It’s not so long ago since I left school so I need to ask, who comes up with these ideas? In the era when we have half-baked teachers churning out students who can’t multiply 8 by 8, we are busy trying to ride high on the moral pedestal? What is random drug testing anyway? What will they test for, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, shisha? Or our students are ‘sophisticated’ enough to gain access to cocaine or heroin? 

I will start with the law; we are presumed innocent of any wrong doing unless the court proves us guilty. So, what does that tell us? Our children will be judged by their appearance and socialising tendencies and subjected to countless and random tests. How this will help a school improve the school’s overall performance is something that I don’t understand. 

Schools are supposed to teach students about the dangers of drugs and not testing them. It is bad enough that some of our hospitals are ill-equipped so how will schools get equipment to test students? By the way, how many schools even have proper medical facilities like a sick bay for example? 

In life, we meet people with different characters but that doesn’t mean that we all have to do the same thing. This is when innocent people will be subjected to senseless drug tests just because they’ve been seen talking to a suspected drug user. The notion of privacy prohibits unreasonable searches and embodies the principle that merely belonging to a certain group is not a sufficient reason for a search, even if many members of that group are suspected of illegal activity. 

Thus, for example, even if it were true that most men with long hair are drug users, the police would have a field day stopping all long haired men to search them for drugs. People have a tendency of assuming that anyone with dreadlocks is into drugs or a guy wearing studs is a "thug”. When Kenya’s current Chief Justice was being vetted, he passed highly but had one problem; he had earrings and the vetting committee frowned on him. Before he explained that it had something to do with religion, they all looked at him as an adult stuck in adolescence. 

If we allow random drug tests in schools, we shouldn’t be surprised if they start virginity checks and for those students suspected to be gay.....well, you can tell how the test will go.