It has been ear-piercing that sons and daughters of the rich people who muchly depend on their fathers’ or mothers’ wealth and do not go out to face survival challenges are the ones incapable of doing anything on their own, but now, with city life where breakfast, lunch and supper remain the burden of the owner of the house one stays in, the whole lot has also involved sons and daughters of the people of all classes.
It is an obligation of the parents to raise, educate, care, protect and train you on how to cope with dangers of life but as a child whose future is predictable, you still need to go out independently to work as a start to standing on your own feet. Among some of the things that are comfortably enjoyed but are somehow embarrassing are your parent’s reputation, wealth, leadership and many more that their presence with you denies your competence and question it that “why not you as a competent young person to achieve them at your time”.
Competency is gained best in exposure and interactions with different types of people in a funny style that you always need to become a much-time listener rather than a talker so as to drain much of what you need from those people, but take it from me honestly that it takes months or even years for other types of people to say what a young person can jot down in his/her notebook, and because of that, precautions are to be taken to avoid accumulating garbage information in your vacuum of competence.
Training to become competent starts at infantry age until death, that means a big part of it lies at the hands of the parents during childhood as a child’s mind modelling in accordance with the shape a modeler desires to see in future. Rurally, a father trains up his children on how to cultivate crops, weed, harvest and make good use of them until another cultivating season is reached.
Some people who have cultivated more lands and harvested them well can buy cattle and other valuable materials so as to show children that competence to cultivate can also provide essential needs for survival. Training young people, on the other hand, to become competent to hunt and bring home wild animals’ meat also falls under one of the economical approaches to delay consumption of crops in the stores.
What then brings all this hindsight? It is life in towns where a well-established house of a working class is shamelessly occupied by over thirty people whose only jobs are to monitor whether or not there is smoke in the kitchen and to create chaos by gossiping and propagandizing words among politicians of the same area so as to win the heart of the owner of the house to allow them stay for long.
It is becoming incorporated in young people’s lives now that they are motivated to defame other people so badly that the last resorts are not far from physical violence, and once this stage is reached, it will culminate a spirit of hatred among members of the same origin. This motivation makes young people lazy to search for jobs as it comes without sweat, but with curse or even death if the person being defamed decides first to deal with them as a means of wanting to get whoever sends them.
Not only that, there are lot of things that encourage dependency, among them are sugar mummies and daddies, open bill on two weekend days, over-praising in expectation, and the most severe one is the uncle job which needs no qualifications but servantry.
A sugar mummy or daddy carries the burden of providing for the loved ones, an open bill on two weekend days instils hope in dependents to starve in five working days, expecting to become too much satisfied in compensation on Saturdays and Sundays, an over-praising in expectation makes a person being praised think of no other thing to give in turn other than money to encourage him/her do more.
Meanwhile uncle jobs go contrary with education as they do not need qualifications, all it needs is to rally behind your uncle unceasingly until he gets a job, and then you automatically become what you want to become in his office by the virtue of uncledom or whatever term it may be.
The author is a medical student, University of Juba.