My brother Dukes, as we refer to him at home, will be turning 20 next month. At the beginning of the year, he quit school. He was a grade nine pupil at Makovongo High School at Hatshama Village in Giyani. At home we’ve always been convinced that he is using dagga. I suspect the problem is more than that. I believe he is an addict and may be in an urgent need for rehabilitation.
My search for drugs treatment centre in Giyani has yielded shocking revelations. I did not only discover that Giyani has no drug rehabilitation centre, but I found out that the entire province has got none. “Until June this year (2015), Limpopo had no drug rehabilitation centre,” Tlangelani Makhuvele, Substance Abuse Coordinator for Giyani Sub-district says. “The newly built treatment centre in Seshego, Polokwane (Seshego Treatment Centre) has not started admitting patients, so we are bound to send our patients to Mpumalanga Province.”
When I visited Elaine Africa, a 35 Year old recovering drug addict from Klipsruit West in Soweto, I was jealous of her story. She is a mother of five that has recovered from using drugs, after six weeks of treatment at the Dr Fabian and Florence Ribeiro Treatment Centre in Pretoria. “I was smoking crystal-meth (tik), cat and mandrax,” Africa says. When listening to her story, I wished Dukes was based in Gauteng so that he could easily access the same facility for his addiction.
I’m not that guy who groans and moans at everything that the government and the civil organisations do for South African communities, but when Yershen Pillay, Chairperson of the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) addressed the youth on the official launch of Youth Month 2015 at the Hector Peterson Memorial in Soweto, I nearly lost my mind. Do not get me wrong. I am not against NYDA’s efforts to launch a youth office at Eldorado Park to deal with the evils of drug abuse in the area. I understand the scourge with a total of 4026 patients treated at Gauteng treatment centres during the period January – June 2013. However, drug problem is not only a Gauteng problem, but a countrywide challenge and rural areas are not exempt from the problem. Therefore rural towns and villages should also be prioritised when government and NGO’s launch youth drug centres of this kind.
Makhuvele says when her team visit school around Giyani, they discover many young children with sings of addiction. “Substance abuse is a common problem in this area, but dagga is the most common substance used by school children,” Makhuvele says. The Limpopo Department of Social Development in partnership with the University of Limpopo has conducted a study titled “Substance use, misuse and abuse amongst the youth in Limpopo Province”. Findings from this study show that the most commonly used substances are Dagga (49%), Inhalants (39%), bottled wine (32%), home-brewed beer (30%), and commercially brewed beer (greater than 4% Alc/Vol) used by 54.8% of the youth. With the statistics above one can see the urgent need for a rehabilitation centre in rural areas.
According to Africa, rehabilitation is very important for every drug addict. “If I did not go to a rehab, I would have relapsed, because rehab has got some basic foundations where you learn about yourself, your behaviour and your self-esteem.
“Furthermore, you learn how to overcome anger, triggers and cravings and boredom, because boredom is the biggest trigger that causes people to relapse,” she says.
I can only imagine my brother trying to overcome his habits on his own, but without institutions such as the ones that Africa went to, it will be very difficult for him to quit, especially because he lives in a country where drug consumption is twice the world norm and, where 15% of South Africa’s population has a drug problem. The recently-released United Nations World Drug Report had named South Africa as one of the drug capitals of the world. In addition, the abuse of alcohol and usage of dagga has led to the country to being one of the top ten narcotics and alcohol abusers in the world.
Therefore there seem to be a special need for youth centres such as the one NYDA is to launch in Eldorado Park. However, the focus should also shift to rural towns and villages as they are not excluded to the drug problem South Africa is currently facing. Should the government and NGOs start applying the same commitment to rural areas like they do to Gauteng townships, it would ensure that Africa and Dukes get equal opportunities regarding drug rehabilitation to the betterment of their lives.
Mandla Masingi is a senior researcher with the SABC Research & Policy Analysis Unit in Johannesburg.
– By Mandla Masingi , SABC Research and Policy Analysis Unit
