adminLeroy Dzenga Youth Diaries
Last week, Zimbabwe hosted the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development in Victoria Falls where government officials, development partners, parliamentarians and young people from all corners of Africa discussed the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The SDGs are 17 globally agreed targets whose attainment is meant to improve the standard of living for every person living on planet earth.
The SDGs include ending poverty, reducing inequality, good health and well-being and ending hunger.
The forum’s thrust was on how science and technological ideas implemented by young people had potential to change the complexion of the world.
Anyone who has spent time in spaces where development narratives dominate must know this song.
There is doubt that nations need to harness the demographic dividend because youths form the bulk of future leaders.
Most developmental projects at the moment give specific focus to the youth. However, there is fear that this might lead to the neglect of other demographics, especially the elderly.
An elderly person is described as someone aged 65 and above.
There is a messaging flaw in developmental conversations which have tacitly made the development agenda the sole preserve of the youth.
In turn, this has created a problem where elderly persons are almost obscured and have to fight to be heard.
A presentation by Stephen Mungate, a former member of the Older Person’s Board, put into perspective how the elderly people of Zimbabwe feel.
Said to be around 900 000, our elders feel they are being sidelined on matters of policy-making and resource allocation at national, regional and global levels.
Zimbabwe in 2012 admitted to this unfortunate fact by way of enacting the Older Persons Act, paving way for the establishment of an Older Persons Board, and creation of an Older Persons Fund, among others.
This begs the question, do we need legal instruments to seek wisdom from those who have seen life unfold way before us?
The youth, on whom more focus is being directed, should take initiatives to include the elderly in programmes even if development partners exclude them.
Whenever there is a law, idea or concept whose development has been made a preserve of the youth, young people should always ask for the elderly to be included.
This will help them get experience-based insights guided by precedence and institutional memory as there is nothing really new under the sun.
The elderly, as they grow, accumulate organic knowledge which can be priceless.
Its value cannot be quantified; it would be fatal for this generation to understate the importance of the grey-haired in critical matters.
There is a joke whose essence is hard to dispute.
During the industrialisation era, it is said that there was a machine which suffered a knock.
Engineers —fresh from college — tried to fix it, but failed.
After they had tried all known conventional methods, an elderly staffer who had worked with the machine longer than all of the people at the site told them to knock on a few bolts and the machine roared back into life.
It may or may not have happened, but the moral of the story is that sometimes youths in their exuberance and academic naivety assume they are the most creative by virtue of being young.
By default, Zimbabweans were raised on the principle of unhu or ubuntu.
It is a social philosophy common in Sub-Saharan Africa that emphasises on the need to tap into the fountains of wisdom, i.e. the community’s elders.
Although this ideology prevails at a familial level, there is need to import this thinking onto bigger platforms.
In the same way there is a quota for youths on most events, there should be space for the elderly so they can provide guidance and ensure mistakes made in their youth are not repeated.
Scholar Joseph Mbele, in his paper titled “The Elder in African Society” describes the African elder as a wise, dignified and powerful figure, who keeps the culture alive and guides the young.
This is what sometimes lacks in ideas pushed by the young, an anchoring voice of reason which provides the uncomfortable but necessary question in the face of raging exuberance.
Statistics provided by Help Age Zimbabwe executive director Priscilla Gavi at an event for the elderly at the Victoria Falls SDGs summit show that in Zimbabwe, 900 000 elderly people are taking care of about 1,2 million children.
Most of these children are orphaned or are left by their relatively young parents who have left to pursue greener pastures.
This statistic shows that the elderly fit within the much favoured youths are the future conversation.
Acording to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), there are about 6,3 children in Zimbabwe.
About a fifth of that number is looked after by people over the age of 60 who are classified as older persons.
Numerically, it means in raising the future Africa repeatedly leverages, elderly people are playing a significant part.
They are doing so in the absence of strong social services.
In Zimbabwe pensioners are receiving about $240 in payouts, this is despite the fact that the cost of living has gone up over the past few months.
As the world focuses its attention on the youth, it is important that we don’t forget the elderly.
There is also need to ensure that the elderly get involved in conversations as leaving them out impacts young people negatively especially in the Zimbabwean context.
Young people should advocate for this inclusion, if not through the thirst for ideas then their thinking should be influenced by the fact that no one stays young forever.
Whichever way society treats the elderly presently will become a template on which today’s youth will be viewed when their inevitable dance with age finally happens.
Feedback: [email protected]
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter