Page 86 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 27 Final

Community
in this article.
First, concerning drugs and the peddling
of drugs in South Africa by Nigerians or
whoever else that is being accused, my
opinion will be, let whoever is guilty of such
crimes be arrested and prosecuted according
to the laws of the land. Period! There should
not be any debate about such crimes. It is
evil and should be dealt with as such but with
fairness and justice according to the laws of
the land and without prejudices.
As a South African, you may want to say
“but the SA police are in bed with the
criminals, so they cannot arrest them”. If
that is true, then the police themselves are
criminals and you should be worried. In
fact, that means you have a bigger systemic
problem that needs a serious systemic
solution. The South African police or
customs officer or immigration office who
will turn a blind eye to drug traffickers or
contraband goods because he was given a
thousand Rand will one day allow a terror
group bring in bombs to the capital if given
a million Rand. Its pretty simple. And that
will become a serious national security issue
and not just a case of drug peddling. Meaning
that as South Africans, you must remove
the emotions you have about the so called
foreign nationalities doing drugs in your
country and really look at the systemic rot
that is creating and also benefiting from the
drug trade.
We all know that drugs don’t grow on the
streets and the distribution of it is based on
complex systems that involves people in and
WWW.MSINGIAFRIKAMAGAZINE.COM
86
| we tell the true afrikan story
out of the government and private agencies.
So to not deal with it from its many angles
is to be wasting time dealing with the wrong
thing. Also, there is a simple business law
which posits that demand always drives
supply. Simply put, you cannot call the seller
of drugs criminals while calling the buyer
and user of the drugs innocent victims. Its
like saying a thief is a criminal but the buyer
of stolen goods is a saint. In simple words,
the day the buyer stops buying, thats the day
the seller will be forced to stop selling. But if
its that simple, that I do not know.
South Africans claim that foreigners are
turning their young women into prostitutes.
This is a very unfortunate matter and should
be looked into critically. My opinion will be
that, in as much as the issue of prostitution
of young women in any society is an evil
that should not be tolerated by any means,
but how come we don’t start by asking basic
questions like, when a jobless sixteen year
old girl comes back home with the latest
iPhone and some big bags of groceries, what
did you do as a parent? Like drugs, iphones
don’t grow on trees. Or do you only complain
that foreigners lured your young women into
prostitution because they suddenly stopped
coming home? The fact remains that every
family has a responsibility for the moral
upbringing of the folks in that family. And I
do not say this to make light the things going
on in the street. The truth is, the street is very
hard and to conquer it requires some real
boldness. But the family is a good place to
start if we want to rid the streets of its evil.
Is this a poverty war among the poor?
From every report or videos that I have seen