A WORRYING GENERATION IS BORN

EVERY generation of adults today appears to worry that the next generation of youth is in trouble.
This is because the perception of young people today is so different, with multifarious theories as to why the mental health of the newest generation is slipping, compared with previous standards.
Many news headlines in newspapers or TV and Radio often seem to confirm these widespread concerns and sadly Zambia is no exception.
Take this man who witnessed the stabbing of a Lusaka young man at a Chinese market in Lusaka’s Longacres area by a fellow youth, and later picked both the stabber and the victim to UTH where the victim unfortunately passed.
This is a true pointer that if such behavior problems of the kind seen in our youths today continue, they can create other challenges which the government of the day will find hard to solve.
Other schools of thought however argue that such children who more frequently engage in aggressive behaviors become hardcore criminals by their 30s and significantly lower status occupations by their mid-40s.
We condemn this type of behaviour among our youths and the family of the slain Sebastian Lungu should indeed be shocked that his own friends, who ate and played with him could take his life in that barbarous manner.
“It is sad that the people we cooked for and fed have turned-around and stabbed us in the back by murdering my brother, first cousin to slain Sebastian Lungu,” Naomi Mushanga cries.
And John Chimba, who was found at the mourning house says that he had earlier stopped the fight and asked the boys to go in separate directions but for some unknown reasons, the two suspects allegedly followed Sebastian.
“After that, I was certain that the fight had ended, my two friends and I decided to leave JCS because the place had too many unruly youngsters. To my dismay, as I drove out I found the fight had shifted to outside with, the security officers there just watching helplessly with other people cheering instead of stopping it.
From the above it is more than clear that it may be worth a more objective look to examine the assumption that child behavioral problems are worse than ever in Zambia.
But in 20-year-old Sebastian’s case it is probably more outrageous that he could lose life at the hands of his friends who used to frequent his parents’ home.
To imagine that Sebastian’s attackers even had the cheek to stab him in the neck using pieces of a broken bottle is totally despicable.
Truly Sebastian has been described as a fine young man who did not deserve to die at the hands of his friends.
“We know very well those boys who stabbed him. They would come here and play with Sebastian in his bedroom here at our family house. We cooked for them, they ate and did whatever they wanted because we treated them as family members as they were close to my brother but it’s painful that they turned against him,” says Naomi, sister of Sebastian.
As if that was not bad enough Sebastian has left behind an 8 months pregnant woman who rightly wants the law to take its course.
When all is said and done, it is only the law that will determine the fate of the suspects, because under the law, one is innocent until proved guilty.