Are youth being equipped to rule?

IT’S BEEN more than 20 years since the birth of South Africa’s “democracy”.

I put the word democracy in inverted commas because it is such an ambiguous term, loosely used to cover everything else that goes on in this country.

I like to call this so-called fairness and equality “consensus”, not democracy.

You see, if we are going to talk about “democracy”, then we don’t know what that word means: we are not free and there is nothing fair or equal about this country, racially, politically, socially and otherwise.

So our leaders reached a consensus on their Gumbaya concert. The main question, though, is the limited influence the youth has in national and political institutions. Why is this? How can it be changed?

First, who are “the youth”? According to South African law, youth is any person younger than 35 and a citizen of this country. Now why as the youth do we have limited access to these political institutions?

One: it is because of apathy; the laziness and lack of interest from our youth is rather appalling. Sometimes you find that a certain place has unlimited resources and information, but people do not want to take the initiative to find out what is what, and I sometimes fall into the same trap.

And two: as much as we lack the fire or the interest to be involved, the people above us are failing us as well.

Let’s start in high school, a place deemed to start shaping your life. How many high schools have an active Cosas branch? How many pupils even know about Cosas and what it does, and those who know, what are they doing about it?

Then we move to tertiary institutions, our universities, FETs (technical and vocational education and training places) and colleges. These institutions have so much power and influence.

There is student politics being practised at SRC level and in many student political parties: the South African Students Congress (Sasco), the Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania (Pasma), EFF and the Democtratic Alliance Student Organisation (Daso).

Most of these student movements have mother bodies or allies with the upper structures. Those are perfect opportunities for the youth to be involved, but only a few end up doing that because the people on the ground and in upper structures mainly do not care.

Another thing is that we like being spoon- fed, therefore we end up missing out on things happening around us. We are so ignorant about things and that leads to lack of understanding the functions of these political institutions at our disposal.

I am the first to admit that until recently, because of my laziness and ignorance, I did not know there was even a provincial office of the public protector.

Lack of resources and information in our surroundings is also a big problem. We come from different places and backgrounds, places that did not have the kind of information that would be useful to you when you got to bigger cities, so you do not know where to start or what to do with the information you had.

Then there’s the trend of abuse of power and misinformation, because it is no secret that the people in power abuse their power to their benefit especially when they see you are hungry for information.

There are organisations that deal with such issues though. We are the future The system will have to change and our 20-something-year-old selves will have to step up to the plate.

The real question is: Are we equipped for it?