People don’t respect
MBABANE – The Chairperson of the Council of Swaziland Churches, Archdeacon Bhekindlela Magongo, says it was unfortunate to see the existence of the church contributing to social ills.
Magongo was reacting to a study that was set to investigate reasons for early sexual debut among in-school youth in Eswatini, which has a setting with high HIV incidence among the youth.
The focus of the study was the Manzini Region and it was conducted by lecturers from the University of Eswatini (UNESWA), in partnership with ICAP.
The study highlighted that school-going children said attending church activities was one of the reasons for early sexual debut, because it presented them with unsupervised time to engage in sexual activities.
It also explored the use of cellphones among the age groups as well as their dating life. It was stated that these children found themselves engaging in transactional sex, and cellphones enabled them to send nude pictures.
“It is unfortunate that the existence of the church has been found contributing to social ills and challenges. This is because the church is there to assist people in terms of morals and development of human beings,” Magongo said.
He said the issue was not the existence of the church but morals and values that were non-existent in family structures. He said the church was constituted by people from different family backgrounds.
The archdeacon explained that the background varied per family as some had parents and some did not. He said the degree of instilling discipline and values in children was sometimes relaxed in some families, but there were those instances where a child became rebellious.
Values
Magongo said what the nation needed to focus on was to instil values that developed a person to be able to stay away from anything wrong. “The moral decay is not from the youth only but all age groups. The country is at a level where nobody cares what is wrong or right. We need each other to sit down as a nation and distinguish wrong from right,” he said.
Further, he said it was crucial for the church to create opportunities within it, that would assist the parents with development skills. These would enable them to be able to assist the development of their children and be able to instil morals in them.
The chairperson stated that his generation grew up respecting the church, adding that it was startling to note that children lied about going or being in church easily. “People don’t even respect the church,” he said.
He went on to state that the church should develop a strong relationship with the community, to close the gaps that existed, which would equip the children with proper life skills and morals.