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Farewell to a young lion whose
roar still inspires us
This week,
on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, we will
celebrate National Youth Day. All of us should join together to salute
what the youth of our country has done through history to bring our country
to where it is today.
At the same time, Youth Day will give our youth and
our country as a whole the possibility to discuss and agree on the tasks
that face our youth today, as well as our obligations as a country to
our young people.
As we prepared for our celebrations, all of us received
the shocking, unexpected and sad news that one of our compatriots who
grew into national prominence as a youth leader had passed away. I refer,
of course, to the late Peter Mokaba, Member of Parliament, member of the
National Executive Committee of the ANC and head of its Elections Department.
As we celebrate National Youth Day, we will therefore
have occasion to pay our respects to this outstanding activist for the
liberation of our people. We will draw on his contribution to familiarise
and inspire as many of our youth and people as possible with the example
he set, of selfless commitment to the realisation of the goal of a better
life for all our people.
I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute
to the late Peter Mokaba as an architect both of the organised progressive
movement in our country and the ANC Youth League. In this regard, he followed
in the footsteps of the founders of the Youth League, including Anton
Lembede, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela.
The banning of the ANC and the PAC in 1960, after the
Sharpeville Massacre, marked the beginning of a period of extreme repression
in our country. It is clear that during this period, the apartheid regime
took the decision that its survival depended on the complete and permanent
destruction of the organised movement for national liberation.
It was in this situation of states of emergency, mass
arrests, the torture, imprisonment and exile of thousands of freedom fighters
and the silencing of all dissent through open state terror, that the ANC
Youth League and the African Students Association were destroyed as organised
formations.
Being the vanguard organisations of the progressive
youth movement, their destruction also meant the demise of this movement.
Nevertheless, the young activists that served in the ranks of these organisations
of the Congress Movement, such as Barney Pityana, were later to play an
important role in the birth and leadership of the Black Consciousness
Movement (BCM).
Later, in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto Uprising,
the youth were to rejoin the mass struggle for liberation in their millions,
building on the work that had been done by the BCM to re-energise and
reactivise our youth and people to defeat the campaign of terror imposed
on our country and people by the apartheid regime. After the banning of
the BCM organisations in 1977, the activists and leaders of these organisations
turned decisively towards the historic traditions and organisations of
the Congress Movement, including Umkhonto we Sizwe.
It was out of all these circumstances that it became
possible for the Congress Movement finally to recover from the decimation
it had suffered during the period of extreme repression that followed
the Sharpeville Massacre. Young patriots, such as Peter Mokaba, took charge
of this process among the youth.
Among other things, this led to the formation of the
South African Youth Congress (SAYCO), which counted Peter Mokaba as one
of its outstanding leaders and, after 1990, the reestablishment of the
ANC Youth League, with Peter Mokaba as one of its front rank leaders.
Accordingly, this we can say of the late Peter Mokaba
that he led our youth as it established the organisations it needed to
lead it during its final assault on the bastions of apartheid tyranny.
He led our youth during that victorious offensive.
He led our youth as it established the organisations
it needed during the period of liberation. He led our youth as it began
a new struggle to build a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous
South Africa. He was truly a potent force against the old and reactionary
order, and a committed architect of the new and progressive society.
I am certain that all of us will seek to dedicate this
year's National Youth Day to such of our compatriots as Peter Mokaba,
who played such an important role during the critical period of the end
of apartheid and the birth of democracy. What happened during this period
has been characterised by many as a miracle. Peter Mokaba was among the
midwives of that miracle.
Our National Youth Commission (NYC), a product of our
democratic order, has decided to carry out its activities this month under
the theme: "Letsema, Youth Service for Sustainable Development".
In its published documents, the NYC says: "Key
to this campaign is the establishment of the Youth Volunteer Corps that
must sustain all the activities commenced during this month. Programmes
should be underpinned by sustainability plans to ensure that such activities
continue beyond June 2002.
"With the forthcoming inauguration of the African
Union and the launch of the New Partnership for Africa's Development,
it is becoming inevitable that our role in combating poverty at domestic
and continental levels be consolidated.
"Global challenges to youth development demand
that we extend these efforts to the global arena. Hence activities during
this month are also meant to mobilise youth towards the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (WSSD) to be held in Johannesburg in August-September
2002."
The specific matters that the youth will focus on as
it addresses issues of youth development include building democracy, creating
a non-racial and non-sexist society, education and skills development,
employment, moral regeneration, crime, urban and rural community development,
sport, arts, crafts and culture, health including AIDS, drug and substance
abuse, the environment, the African Union, NEPAD, the WSSD and Palestine.
Our country recognises its responsibility towards the
youth of our country. This centres on two objectives. One of these is
the creation of the circumstances for our youth to grow up in conditions
that ensure the all-round physical, moral and intellectual growth of each
young person. The second is the preparation of our young people to enable
them to assume responsibility for themselves as individuals and for the
society they will inherit.
To achieve these objectives, we have sought to focus
on all the matters identified by the National Youth Commission. We have
a responsibility to do more in this regard and to act with even greater
vigour. We must also monitor the outcomes of our activities closely, to
determine whether we are actually making progress towards the attainment
of the goals we have mentioned.
In this regard, a number of questions stand out in a
very stark way. One of these is that we have to ensure that we expose
our youth to a system of education that gives them the skills, initiative
and confidence that enables them to engage in sustainable economic activity
once they leave school. Our educational system continues to graduate many
young people who, in reality, are unemployable.
Even where we have sought to place young people in training
programmes intended to give them specific skills relevant to economic
activities in our country, in some instances the training has been insufficient
actually to prepare the students for employment in functioning economic
establishments.
Another of the urgent issues to which we have to attend
is the overall value system to which our young people are exposed. In
the context of the 1999 general elections, our country was worried about
the lack of interest of our youth in the elections.
This raised the legitimate concern that these young
people would no longer be interested either in the attainment of the objectives
we have mentioned, or the matters referred to by the NYC. Many among us
concluded that the problem we faced extended beyond interest in elections,
and related to the very future of our youth as responsible adults.
In part, these concerns arose from what we all knew
about many things that are wrong in our society which, among other things,
have resulted in the calls for moral renewal and a new patriotism. All
of us knew then, as we do now, that our society teaches our young people
many wrong things that contribute to unacceptable social behaviour.
One of these is the accumulation of personal material
wealth as the principal objective of human activity. Another is the elevation
of individual interests to the level where society, community and the
interests of other individuals cease to have any meaning. In this context,
the concept of pride in one's national identity also ceases to have any
relevance.
The totality of these circumstances gives birth to all
manner of unacceptable behaviour. This includes the disappearance of the
demarcation line that separates right from wrong. It creates the situation
in which it becomes impossible to inspire people to do anything directed
at increasing the greater good.
It opens the way for the individual to indulge all his
or her whims without let or hindrance. It leads to an easy acceptance
of criminal misconduct, including violence against other people, drug
and other substance abuse and loss of identity, except as a social misfit.
It leads to the emergence of a frame of mind that only recognises absolute
individual rights and rejects any notion of social obligations.
Clearly, we have to create the circumstances such that
we do not allow this kind of alienation of our young people to take place.
This is a challenge to which we have to respond as part of the process
of building the new South Africa we want our youth to inherit.
In this context, we salute the decision of the NYC to
establish a Youth Volunteer Corps. Indeed the best way to inculcate the
concept and practice of service to the people among our youth is by drawing
them into organised social activity. Merely to lecture to them will not
produce the desired results.
Similarly, to teach the youth to take responsibility
for its future, as did the children of Soweto and as did Peter Mokaba,
requires that the youth should actually engage in struggle to confront
the challenges they and our country face. The focal areas identified by
the NYC provide the possibility for our youth to influence what our country
does further to respond to the problems contained in each of these areas.
It is important that the government, our society as
a whole and all adults respond positively to the initiative taken by the
NYC, and which we hope will be supported by the majority of our youth.
It is necessary that we communicate the message to our youth in very clear
terms that they have the full support of the country as they take their
place in the common effort to build the kind of South Africa for which
so many young people paid the supreme sacrifice.
As we say farewell to the Young Lion that roared, Peter
Mokaba, we must repeat the call to our youth who are engaged in struggle
to build a caring society, a winning nation and a humane world - roar,
young lions, roar!
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