fund and Tibiyo Taka Ngwane. He said the amount of E1 950, which government had been paying since the year 2000, needed to be reviewed.