Online Reporter
Today is National Youth Day with the main celebration being held in Bulawayo, and both the name of the day and venue for this year’s central celebration are important.
The day only became a public holiday under the Second Republic, and President Mnangagwa has stressed the national nature of the day from its inception.
In one sense, the choice of Bulawayo is doubly symbolic of the national nature of the holiday. While it is useful for a February holiday to choose a location where it is easy to find venues that allow gatherings if it rains, the Second Republic has been determined to rotate the main national occasions round the country to emphasise both their national nature and that all parts of Zimbabwe are included in the concept.
The main reason for a national day, and the associated public holiday, is to concentrate attention on our young people, their needs and their expectations, and to celebrate their accomplishments.
The younger generations are a majority of the population, so they are important, and the future of Zimbabwe will fairly obviously be built around what they do and what they do not do. So it is very important that what they do is productive and constructive and that they do not drift into the self-destruction of drugs and alcohol abuse.
A lot has been done since Independence and is still being done to ensure that all children have a full primary education and at least four years of secondary education. Curriculums are being adjusted to make this basic education more effective and to introduce a great deal more relevance to studies and ensure that all children, regardless of examination results, have a decent base on which to further their training and skills.
While the same post-Independence thrust saw a rapid and dramatic expansion in university and polytechnic education, this still left a lot of young people behind.
A lot of tertiary education requires in practice A-Level, although technically a very good O-Level certificate is the minimum for many non-degree diploma and higher diploma courses.
So what about the rest, the majority, of the youth. Here the Second Republic has been active with the rapid expansion of vocational training and making sure the training centres are dispersed to they are practically accessible.
Now, more is being done to measure the skills that people learn, so that future customers, and bankers, of those who set up their own businesses know who they are dealing with, and future employers have an idea of what they might be hiring.
Obviously a lot more needs to be done in this regard, to build on President Mnangagwa’s declarations that no person and no place must be left behind as Zimbabwe advances. But at least we are now headed in the right direction, and a lot more effort and attention is being directed at ensuring that there are advances.
The importance is that all young people as they leave school are now being catered for and are seeing opportunities opening up.
The creation of a dedicated Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Development and Vocational Training highlights the decisions to turn rhetoric into practical programmes with its own slice of the national budget and with officials all having their accomplishments measured in another of President Mnangagwa’s policies, that political leaders and officials all have to deliver.
A lot has been spoken about the dangers youths face, with drugs and alcohol topping many lists, and young girls in danger of forced marriages while still in their teens. Effective programmes are already in place, and being made better and expanded, to deal with these menaces. But a lot of the temptations and pressures would be dramatically reduced if all youths could get ahead and earn a reasonable income.
We have noted comments coming from parents and community leaders when investors in a particular area hire local youths where possible, or when the contractors for major infrastructure contracts hire local youths. Comments tend to centre on the fact that their young adult children are highly unlikely to be taking drugs if they are gainfully employed.
Like most developing countries Zimbabwe at the moment has a demographic dividend. The falling birth rates in recent decades, and the far lower size of the population in the past, means that the percentage of the population who are too old to work or are still children is low compared to what we see in most developed countries. We have what is known as a low theoretic dependency ratio.
With a significant majority of the population in what are seen as the working years of most people’s lives, it is essential for our development that all those in that long gap between childhood and old age are in fact productive and building the wealth of the nation as well as earning their own living and supporting their families.
This is another point that needs stressing, that we need our youth to be productive, and for that matter paying their share of taxes out of that production, if our economy is to keep growing, and that means there are national needs, as well a human needs, to making sure that every youth is equipped to be productive.
So the concentration of thought that we hope we will see through our National Youth Day is a major requirement for a better, more prosperous and more equitable Zimbabwe.
