The Sunday News
22 September 2012
THE paradox of our time is that while our education sector is faced with a myriad of grave challenges, we spend more time on dead debates.
For instance, instead of engaging in constructive debate on how we can improve high school education in the country, “respectable’’ government ministers and some traditional  leaders would rather stir a hornet’s nest by supporting the distribution of condoms and  contraceptives in schools. Schoolchildren require reading, teaching aids, books, computers and qualified teachers not condoms and contraceptives.
Just yesterday, we woke up to the news that Health and Child Welfare Minister Dr Henry Madzorera expressed support for the distribution of contraceptives in schools, saying this would curb cases of illegal abortions in the country. Whose child does the minister want to give condoms instead of books?
Let us practise what we preach. We preach abstinence and moral uprightness and not this condom business in schools. The Ministry of Health and Child Welfare and  that of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, the National Aids Council, the church should be teaching students the dangers of premarital sex and the benefits of abstaining from premarital sex.
Condoms do not promote abstinence. This is a fact.
Does abortion pose a threat bigger than that of social decadence?
Here are a few facts based on research in America where this dead debate was born.
The distribution of condoms in schools is wrong because:
– it encourages an earlier onset of sexual activity
– it is a potential offence to religious people/groups
– it is wrong for taxpayers to be forced to financially support a programme they consider morally objectionable
– it makes sexual activity in general become the norm
-Â it increases peer pressure to engage in sexual behaviour
n of the relative ineffectiveness of condoms, especially when used improperly, as is commonly done by those inexperienced, or young.
Zimbabwe is a free country. People who support the distribution of condoms to schoolchildren should distribute them in their homes and leave our children alone.
The Ministers of Health and his education counterpart, Senator David Coltart, should be debating on why they are only a few schools doing well in science education and provide test tubes instead of condoms.
Biology lessons should be left to theory in the science laboratory and not enhanced through the distribution of condoms. This also raises other pertinent questions which beg for answers from those who support the distribution of condoms to children. Exactly where will these condoms be used and how? Are we going to ask manufacturers to  come up with a small version of  condoms for these kids? Leaders need to be more serious than this.
Will Government allow children in mixed schools to cohabit? Will devious children in day schools abusing storerooms and bushes be afforded accommodation just for sex?
Will children caught in the act be expelled? Surely, we cannot give them condoms with one hand and punish them with the other.
Why are we obsessed with dead debates?
Let’s talk about nutrition in schools, books and quality of education.
Let’s teach our children the same principles and values we were taught by those who came before us. No sex before marriage, PERIOD!
Dr Madzorera was a high school student once and he made it without the availability of condoms.
He must not fix what is not broken. We have said this before and we repeat it now, that those  children who will not listen to  advice from their parents to  abstain from illicit sex are food for the maggots. This is simple and straightforward. We cannot pay fees for students to go to school to engage in sex.