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Time for nation that worships booze to take stock

The ceremonial funeral of 21 youths who died at a tavern in the Eastern Cape. Photo: GCIS

The Enyobeni tragedy brings to the fore the reality of our broken society’s toxic relationship with alcohol. Glamourising of liquor and drunkenness is leading youth to addiction and destruction writes Lucas Ledwaba

THE nation mourned the deaths of the Enyobeni 21 recently – but the sad reality remains that scores of other young people across the country continue to die a slow death from alcohol and drug abuse.

A generation of young people is being condemned to early graves, wiped out, transformed into ghosts roaming aimlessly with no purpose.

In the townships young people walk around dazed and unkempt, zombies whose sole mission is to raise cash, by hook or crook, to feed their addiction to nyaope.

They hang around public spaces, taxi ranks, malls, shopping centres and intersections, begging for cash or offering their services to perform whatever chores that can bring them cash. Some scour landfill sites and rubbish bins in search of anything they can sell to pay for their next fix. They steal and rob in a quest to feed their habit.

This is nothing new. It’s been plaguing our society for well over a decade now. It has become normalised. The nyaope-boys, as they have come to be called, are accepted as a normal group of in our society. How did we get to this stage, where watching young people deteriorating into sorry wrecks, as a normal way of life?

The nyaope addicts are available for hire when home owners require someone to carry out some work around the yard. They will do anything, wash cars, gather and collect rubble, fix up the roof. In the villages they dig pit toilets. Some are efficient grave diggers. They have become a readily available resource, a cheap source of labour serving an indifferent society taking advantage of a sick situation.

It seems everyone, the state, communities, families, have given up on them. It has been accepted as normal to have a part of our society ravaged by an illegal substance.

The Department of Social Development is offering those troubled by substance abuse an opportunity to get clean.

Community members do not pursue the nyaope peddlers who feed this poison their loved ones with the same zeal they would when burning down a library during a protest against a lack of service delivery. The drug peddlers, who are all too often known by community members, have also been accepted as a normal part of our society. They are left to destroy our society with impunity and arrogance. There are widespread reports, or allegations that some of these peddlers are protected by the police, the very people meant to root out such elements from our communities.

But what do we do? We are defeated, it seems. We have given up. Ai, these young people of today, we shrug. What can we do? It’s the same attitude we seem to have adopted towards the glaring abuse of alcohol by the youth.

We have normalised getting drunk. We brag about booze and flaunt it at every opportunity, on social media, in public, even at funerals. We worship liquor.

We are showing the young ones that this is the way – drinking and getting drunk in public at every opportunity. We even drink with them. When they ask for money to buy booze, we are quick to oblige. Getting drunk is the new normal, the new cool, and the young ones have observed, learnt and now they are doing it.

We have sunk so low that, even on June 16, when we are meant to commemorate our tragic and bitter past, we get drunk in public. We force our puffed up bodies into small sized school uniforms and show the young people that it’s fine to mock our history, to piss on the bones of those who were murdered on our march to freedom.

The tavern has become the centre of life in our communities. It is more often than not the link to contact crimes such as murder, rape, assault, stabbings that haunt our communities. Even the shisa-nyama has become a place where we consume more booze than we chew meat. We drink everywhere, at the car wash, funerals, in the streets, just about everywhere, at every given opportunity.

On weekends we pack the taverns, get drunk and shoot videos of our drunken dances and share them across social media platforms. And we laugh and celebrate drunken adults behaving badly. They even become national celebrities to a nation that has come to worship alcohol. The young people hang out at taverns even on weekdays, harassing patrons for small change to feed their dependency on alcohol.

International polls rank our nation high up there among the world’s top boozers. We laugh about this too. How do we expect young people to act differently when we lead the way to the tavern and the shisa nyama regularly?

How do we expect young people to frown upon drunkenness and lewd behaviour when we celebrate and praise it all the time?

Even sporting events are not spared. Tournaments organised with the intention to keep the youth away from the streets have become instead, another convenient avenue for boozing. Even here, the youth are not spared the exposure to this worshipping and love of liquor.

Boozing, just like nyaope addiction, have become normalised in our society. Peer pressure among the youth is driving many to experiment. Even those who do not wish to join the booze brigade, are probably ending up doing so because, even the elders are doing it.

Fingers have been pointed at various stakeholders for the Enyobeni tragedy. Politicians have blamed parents, parents have in turn pointed a finger at politicians and poor policing.

The Enyobeni 21 are gone, but the sad truth is that everyday nyaope and liquor take more young lives. Photo: GCIS

In some quarters the blame has been laid at the counters of the tavern owner. At least nobody has blamed the booze itself. But perhaps everyone deserves the blame for not playing their part. We only got to know about the Enyobeni 21because of the scale of the tragedy. But truth be told, everywhere in our country’s suburbs, townships, villages and informal settlements, youths are being wiped out by alcohol and drug abuse; by a carefree, destructive lifestyle they copy from the adults.

We would probably never have heard of Enyobeni had those young people not died there that night, but is it possible that they too would have become, or were part of the many others who are dying, slowly, daily, weekly, from alcohol abuse and drug addiction?

The Enyobeni 21 are gone, but the sad truth is that everyday nyaope and liquor take more young lives. Is it not perhaps time for the nation, this nation that has come to worship booze so much, to take stock and reflect? Or should it just be business as usual, where the deaths of young people resulting from drunkenness or drug addiction are just accepted as God’s will as it’s always expressed at memorial services and funerals for victims of such?