Our youth should be makers of
history
This week
our country will celebrate National Youth Day. Hopefully, we will all
use the occasion of this important national event to reflect on the tasks
our society faces with regard to youth empowerment and development. We
would do this cognisant of the fact that the youth constitutes the majority
of our population.
Accordingly, we would also focus on the reality that
the young people of today are tomorrow's adults. What happens to our youth
today will determine what our country will be tomorrow.
Our movement has a particular vision about our country
and its future. We want to see all our people, regardless of race, colour,
gender or location, living together in a united South Africa as equals.
We want to build a united, non-racial and non-sexist society, with our
citizens sharing a common patriotism.
We are striving to construct a system of governance
that truly represents the vision that the people shall govern. Accordingly,
we have spoken both of a people-centred society and a people-driven process
of change. We therefore continue to work to ensure that the people determine
their future within a law-governed society.
The izimbizo of the executive authorities of the three
spheres of government, the parliamentary outreach programmes, the use
of modern information and communication technologies to communicate to
the people and to access their views, letsema and vuk'uzenzele, are all
part of the effort to ensure that the people participate in our system
of governance.
We want to build a South Africa that has rid itself
of the scourge of poverty. This means that we have to construct a prosperous
society that shares its wealth equitably. This must enable us to end the
negatives that are a blight on our new democracy, such as hunger, joblessness,
homelessness, the prevalence of curable diseases, and unacceptable racial,
gender and geographic disparities in terms of distribution of wealth,
income and opportunity.
We are determined to give birth to a new South Africa
characterised by high levels of safety and security for all our citizens.
This includes safety and security for our children and youth. It includes
the safety and security both of persons and property. It entails the cultivation
of a value-system that results in social behaviour that opposes criminality,
and discourages crime not merely because the law prohibits crime and provides
for its punishment.
We want to see a new South Africa in which all our citizens
have the possibility and opportunity to achieve spiritual fulfilment.
All our people should live in conditions free of material deprivation
and free of enslavement by ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Among
other things, this means that we have to ensure that all our people are
able to read, write and count. It signifies that we must work to realise
the objective stated in the Freedom Charter that the doors of learning
and culture should be open to all.
We are working to help create the environment in which
our country belongs to a united African continent of peace, democracy,
and a shared prosperity. We must achieve the result that we end the centuries
of suffering during which Africans became an object of contempt in the
eyes of other human beings, and during which it got marginalized from
the rest of human society except as a source of raw materials and cheap
labour.
We will continue to do what we can to ensure that our
country and continent develop in the context of a better global setting.
In our own interest, we want to see our common world transformed into
a common home for all, one that genuinely addresses the interests of all
humanity, and ensures equality, cooperation and solidarity among all nations.
We want the children and youth of today to grow up in
and into the kind of South Africa, Africa and the world that we have tried
to sketch, briefly. At the same time, we know very well that the construction
of the national, continental and global reality we have sought to describe
will take time and will not be easy. However, our movement and the masses
of our people fought for and won their liberation despite the similar
reality that they knew that it would take time to achieve victory and
that it would not be easy to realise this goal.
At the same time as we want to ensure that our youth
should inherit the better world we have spoken of, we also want them to
play a role as conscious participants in the processes that will surely
lead to the birth of this better world. They youth should both be the
beneficiaries of this process of human evolution, and makers of history.
This requires that our youth should be brought up as
such makers of history, even as we strive to attend to the many practical
tasks that confront our society with regard to the challenge of youth
empowerment and development. These encompass the period from the unborn
child to the young adults who begin to bring up their own children.
Directly, this means that, among other things, our society
should look after the health and welfare of the expectant mother and the
unborn child. It should work to ensure the same for the infant and the
child. In this regard, it is correct that we should continue to be vigilant
against all forms of abuse of both mother and child.
We should also create the conditions such that the children
enjoy all the rights and protections guaranteed by our constitution, the
law and international conventions. These include the right to education,
to protection from child labour, and access to the means needed to ensure
good health, including clean water, adequate access to sufficient, nutritious
food and sports facilities.
Among other things, this means that we should continue
to strive to ensure that we solve such problems as the availability of
a proper school infrastructure that is within easy reach of the children,
proper education from the pre-school level upwards, including access to
computers and other material that prepare the children to understand the
world of science and technology into which they will grow up, and the
success of our special education programmes for children with disabilities.
We must support the steps announced by our government to ensure that children
from our poorest families receive free education.
It also means that we should ensure that our school-feeding
scheme functions properly and reaches all the children who may not have
the possibility to have adequate nutrition at home. We must continue to
strive so that all children in need have access to the child support grant.
This must also entail education of the parents to ensure that such grants
are in fact used for the benefit of the child.
We must also continue to improve our entire system of
education, keeping in sharp focus the understanding that it should produce
young people who are properly educated, who are prepared in a manner that
would facilitate their access to decent work and who share the kind of
value system we all advocate as we strive to achieve the objectives of
"the RDP of the soul", and understand the responsibilities of
adulthood.
We have a duty to attend to the challenge of youth unemployment
with all the means at our disposal. This includes the empowerment of the
youth to be able to take its own economic initiatives, enjoying the greatest
possible support of the state and all other echelons of our society. We
have to ensure that such parastatal organisations as the Umsobomvu Fund
and the National Youth Commission maximise their impact in terms of their
mandates. Such other programmes as we have and will institute, including
the Expanded Public Works Programme, the National Youth Service and the
Rural and Urban Development Strategies, should assist in drawing the youth
into productive employment and creating additional opportunities for vocational
training.
We also need to encourage both community based and non-governmental
organisations active in areas concerned with youth development and empowerment
to help our society to make even greater progress in the struggle to achieve
these goals. This includes those that are particularly focused on dealing
with the challenge of children in conflict with the law, including the
implementation of programmes intended to prevent the progression of children
to the commission of crime.
As we continue to pursue the goal of a better life for
all, one of the things we must measure as we weigh our success in this
regard, is the progress we are making towards the achievement of the goals
of child and youth development and empowerment we have mentioned, and
others. Clearly we cannot claim that we are making progress towards the
realisation of the goal of a better life for all, when our youth is exposed
to avoidable ill health, hunger and poverty, ignorance, joblessness and
crime.
The empowerment we speak of includes encouraging the
youth to see themselves and act as agents of change in their own interest.
Our Youth League is therefore correct when it calls on our youth to use
the possibilities created by the victory of the democratic revolution
to advance both their goals and those of society as a whole. Our entire
movement has a responsibility to support the Youth League in its important
work, helping it to reach as many of our youth as possible, both black
and white.
Our collective resolve to ensure that we activate the
youth is informed by our confidence in the will and capacity of the youth
to act as agents of change. After all, our National Youth Day was chosen
to commemorate the youth uprising of June 16, 1976 and to pay tribute
to the youth who have played such a central role in the struggle for liberation,
for many decades.
June 16 confirmed that the youth our country is perfectly
capable of understanding what is in its own best interest. It demonstrated
the willingness of the youth to become part of the mass army for progressive
change, integrating their interests and efforts within those of society
as a whole. It conveyed the message in no uncertain terms that the youth
is capable of sustained acts of bravery, based on the understanding that
sometimes we must be ready to sacrifice everything, including life, to
achieve the common good.
Next year we will be holding our third General Elections.
During our last elections, including those that elected our municipal
governments, we worked to defeat the tendency among some of our youth
to stay away from the political process. We sought to impress it on our
youth that it had a right and duty to help decide both who should govern
our country and what our future should be. We must continue our work in
this regard, to reduce the numbers of those who stay away from next year's
elections, bearing in mind that this is part of the continuum that must
result in the engagement of the youth in the struggle for the reconstruction
and development of our society, in their own interest.
We should carry out this work of youth education and
mobilisation conscious of the fact that the youth is exposed to other
tendencies in our society that encourage selfishness and the pursuit of
personal material wealth as the most important objective in life.
Our youth is also exposed persistent negative images
of both our country and our continent. All of us know that there are some
in our country who seem intent on painting as negative an image of our
society as possible. These lose no opportunity to make false assertions
such as that our country is the rape capital, the crime capital, and other
negative capitals of the world.
They are determined to highlight and exaggerate the
problems we experience, and downplay and disparage the progress our country
is making to eradicate the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, seeking
to convince one and all that failure is the dominant feature of the efforts
in which our people are engaged to build a better life for themselves.
These cannot but have a de-motivating and debilitating
impact on those of our youth exposed to this negative campaign. However,
this emphasises the importance of the work we have to do, to educate the
youth about the gains of the democratic victory and convince them about
the possibilities open to them to use the democratic space to advance
the goals of youth development and empowerment.
Our youth is growing up in an exciting period of the
rebirth of both our society and continent. It is growing up in a situation
in which the battle is joined to build a world that is truly focussed
on changing the lives of ordinary people throughout the world, for the
better. This world has the material and intellectual resources to achieve
this goal.
However, it also needs young people as visionary, courageous
and full of initiative as the youth of 1976, both makers of history and
beneficiaries of the gains they will score through struggle. As we celebrate
Youth Day, we wish all our youth success in their endeavours to build
the people-centred society for which their peers in the past sacrificed
their lives.
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