BY GRACE NAKATO
UGANDA: What a week this has been! I am glad I am not a parent with a child in campus.
There seems to be an entrepreneurial virus that has taken over our students’ brains.
It seems the days of hustling by doing course work for cash are over, and we are using natural resources for a quick buck.
Campus has always been known as the place the youth go and “discover themselves”. Your children leave the comforts and restrictions of home and enter the land of booze and freedom.
Most of the youth who make it to campus are not prepared mentally or emotionally for this Nirvana, which has no rules or strictures in dress code, bedtime or socialising cliques.
Moral decay
They are free to do all those things that their parents are guaranteed to kill them for thinking about; add a dash of technology and peer pressure to this melting pot of hormones and the result is moral decay.
Tabloids broke the “Porn for tuition” story and splashed photos of campus students in various compromising positions in hostels, campus grounds and bathrooms. Apparently, there is a craze on campus, and the various local universities are competing for who has made the most porn videos.
We jumped on our moral high horses in social media and on the airwaves, and discoursed on poor parenting and the lack of morals in today’s society.
In the background, we gorged ourselves on the leaked videos on Facebook and Whatsapp.
Popularity
I pity the parents of the headlining ‘stars’, one of whom is actually a doctor at Mulago Hospital (KNH of Uganda) and his daughter was quite proud of her sudden popularity.
The saddest part is that she will probably find herself expelled because the Uganda Christian University frowns upon premarital sex, and do not offer Drama and Theatrics as one of their courses.
We have long memories, and the Internet is not kind. This means her momentary lapse in judgment will probably rear its ugly head a few years down the line.
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Probably when she is in some prominent position or married to a man of influence.
There are rumours that the source of all these bulletins is a website administered by students from Makerere Business School.
With Sh400, you get access to the site dubbed “Back to School Magazine”. The website administrator has issued a disclaimer stating that they are not a porn site.
Showcase
They do not pay anyone to make porn videos, and students are the ones who use the site as a market place to showcase themselves targeting “white fellas”.
The website claims to be a channel to enable students survive the harsh financial policies of the universities and have so far helped more than 400 students get tuition.
The aspiring superstars reveal their names, ages and are proud to share their ‘achievements’. Members can even order up and have their fantasy delivered like fast-food.
Bandwagon
The web members are using this channel for fun, for cash or for playmates.
Techies should jump on this bandwagon, and create trackers that will enable parents to monitor their offsprings’ activities and whereabouts, providing a live-feed on the parents’ phone or computer