Army won't be cowed: Grenadiers' slow march and marijuana don't go together
Opinion
By
Ted Malanda
| Nov 30, 2025
This week, Kenyans on social media laughed themselves senseless, amused that the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) kicked out 1,500 recruits from army training school for walking into a military establishment with traces of marijuana in their veins.
The army, they giggled, would quickly run out of recruits to train if they insisted on enlisting only marijuana-free lads because, hey, weed smoking is now more widespread than religion among Kenyan youths.
The herb, it appears, is no longer confined within school dropouts, the villains who hang around bus termini and goons who disrupt funerals at the behest of politicians. It has become an academic accelerant for hundreds of thousands of young scholars in our universities. The kids aren’t smoking tobacco – thanks to stringent government warnings and laws. They puff the big one.
Other gigglers went further. They argued that marijuana and other narcotics have always been an integral part of soldering. It would be unthinkable, they cried, for a man whose head is not addled with opium to race head-long into enemy fire to get his head blown off, or to blow off the heads of people he had never met or quarreled with.
Some went on to add that if a national marijuana test was conducted, the results would stun the nation. All sorts of places, including parliament which makes laws, the “disciplined” services that enforce them, and the judiciary which flings bhang smokers into jail, would blink red.
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The army, of course, knows this. But one would be high to dream that the KDF will slacken rules to allow weed puffers into the fold just because everyone is puffing away. Recruits can pick up the habit after training, but arrive for enlistment with smoke wafting out their ears? Hell no. Recruits? About-turn. Scram.
See, armies all over the world are about tradition. To this day, most armies in the Commonwealth still peacock to the Grenadier’s Last March in honour of the “Sovereign’s birthday” – a practice dating back to 1748 when King George II was the reigning monarch in Great Britain.
Even Ugandan and Tanzanian armies who march to the goosestep because of their country’s flirtation with Marxism spare a moment time and again to salute the Sovereign’s birthday. And kids reckon they can strut into the army training school with bangi in their heads?
You want to puff weed easy, lads? Join politics.