My sympathies, for a little while now, have been with Doreen Sefuke Mwamba, nominated member of parliament and current UPND Minister of Community and Social Services, appointed by President Hakainde Hichilema. She is one of those very obvious supper supporters and fans of President Hakainde Hichilema.

On the 13th of April 2021, for example, she posted the following on her Facebook page:

“THERE’S SO MUCH WE CAN DO THAN BEING MPS. IF YOU ARE NOT ADOPTED AS MP OR COUNCILOR OR MAYOR IT’S NOT THE END
Ours is the mission to take Hakainde Hichilema to State House so that he can take us to the Promised Land. This is why I have chosen not to contest as MP but to work for the party.
When President Hakainde Hichilema appointed me as UPND National Chairperson Women’s Affairs I told myself it’s my duty to help HH form Government through working hard.” This kind of absolute loyalty actually gets you the positions you want!

Hakainde Hichilema appointed her UPND National Chairperson, Women Affairs. It just so happens she is also the sister-in-law of Zambia’s infamous politician Godfrey Bwalya Mwamba, also known as GBM.

I love her energy; it radiates from her to everyone around her. I love her kind of loyalty; every leader of any political party needs a few such totally committed blind followers. She reminds me of the United National Independent Party (UNIP) Women’s League Chairpersons: tough, unyielding in their loyalty to Kaunda and totally committed to their patriarchal version of gender equality!

It is the small matter of urgent national importance of teen and pre-teen sex that has drawn my attention to Doreen. Doreen is extremely worried, as she should, and unhappy, as most mothers and fathers with children of this age must be, about the sexual goings on among our 12 – 13 year-olds. At this age, today, already some of these young children are having sex, sharing nude pictures via electronic media, becoming pregnant, dropping out of school, getting married, and therefore squandering their childhood and massacring their dreams of a fruitful adult life.
I am extremely proud of Doreen for raising these urgent national issues especially during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence. I am tempted to extend her concerns and simply label all the early sex activities she has described and is worried about as simply violence against our children, especially girls. Doreen raised these urgent, and I agree, sensitive matters, at a high-level girls’ indaba held during the just ended 16 days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence.
I take my heart off to the UPND government for making sanitary wear a budget issue for the 2022 Budget, for all girls in Zambian schools. This is long overdue. I truly wish the UPND government all the best, next year, as this historic service to our children is undertaken, for the first time.

I must admit I do not know Doreen at all, apart from what I know from the media and her public life. She must, therefore forgive me if I either exaggerate upwards her true character or understate her virtues.

It is the matter of her use of the word “demons” in association with the sex behaviours and activities of our teens and pre-teens that in fact drew my attention to her. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that she means well for our children, and that it is her desire to see that they grow up into useful equal and full members of our Zambian communities, educated, self-supporting and contributing to national development beyond merely being mothers and wives or single mothers. How I wish all other ministers of our government would pay similar attention to these urgent and sensitive matters!

“Demons” and “sex” especially when talking to children, to young people, should never mix, in my opinion. Human beings from birth to death are sexual beings, are orgasmic beings; human sexuality is an inherent and integral aspect of our lives. It is who we are; sexual beings. Sex is what we have as the highest form of physical and spiritual pleasure.

Sex, and appropriate sex education and skills using the right language and words throughout life (yes, even for adults as old and near a grave as I am!) are absolutely essential to full human health, quality social life, and above all, full enjoyment of human freedom.This education and skilling about things as essential and necessary as human sexuality and sex should have been a matter of course, 57 years after our independence.

What Doreen Sefuke Mwamba has so well exposed is the urgent attention needing to be paid to the matter of a universal human sexuality and sex education, from birth to death, for all human beings in Zambia. The contents of such education and skilling must of necessity be products of a thoroughgoing democratic national conversation on these matters, isolating areas of sharp differences and contradictions, and building upon areas of universal agreement to lay the foundation for such education and skills.

We the adults have abandoned our children to their poverty, thecell phone, computer, internet, social media, their peers and their own bodies and minds to navigate the minefield of their sexuality and sex. And then we wonder when 9-year-olds know more about the human body, human sexuality and sex than say, did our grandparents! We act surprised and mistakenly start looking for demons to explain why 12 and 13 year olds are very well versed in their wrong sex ways than we were at a similar age (as if we were any wiser then ourselves!).

Our ignorance, we adults, and our unwillingness to liberate ourselves from our true demons of traditions, cultures, customs, backward religious practices and beliefs, and scientific ignorance of human sexuality and sex are what are enabling young children to beat out their own sexuality and sex paths in a world drowning in information, pornography, alcohol, drugs and a capitalist materialist consumerist culture which places immediate pleasure above everything else.

And so, rather than ask little boys and girls what demons haunt them to indulge in the kind of sexual behaviours Doreen is worried about, she should be asking what kind of demons have caused adults to abandon their responsibilities to children in this internet age to their own sexuality and sex destruction.

There is the danger of harming blooming sexuality in children by associating their explorations and discoveries of their full being with “demons”. This has been the device most religions and backward moral teachings on human sexuality and sex have deployed. This terror tactic has clearly failed, as Doreen laments.

We must, more than 57 years after our “independence” cast away the demon of ignorance, fear and harmful ideologies (such as capitalism), cultures, customs, traditions, religious belief and practices which have prevented us as a people and country from advancing a liberating and truly fully human sexuality and sex education, culture and skilling. Our failure to do so is reflected in the ever-diminishing age at which our children enter the bad adult sex arena!

In my life, I have struggled with the demon of my ignorance of my human sexuality and sex, I am not sure how much victory I have secured. I know how much I have been harmed, and harmed others. This is a story for another day.

Do have a delicious healthy sexy Merry Christmas, and a Happy sexually liberating 2022!

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