Youths must demand greater stake in national resources

President Mugabe said this week that the problem of youth unemployment in Africa was a manifestation of inequitable distribution of resources.
“Yet if managed well, this youth represents Africa’s best development asset over the next decades,” said President Mugabe.
Speaking on Zimbabwe, the President said the country was addressing this challenge through support to small and medium enterprises and indigenisation and economic empowerment and promoting the use of information communication technologies. We agree with the President that poor resource allocation is a major cause of unemployment and that this should be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Though it is largely acknowledged that SMEs are the engine of growth for many economies, support for the youth to gain a foothold in this sector has not been satisfactory. It is important for a deliberate programme to groom youths to start businesses that are grown so that over time they graduate into bigger formal businesses with yet another crop starting the SMEs programme so that we engender an entrepreneurial culture.
It is quite unfortunate that the job-seeking mentality still rules supreme in our economy hence the focus on the challenges of unemployment. However, the high levels of unemployment represent human resources that are waiting to be deployed to areas of competence hence the need to build capacity in our people and turn the curse into a blessing.
Indigenisation is a programme that is taking the present generation to a promised destiny hence the need not to leave the youth behind in its implementation. It is important that our youth have access to the means of production and at this time this is quite a challenge since they cannot do that through inheritance as their parents also have no access to such resources.
It is against this background that we need to capacitate our youth and give them focus in terms of the national vision that we are not looking only for investors from other countries to start businesses here and rescue us from poverty but should also aim to own major resources and be masters of our own destiny.
We know how the West underdeveloped Africa by looting our mineral resources and the trend appears to be continuing in much of Africa due to a lack of capacity to manage our own resources so that we haul ourselves out of poverty and meet our development goals. With that background in mind, we should not allow a situation whereby resource distribution is skewed even within a country.
People in a particular province should benefit from resources in their area, in as much as the resources should be equitably distributed to uplift the lives of the people in the whole country. This should apply to the diamonds in Marange, the tourism product in Victoria Falls, the timber and coal in Matabeleland North and the platinum in Mashonaland West.
We are pleased that the Government has stepped up the community share ownership scheme and it is our hope that this will be rolled out throughout the country so that everyone has control over resources in their areas. Firms investing in provinces should ensure that they draw the bulk of their unskilled labour from those areas to aid the development agenda of their areas of operation. The mismatch between our human resources and the demand for such resources by our businesses is termed unemployment, though a refocus on our curriculum to job creation would see us demanding an equitable share of resources so that we sustain our business operations. The future lies in the youths, the ICT generation that can make the most of information technology and the availability of technologies that would have taken ages to reach this corner of the world were it not for ICTs.
While the Government has put in place policies on SMEs, land ownership and indigenisation, it is us who will shape the allocation of the resources to give meaning to the intention of the Government to ensure access to resources through making a demand for greater access. And the youths are better placed to make that demand, and the higher the unemployment figure the greater the justification for more resources to facilitate productive activities to create jobs and grow the economy.