June 16 hoopla masks how we neglect the future of SA’s youth

ON Tuesday, Youth Day, politicians of all stripes will fan out across the country and, in-between exuberant song and dance, wax lyrical about what they’re doing for young people.

In some instances, the odd beast will meet its ancestors. And a good time will be had by all.

Everybody will go home pleased with themselves. But nothing will happen. It’s a spectacle that repeats itself every year. The betrayal of the youth continues.

Youth Day commemorates the events that began in Soweto on June 16 1976 and proceeded to paralyse the schooling system in black areas countrywide.

It was a watershed that plunged South Africa into its worst crisis since the Sharpeville massacre and, in retrospect, may have sounded the death knell for apartheid.

The events were triggered by the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools. But 40 years later, the language issue is yet to be resolved satisfactorily.

In the mid-’70s, pupils soon realised that getting their way on the language issue meant taking on the entire edifice of apartheid.

Ultimately, that also meant the emasculation of black parents, pushed aside by children baffled and frustrated by their seniors’ more accommodating attitude towards the system.

That youthful vigour introduced a new dynamism into the struggle against apartheid, at home and in exile. The townships became ungovernable. To support the government or its institutions was to court danger, even death. Education could wait.

Fleeing from an increasingly frightened government, some of the young people landed in the grateful embrace of liberation movements in exile. Their enthusiasm roused these organisations from their slumber.

But their impatience was not always welcomed. It cost some their lives.

The exiles are back home now. Many are doing well. But most have joined the ranks of the unemployed — a familiar story in the new South Africa.

Youth Day is not only the commemoration of the role played by that generation in the birth of our new society. It is also a commitment by our new society to do everything possible to mould our children to become our betters, to equip them with the tools to create a more just and harmonious society.

It is a journey that all generations have to traverse, each preparing the next to do better.

The verdict so far, though, is that we’re not making a good job of it. Many young people are still without the skills or wherewithal to take advantage of the new opportunities. The old colour divide is making way for an ominous class divide.

The political changes in South Africa coincided with or were precipitated by changes elsewhere.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the unravelling of the Soviet Union, for instance, removed the anticommunist umbrella under which the apartheid state had taken refuge.

Even more significant are the technological advances that have transformed the modern world.

Apart from the riots, 1976 was the belated arrival of TV in South Africa, dubbed “the devil’s own box”, which, according to then minister of posts and telegraphs Albert Hertzog, would surreptitiously disseminate communism and immorality to unsuspecting South Africans.

The microprocessor, the foundation of all computers, was introduced in the ’70s, and the invention by black American Henry Thomas Sampson of the gamma-electric cell, the basis of today’s cellphones, was patented in 1971.

These advances ushered in a new world just as South Africa was crawling out of its apartheid cocoon.

It’s a world the new generation understands and revels in. It is, after all, in their fingertips. But it’s a world that’s foreign to their parents.

How do parents teach children to navigate a world that is politically and technologically so different from the one they grew up in?

They can’t apply the rod either, as per the diktat of the new rulers. Some parents feel helpless and almost ineffectual. It’s as if there’s a world out there that’s more in charge or influential in bringing up their children than themselves.

But the greatest disappointment has to be our education system. It is failing our society, churning out young people utterly unprepared to take advantage of opportunities their parents could only dream of.

Instead of grandiose utterances at political rallies, how about something more creative, such as a community service programme for young people?

After matric, they could spend a year doing charity work in rural areas, in the homes of the aged or the infirm. The state could then guarantee free tertiary education to all successful participants.

Apart from exposing them to their country and the myriad challenges it faces, this would infuse good values, character and purpose in young people now loitering aimlessly in the streets.

That could be the hallmark or makings of a stable society.