DESPERATE MEASURES

Kgosi Ontiretse Godirilweng of Mabuo village in the Serowe West constituency is worried that unemployment is leading her people into prostitution because of empty stomachs.Godirilweng said this week that the youth in his village are idling with nothing to keep them busy especially those who did not do well in school. So bad is the situation that his people are not hiding from him what they do at night.“I have been complaining about lawlessness in the village, they drink, sniff drugs and do the unthinkable. When they are brought before me to answer for their crimes, they simply tell me that they are hungry or that they were under the influence of alcohol,” a worried Godirilweng said.He added that the situation is made worse by trucks that pass through his village on a daily basis en-route to the nearby Tlou Energy mine.“What women do is throw themselves at those men hoping that they will give them a few Pulas. Some even travel with truck men to the mine, leaving behind their children with no one to care for them,” Kgosi said.Further, he said that children are now fighting their elderly parents for their monthly old age pension allowances. The little that the oldies receive from government is what families survive on.However, the money is so little and cannot cover basic needs of parents and their children.Kgosi does not think that his people are lazy. He told The Midweek Sun that they are interested in doing business but businesses thrive when there is a market. They realise that there is no circulation of money in his village, everybody is broke and that means businesses cannot survive.He said it is not easy to even get a ‘piece job’ just to clean a yard or do somebody’s laundry. Those are things only popular in cities, not in Mabuo.Kgosi is convinced that because they are in the outskirts of Serowe village, they have been forgotten. He appeals to government to make a plan for them.“I am pleading with government to help take us out of poverty, my people are perishing. Mabuo is the last village of Serowe West, from here all you will see are farms.“At those farms only foreigners have been hired and my children go there to sleep with those men in exchange for food and money,” Godirilweng said.A group of women who spoke to The Midweek Sun at Mabuo village this week said that there is no time for morals at Mabuo. They said that most women do what they do because it is the available option to beating hunger.“O tla shia o tla ja eng? We do anything to beat hunger here, as long as we are not trafficked, we do not mind,” they said.

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DESPERATE MEASURES