How youth can be prosperous
It all depends on us to employ better approaches in ensuring a brighter future
WITH the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, graduates literally begging for jobs, millions of young people living below the bread line, and unprecedented rates of criminality among young people, the future looks bleak for South Africa’s youth.
During Youth Month, while we can commemorate sacrifices that gave rise to a more just and unified present, celebrations somehow seem inappropriate. We should rather commit to finding real solutions that can address real problems.
Firstly, we need to assume an internal locus of control. Prescribing to young people that they are, owing to factors outside of their control, oppressed regardless of circumstance, is the biggest disservice inflicted by post-apartheid South Africa and its institutions. Nothing can be more disempowering than to believe that you are inherently oppressed or that your failures and successes are owed directly to factors outside your locus of control.
Individuals with a strong internal locus of control believe events in their life derive primarily from their own actions. People with a strong external locus of control tend to praise or blame external factors.
South African schools, universities, and other institutions of the state have set themselves the task of raising post-apartheid generations with an immense external locus of control; this quality of mind dictating that they should blame external factors (except the government, of course) such as institutionalised oppression for their failure.
There is certainly merit in the idea that external factors and circumstances can suppress individual prosperity. However, relentlessly steeping young people into the mindset that they are, by virtue of their identities, doomed for failure, and that they may hold accountable anything and anyone, save themselves, for their actions produces a generation incapable of attaining the independence, industriousness and diligence necessary to prosper (or, at the very least, survive).
To salvage the sinking South African ship, young and influential leaders will need to introduce a mindset that speaks against circumstantial victimhood, and that helps us to fully grasp that we are products of our own choices and actions. This internal locus of control is an empowering and liberating quality of mind that enables leaps towards the independence, self-accountability and willpower.
Secondly, we should focus on the common enemies – poverty and unemployment – instead of separating the “good guys” from the “bad guys”. This identity politics-centred approach precludes the crucial co-operation and pooling together of skills and knowledge necessary to arrive at practical solutions that may confront poverty and unemployment. In fact, when issues of identity are positioned at the paramount of solution-seeking discussions and endeavours, limited time and energy remain to find real solutions for real problems.
In many cases, when young people discuss problems and solutions, we are less concerned with the possible solution than we are with the race or gender of those that will be implementing the solution. Everything is about power and privilege, and the “oppressed” (good guys) must be at the helm of the solution-seeking endeavours while the “privileged” (bad guys) must take a back seat.
Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury, in South Africa, of evaluating contributions and solution-seeking endeavours through the lens of identity. We have no choice but to embrace every possible solution, every conveyance of knowledge and every contribution of skill – whatever the identity of the source of it might be.
There can be no reservations when we seek and implement solutions. The youth’s enemies are poverty and unemployment, and, in our endeavours to defeat them, conflict and fundamentalist approaches regarding race and gender are diversions.
Thirdly, we must personally invest in the education of others. The state has proven it is not interested in investing in the education of children. South Africa ranks 75th out of a possible 76 in a ranking table of global education systems, as drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2015.
In 2017, The Economist declared South Africa’s schools are among the most inept in the world. We know we cannot rely on the government to invest in the education of our youth, but this state of affairs should be a call to action rather than a demoralising reality. The empowered youth: graduates, corporate workers and especially those pursuing degrees, must turn their attention to the vast disempowered segment – the school drop-outs, the unemployed and those in school who have been set up for failure by the current state-school system.
We will have to find a way to bring the empowered and disempowered into contact, and establish sustainable processes of knowledge sharing, mentoring and opportunity multiplication. This does not require vast amounts of capital, but it does require facilitation by institutions for education such as universities and invested companies. Granting tax incentives for companies that host these programmes is the least the state can do.
Tertiary-education institutions must establish sustainable programmes that send students out in surrounding communities to aid educators at schools. If monitored, students can be skilful tutors while universities can incentivise involvement in these programmes by granting student fee discounts to participants. This scheme would, incidentally, also address issues of unaffordable student fees.
If we can create a culture of sharing knowledge and multiplying opportunities in the most deprived corners of our society, then we will have engaged in true transformation and a unified Today.