Mdantsane matrics get alcohol warning as Eastern Cape liquor data shows 47% have drunk
The Dr Noma Mbeki Foundation took its first Anti-Pens Down event to Grade 12 learners in the township, saying substance abuse among young people is a national problem.
About 47 percent of learners in the Eastern Cape have consumed alcohol, according to figures from the Eastern Cape Liquor Board reported by SABC News.
The number sits behind a new schools programme that reached Grade 12 learners in Mdantsane this week. The Dr Noma Mbeki Foundation held the first of its planned Anti-Pens Down events for pupils drawn from schools around the township.
Noma Mbeki, who founded the organisation, said the choice of Mdantsane was deliberate. She said the foundation wanted to reach poorer learners first, because its own observations suggested that most of the deaths and incidents it saw were concentrated among households in the lower living standards measures, roughly LSM one to LSM three. Those bands cover township residents and lower to middle income earners.
She said Mdantsane was the starting point and that the programme would be extended to other areas that are similarly cut off from services and opportunity. More events are planned, she said, both in the region and in the rest of the country.
Mbeki described the drinking among young people as a problem on the scale of a pandemic. She said it was not confined to children in the Eastern Cape.
What learners said they took from it
Pupils who attended said the value of the day lay in being handed ways to deal with pressure at home and among their friends.
One of them, Esona Mhlanganisi, said the information on offer was a defence against ending up on the street. She said young people who are unable to accept a parent’s refusal, or who are afraid to speak up, can end up leaving home, and that some turn to substances to cope with that. She also pointed to the influence of peers. Programmes like this one, she said, exist to teach learners how to handle those situations.
Her account matches what the liquor board figure measures. The 47 percent is a prevalence estimate for learners in the province, not a count of children who drink regularly or heavily. The board’s figures do not, on the material available, break the number down by age, by district or by how often a learner drinks.
The Eastern Cape has confronted the consequences of underage drinking at venues before. The Enyobeni Tavern deaths in Scenery Park, East London, prompted a national argument about the enforcement of the law on selling alcohol to minors, and that argument is the reason the issue carries weight in the province’s schools.
The gap the programme is trying to fill
Mbeki’s foundation is not a state body and the event is not a government programme. It is a private initiative that chose a township school audience for its first outing, on the argument that prevention work reaches the learners who need it least when it is aimed at better-off schools.
That reasoning is the part of the day that carries beyond Mdantsane. The liquor board’s figure is provincial. The response described at the event was local and voluntary.
What the event did not produce, on the material available, is a plan from the provincial education department, the liquor board or any other public authority to act on the 47 percent figure, or a commitment to fund programmes of this kind at scale. No date has been given for the next event.
What is on the record is narrower and firmer. A province where roughly one learner in two has tried alcohol now has one more programme telling Grade 12 pupils how to say no, and the learners who attended said they found it useful.
Source: SABC News, 47% of Eastern Cape learners reportedly have consumed alcohol
