To prepare the youth for future leadership roles, they need to be orientated to be progressive, forward-looking, creative, humble, patriotic and hard-working, writes Lufuno Marwala.
The youth are undoubtedly the custodians of the future of South Africa, and therefore have a responsibility to ensure that they are comprehensively prepared for future leadership roles. This preparation can be effected through increasing the intellectual backbone of the youth and orientating them to be progressive, forward-looking, creative, humble, patriotic and hard-working. This can only be attained through an intellectual revolution, where the consciousness of the youth is scientifically advanced to the highest form of mental maturity.
Youth intellectualism is a process that is impacted upon by different aspects of society, namely political, economic, academic and social sectors.
An optimal orientation and dynamic interaction of these forces would build a strong intellectual character in all its dimensions. We live in a fast-changing information age, which requires the ability to think laterally, to understand the relationships between ideas and progress, and to nurture innovations to succeed. Indeed, the youth have to be the basis of all these. This article is aimed at identifying processes that need to be in place to dynamically nurture youth intellectualism and to investigate youth development policies that are currently in place and to identify strengths and weaknesses of these policies and then foster a way forward.
Policies for youth development
The national youth policy was put in place in 1996 by then President Nelson Mandela as a part of government's plan to develop a comprehensive strategy to address the problems and challenges facing young women and men in South Africa. The policy had, among others, the following goals:
The challenge is to translate these goals into practice. The question we need to ask is whether the government is doing enough to ensure that these goals are realised. In the same breath, we also need to ask if the youth are reaching out to embrace these initiatives. The youth and government need to work synergistically to address the challenges of youth development. Various organisations have been established in South Africa to achieve these goals and to deal specifically with the issues relating to youth development.
These organisations include the National Youth Commission, Umsobomvu Youth Fund and South African Youth Council. The main objective of all these organisations is to ensure the well-being of the youth and to make sure they are able to express themselves and to participate in societal issues to the best of their ability. These organisations still do not enjoy popularity among the youth in South Africa. These organisations need to invigorate their awareness campaigns among youth so that they can be effective and achieve the objectives they set for themselves. The conceptualisation of these policies is a significant step towards youth development; however, the critical step is transforming these policies into action.
Political force
The sudden change of events in 1994 was the tipping point for the militant youth of the pre-democratic era. The tipping point required a change of mindset to face the new challenges and get rid of the old militant youth traditions. The adoption of the democratic dispensation in 1994 brought to the fore a different set of challenges for the youth in general. The challenge from a political perspective was to actively participate in the newly established political and economic structures to make a meaningful contribution in the future of the country. It is now eleven years into our democracy, yet the youth are still facing the same challenges. There has to be youth participation in national debates, policy formulation and all other political structures. The youth need to understand state power as an instrument for effecting change, its role and its limitations.
The government has laid a framework for the youth to participate in the political establishments aimed at transforming the South African society.
The youth need to invigorate their interaction with governmental structures to build a strong political consciousness grounded on the principles of our democracy. The youth should always be willing to shoulder more responsibilities to deal with the complexity of the practical political problems. These responsibilities require the kind of youth who are definitive and who understand that the future lies in their hands. The fight requires new thinking, new perspectives and new strategic ways to be formulated and carried out with skill and dexterity. Developing a mindset that is focused on defeating the current political challenges that are facing our country has to be the main focus. This kind of commitment to political transformation will nurture the political aspect of the youth intellectualism that will sustain the projected growth trajectory of South Africa.
Economic force The youth of South Africa need to fully participate in the economy of the country. Economic entrepreneurs have to be nurtured in South Africa for the participation to be meaningful. The government has established different funding mechanisms such as Umsobomvu to encourage entrepreneurship among the youth. These funding mechanisms have had their successes but still there are challenges to be overcome. There is still a significant percentage of the youth who are still not aware of the existence of these funding mechanisms.
Central to the creation of the spirit of entrepreneurship is access to funds and this is still posing a problem in South Africa.
Intellectuals have the ability to create opportunities, seize opportunities and revolutionise the productive forces. The migration towards the global village is so rapid that it requires intellectuals who understand the complex dynamics of the changing world economy. This includes understanding the needs of today's world market and the power shift from west to east.
South Africa can have what one intellectual called "creative destroyers".
These are entrepreneurs so innovative that their ideas revolutionise the orientation and the mode of the global economy.
For the youth to revolutionise the South African economy and modify the old circumstances, characterised by marginalisation and gross inequalities, there needs to be a thorough understanding of the functioning of the current economic structures, through vigorous economic participation of the youth.
The youth should be at the forefront of transforming the state machinery to serve the people of this country. The industrialisation of South Africa will be measured by how advanced it is in the production of useful production machinery and the rapidity of its improvement in the production of such machinery and its impact on the economic growth trajectory that the country has embarked on. The production of machinery in South Africa will require entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, economists and other technical skills that will play a critical role in this regard.
Academic force
Fébé Potgieter noted in an article published in Umrabulo 23 that post 1994:
"South Africa had an active and vibrant youth sector, which made an immeasurable contribution to the struggle against apartheid. Secondly, black youth were among the sectors most affected by apartheid underdevelopment -inferior general education, lack of access to post-matric education and training, racially segmented labour markets, the reality and prospects of unemployment and a host of other problems associated with not only a collapsing political system, but the disintegration of the social fabric of society." There is a need for a thorough evaluation of the current state of affairs twelve years after democracy with regards to youth access to post-matriculation education and training. The number of young people enrolling at institutions of higher learning needs to be increased.
Education is one of the tools that can assist the vibrant youth sector to transcend the gross inequalities inherited from the past. It is through education that the youth can develop a mature theoretical technical training that is the backbone of our economic growth. Many writers in the past have professed the importance of the most advanced theory as guidance to the practice for achievement of the desired outcomes of any developmental undertaking. Antonio Gramsci put it very well in his prison notebooks when he said: "In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual." Access to education for the youth of this country is critical to develop the most advanced level of intellectualism in our society.
Social force
The youth must take intellectual leadership in the societies they live and therefore be able to engage and deal with societal problems such as HIV, poverty and so forth. It is through the spirit of intellectualism that the youth can express themselves practically with the guidance of the theory acquired from academia for the benefit of the society. The practice should translate into the creation of new machinery to further entrench the strategic objectives of the national democratic revolution. It is through the involvement with the transforming social processes that the youth will clearly understand the fundamental needs of the South African society.
This can ensure that class consciousness is imbued in all the youth from a practical perspective.
The youth of South Africa as the agents of change need to acquire scientific intellectual skills and then seize the opportunity to take the society to the highest levels of psychological, mental, physical and spiritual development. It is within society that intellectuals find their function.
The performance of such a function helps in the extraction of true knowledge from experience. Patient practice and investigation, utilising every experience and everyday occurrences as a way of obtaining knowledge about the world around us will propel the youth to deeper understanding, wisdom and intellectualism. The knowledge acquired becomes the guiding tool of attack for any future endeavours and also tool of analysis for any intellectual.
Intellectualism
Intellectualism is a characteristic committed to dialectical inquiry and it develops from a significant interaction of individuals with society, economic, political and academic institutions. The intellectual character encompasses problem solving, innovation, reading and writing. The youth with this kind of character will be ready to assume the leadership that will grow South Africa into a highly developed country. The youth need to maximise their interaction with societal activities through the established frameworks to meaningfully transform our nation to benefit all South African citizens and to learn from the experience. These experiences should be interpreted meaningfully and some form of understanding should be derived which is followed by knowledge. It is through knowledge and interaction with society that the intellectual will develop an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The nation relies on intellectuals to uncover paths that will lead the people to a more advanced culture.
Developing a youth intellectual culture is very critical, for it is on this culture that the future of South Africa hinges. Evidently, intellectuals cannot be defined independent of their function within the societies in which they live and it is important that this function is elaborated at every stage of South Africa's development. The point is simple: we need to have a huge pool of young intellectuals. Every youth must be a commissar.
* Lufuno Marwala is a student at the University of the Witwatersrand and a member of the ANC Joe Slovo Branch.
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