Focus: Who is buying school kids phones?

There has been an upsurge in the number of school kids who own mobile phones LINDA MBABAZI & STEVEN TUMUSIIME discover “He called me this morning but I was still in class. He wanted to see me quickly but I had a lesson to attend to,” says one student who couldn’t reveal her name. The female student is about 17 years old and is in senior two. Traveling a commuter taxi to Kabuga, she complains bitterly that many men call her on her mobile. She then tells her colleague how one day she feigned sickness to meet her boyfriend. But meeting her boyfriend turned out to be a sour event. Her mother had paid an abrupt visit to the school also. She was told her daughter was sick and had returned home. But at home, the family waited Jane (not her real name) in vain. Days after, it was discovered that Jane, after receiving his call, had gone to check on her boyfriend. Today, it is very common to find teenagers in school with mobile phones. There is no crime perhaps for owning a phone but the phones are not given to the kids by their parents. Tokens of affection A mini survey by Sunday Times indicates that the majority of those who own phones are girls. Their parents have jobs but even they cannot own such expensive phones. “Boyfriends buy them phones. They send SMS to their friends or beep them,” a senior five student from Groupe Scholaire de Gahini explains. There was an operation last week and teachers at Gahini ‘arrested’ 45 female students with mobile phones. “The management kept them. They will be given to them back when the holiday begins,” our source adds. Affecting performance Lately when results are released, girls’ overall performance has gone down. Statistics from Rwanda National Examination Council indict that in 2003/4 performance for girls in Senior Three fell from 33.27 per cent in that academic year to 32.43 per cent. But in the same year, the boys registered a general improvement at both levels, with a shift from 66.73 per cent in the academic year 2003/4 up to 67.58 per cent in 2005.Some teachers attributed this trend to lack of concentration on the side of the girls. Justus Tumuhimbise, a teacher at Kabuga high school, says that one will find almost all girls in the school with mobile phones in the school compound. They spend more time talking to friends and arranging meetings with their boyfriends instead of reading books to increase their chances of passing. “There has been a campaign against the phones in the school where many phones were confiscated from students and mostly from girls,” Tumuhimbise reveals. Tumuhimbise says that if you want to know it clearly, you use the statistics of those who move out of the school while classes are going on. “Most of the girls will feign sickness and will appear in a seemingly terrible condition. You will not know who is sick or who is not. Some of them use substances to turn their eyes red,” says Tumuhimbise. Tumuhimbise says that you will not find boys in the line of sick students. “Do you think boys do not fall sick?” Contacts: tumusteve2008@yahoo.com or lindaonly2005@yahoo.com