Youths responsible for creating the future

WHILE the challenges facing the youth of today are far different from those faced by the parents and, in many cases, their grandparents during the liberation war, in essence they are the same, creating a better country and better society through a combination of a lot of individual efforts.

There are other similarities between the present young adults and those who fought, and won, the liberation war.

Those young people were trained, with the training going far beyond just how to use and maintain firearms and other weapons, and they were equipped with those firearms and weapons so they would be effective.

These days the training covers many areas, peaceful and productive areas, and the Second Republic has opened many opportunities so that young people as they embark on their adult lives can gain access to the essential needs.

There is one difference, that the young people in the liberation forces were under military discipline and the modern youth are expected to develop and maintain the necessary self-discipline, but perhaps the difference is not that vast since the liberation forces tended to fight in small groups, were exceptionally reliant on the civil population and so had to have a high level of self-discipline so they did not fail.

President Mnangagwa brought up some of these similarities in his address on National Youth Day on Wednesday, linking the drive for development and growth in the third decade of the 21st century with the liberation drive in the 1960s and 1970s.

Both largely involve young people, often in very responsible positions; both require a dedication; both require some very hard work; and most importantly both require a vision of the sort of Zimbabwe they want to achieve and pass on to the next generations.

The President cast his eyes back fairly briefly, since young people like to concentrate on what is happening now, what the challenges are today, and because, in one of the great virtues of youth, want to know how tomorrow turns out: they look to the future not the past.

But it is still worthwhile to note that the past has lessons, and biggest lesson is that major difficulties can be overcome if people are prepared to make the effort, can pull in the same sort of direction if they are united, and can win through if they maintain the sort of self-discipline and practical hope that this effort needs to be effective.

One of the major challenges facing the youth of today is a drug culture, and a ready availability of drugs.

More dangerously there is a social environment where many youths come under social pressure to indulge, and where there can be an attitude of “why not”.

Youths might feel the older generations, like their parents and like their President, are just moralising and not dealing with the realities of the present.

But they are, largely because they have seen in the past what happened when young people they knew and were at school with and lived next door to, then opted out and almost destroyed themselves, and largely because the older generations have to deal with the mess created when youths do opt out.

The authorities are making a major effort to defeat that drug culture, as the growing number of dealers arrested and jailed shows, but that just makes it easier for the only really effective solution, that no one buys or wants to buy drugs and to opt out. So we are back to the need for youths to opt in to something a lot more positive.

As a nation we are continually recreating Zimbabwe, and as individuals we are continually creating our own futures and all those futures will be combining to form the Zimbabwe in 10 years time, in 20 years time, in fifty years time.

Governments are limited in this process, and their main job is to make it easier for people to create a decent future for themselves and thus for their country.

They can also set targets, but most of those targets are to provide the building blocks and the opportunities that individuals then have to take up and use.

Even Vision 2030 is largely a beacon for those who plan and those who deploy the resources and make it possible for individuals, who might not think about a vision very often but are more concerned with their own private future, to achieve the goal.

And when we talk about 50 years, we are talking about the sort of country that today’s youths will have created, and they need occasionally to think how they will feel in their old age when they look back.

We hope that they will be as proud of their achievements over the next half century as those who joined the liberation and nationalist struggle in the colonial era feel about what they achieved.

This is the challenge that faces every generation, every person, to live a worthwhile and productive life taking up the opportunities that are available and then making the right decisions.

That is how we create, between us, a worthwhile future, how we overcome the challenges that face us as individuals and as a nation.

And that is why President Mnangagwa devoted the bulk of his address to the present and the future, rather than the past. The achievements of the past, and the mistakes of the past, are known.

The future is the new country and is created every second as we wrestle with the present.

What we need to do is wrestle with our present, to make sure that every action will lead to a better life for us, our families, our communities and our nation.