Magoha requests senators to pass laws banning porn sites
Irene Githinji and Mutuku Mwangangi
Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha wants all pornographic sites banned amid assurances that the high number of teen pregnancies reported across the country will be interrogated.
“We want senators to help us start a movement that will shut down the pornographic sites because it is urgent and should have been done yesterday.
There is no reason why we should be having such sites open to our children at home,” said the CS yesterday, during a virtual meeting with the Senate Ad hoc Committee ON WHAT??.
At the same time, Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua has urged President Uhuru Kenyatta to set up a special taskforce to study and find solutions on alarming rates of teenage pregnancies.
Prof Magoha termed the reported numbers of teenage pregnancies, running into thousands, as outrageous and assured the ministry will get to the bottom of the matter.
“Even though I have been preaching parental engagement; I’m not sure whether that report is coming from non-governmental organisations who want to alarm us so my team will go to the root cause of this to find out,” the CS said.
He questioned whether the said pregnant girls went to report about it, noting that the schools are closed and it would be difficult to easily document the outrageous numbers
“Allow us to interrogate the issue and we will let you know whether it is true or false… it could be true it could be false but my gut feeling is that the people who are bent on teaching sex education may be using this as an opportunity to move forward their agenda,” said Magoha.
“I want to see the children that are actually pregnant; you know they may not even be there.
I am sure that pregnancy is a problem but the numbers are outrageous and it then means we are Sodom and Gomorrah…it is terrible,” he added.
Governor Mutua’s call to the President comes after National Health Survey released a damning report indicating that over 150,000 girls aged 19 and below were impregnated in the last four months, 4,000 of them being from Machakos.
He said his government has set up a special team to probe and table solutions to reverse the trend, which he described as not only shocking but unacceptable.
He said all secondary and primary school children in the county will undergo sexual education.
The governor asked religious leaders to come up with support programmes, saying that it is a national issue that requires concerted efforts.
“We need to provide an avenue to educate our girls and boys about sex education.
Sex education is important because parents are no longer talking about it at home, otherwise they will be taught by the ‘world’,” said Mutua from his Machakos office.
He also said the government should accelerate the war on drug and substance abuse, which he said was directly linked to the alarming teenage pregnancies rates.
“War on drug abuse should be taken a notch higher because our young people are meeting in parties, drinking hard liquor and smoking marijuana, popping pills almost every day which is ruining our children,” he said.
Mutua directed the County department of Education, Youth and Social services to come up with a programme on sexual education, abstinence, peer pressure and HIV/Aids to be rolled out once schools reopen.
The affected girls in Machakos are set to benefit from a social protection programme even as the concerned boys and men undergo prosecution in line with the law.
