shishNjoki Chege wrote an article about ladies who smoke shisha which went ahead to cause a stir from the blogosphere, vomiting its hard truths in the streets of social media to the not so amused large number of urbanite generation. Of course the reaction was predictable. It’s politically correct to put it this way; that contemporary men are at peace with women who pull heavy gasps of tobacco down to their three decade old lungs and let out dark clouds of oscillating smoke that lazily finds its way to the stuffy air at 3am in an entertainment joint. Very few would disapprove this fact.

But when the same is practiced by kids who are graduating from adolescence; boys who have half a dozen years ahead of them to grow beards and high school girls whose most valuable assets are smartphones, then the rain won’t stop beating us anytime soon. We will be swept by raiding floods of evil without huruma!(Mercy). The so called contemporary parents will bury many of their kids even before they clear college. They will die out of excess freedom, careless parenting and from worship of Western cultures. They will die with lungs reduced to ash trays no different from street kids who spend years sniffing glue. Shisha people and glue sniffing street kids have no difference only separated by access to money.

Somebody said on TV the other day, that parents nowadays are raising career kids. I strongly agree. We are a people that are putting too much focus on kids’ performance in schools at the very expense of family values. That since your son or daughter is in a competitive National school and scoring good grades; he or she is treated as a demigod. Their behaviors aren’t questioned nor raise parents’ eyebrows. They are pampered from kindergarten age to when they marry and thereafter. Any mess that is reported, is blamed on the teachers. Teachers, drug peddlers and bar men understand these kids more than the parents!

Just before schools opened from the last April holidays, I checked into this entertainment joint. Apparently, there was an organised Salsa dancing competition. What my friends and I found out was that most of the participants were high school kids. It must have been past 11pm. I’m talking about teenagers who had sneaked from their parents’ homes or rather allowed to be away for the night to participate in a salsa competition at a nightclub mingled by adults of all walks of life. How mindless can parents be? Of course they couldn’t afford beer, but smoked shisha in turns until cockcrow hours. They stirred the section we were seated in, burying the rest of us with heavy billows of shisha smoke. Occasionally as the ecstatic night dragged on, these high schools kids would assemble together and in turns religiously pull humongous puffs and let out white waverings of smoke that would leave behind blurred illusions. In fact, by the time we stepped out, we must have drawn in kilos and kilos of shisha from secondary smoking.

At another end was a young lady accompanied by a guy, who seemed to be her partner. Every time my eyes pounced on her, she was always breathing in, holding diligently the shisha pipe for minutes that would drag to half an hour or more. She was beautiful, with a glowing skin, dangling hairs and if you happened to bump on her during the day, her eyes would flatter you with the innocence they illuminated. The seemingly unperturbed partner traded his eyes to the dancing humanity pulling a-not-so-bothered demeanor.

I’m not sure how I would seat up with my girlfriend for five hours and all she did would be sucking a shisha pipe holding it more tightly than she held me. How? A night full of white smoke, smokier kisses and a look at our very foggy future together. My mind would create imaginations of me stumbling her in the house still holding a shisha pipe, holed somewhere in the table room, forgetting that she left something cooking in the kitchen. I’d think of how she would raise our kids including how worse off they could turn out. I’d worry of the numerous times we would visit the doc for her chest problems and heavy, dark coughs that in essence would put to bare her dark life as well. I would think of mum and how her reaction would be upon realising I date such a chic….what would be left of me is probably die and fail to resurrect. Avoiding dealing with the reality of betraying her time, investments, emotions, prayers and expectations.

I have serious beef with contemporary parenting. This coolness you brag to your peers about your kids, is sucking me up. It’s filling my heart with choking anger. I’m infuriated by this sheer wastage of a generation. Dear newfangled parents who care less about where your high school sons and daughters spend their nights; you will have a very miserable posterity. The kind of laziness you are depicting in raising those kids will come down tumbling on your balding heads rather hard. The demigods you are nurturing will in the end, feed every investment you own and finally feed on you too. We will bury you of ulcers and all other stress related illnesses.

You parents that are easily carried away by Nairobi Diaries never missing an episode while your daughter is out there dressed in under wears, in the evil hours of the night, seated in dark corners of entertainment joints religiously holding shisha pipes for hours, engulfed by men who have rendered millions of women to be single mothers, your space in hell is set and waiting for you. You absentee dads that spend nights in pubs with somebody’s teenage daughters ruining their lives with pots of shisha, cheap money and loaned cars while in the process taking away their innocence; you have a mandate to reconcile with your sins here on earth or in the afterlife.

Parents must rise to the occasion and realise one never stops raising his/her kids. Ask Tonny Kibaki if his mum ever stopped raising him even after he was all grown, married and a daddy. Learn lessons of how Lucy Kibaki (RIP) raised her kids. And for your information, according to Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health which released its report last Tuesday(10/05/2016), it pointed that the fastest growing risk factor for ill health in young people aged between 10 and 24 years in the past 23 years has been unsafe sex. Now, isn’t these high school kids bragging of shisha escapades that pose to be victims of this statistics?

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