YOUTH DAY

Youth Day provides us with an opportunity to consider the condition of our young people and the challenges that confront them. By any measure, the plight of millions of our children is unacceptable.

Only 28,5 % of black children - and 50% of coloured children - have two parents in their households;

The education system has failed whole generations of our youth. Literacy and numeracy levels compare poorly with those of even the least developed African countries; 65% of children fall out of the education system without matric. Most of those who pass matric receive a qualification that has been so diluted and degraded that it is simply does not prepare them for further education or for the job market.

Child abuse is common. Millions of kids grow up in environments where violence, gangs, drugs and criminality are commonplace - in their schools, in their streets and in their communities.

Thousands of children are parentless and are left to care for their siblings - or to sleep in the streets.

Youth unemployment has become the norm in many communities. Millions of young people are condemned to lives of inactivity, futility and mounting frustration and anger. They provide receptive audiences for fiery demagogues.

Everyone - including the government - acknowledges these problems. Everybody says that the situation is unacceptable. Conferences are held and workshops are arranged.  Experts talk on TV and on the radio. Commissions are appointed to investigate the situation and to come up with solutions. The National Youth Development Agency holds a R100 million ‘anti-imperialist' jamboree. But little or nothing seems to happen.

Nothing will happen until the communities that are worst affected begin to address the problem themselves:

They need to make sure that our men folk accept their responsibility as fathers and stop leaving the care and nurturing of their children solely in the hands of our long-suffering and overburdened mothers.

They should help to ensure that young women do not have babies unless they can give them the care and love that all children need.  

Communities need to take back control of their schools. They must call principals to account. They must ensure that teachers are at their posts and that kids are in their classrooms. They should chase away unions that protect lazy teachers and that are more concerned with teachers  packages than teaching the children. They should ensure that schools are tidy, that the toilets work and that the fences are mended. They must also make sure that no weapons are brought into schools and that violence and gangs are prohibited.

Communities should work more closely with the Police to chase the criminals and the gangs out of their neighbourhoods.

All of us should demand that no child goes to sleep uncared for and particularly that no child has to sleep in the street.

We should all insist that the government should adopt as soon as possible the type of two-tier employment system that President Mbeki proposed in 2005. This would make it much easier for companies to employ school-leavers and people who have been unemployed for a number of years - while at the same time protecting the rights of established union workers. It would do much more to create jobs than all the expensive programmes that have so far been announced.

 Do not expect government to provide the answers. They have an important role to play - but at the end of the day, in our democracy, they are our servants. The future of our children - and of our country - is in the hands of our communities.

Statement issued by the FW de Klerk Foundation, June 15 2011

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