Zimbabwe: Mired in Transition: Zimbabwe: Mired in Transition

10. Youth in Zimbabwe – A Lost Generation

252 With exuberance we saluted them as the born frees, those lucky ones born after 18 April 1980. They would never have to live as colonised subjects. Countless opportunities would open up in front of them, and they would simply have to pluck the fruit that had so long been denied to the majority of black Zimbabweans. Access to education would provide them with a ticket to employment, rising incomes and improved standards of living for the whole family, and ultimately the nation. Together with their parents and their elder siblings, they would build a future of prosperity that would validate the bitter sacrifices of the struggle for independence. Now, more than 30 years on, the oldest of the born frees should be fully adult, no longer even youths. They might have expected to have concluded their education, settled into stable employment or set up small businesses, or be gradually taking over the heavy work and responsibilities of agriculture from their elders; they could be planning marriage if they are not already married, and raising children with confidence. But this is the privileged position of a minority. For the majority, the reality is very different. Who are the youth and what is their problem? Let us consider for a moment those Zimbabweans born between 1980 and 1995 – those now aged 16 to 31. We will call them the youth of today.1 While the vast majority attended primary school long enough Youth in Zimbabwe – A Lost Generation Mary Ndlovu 10 253 Mary Ndlovu to become literate – probably more than 80 per cent2 – fewer than 40 per cent completed secondary school3 and at most only six to seven per cent of them gained the basic qualifications to secure further training and thus employment.4 And even for those who did gain a full O-level certificate, i.e. five passes, their qualifications did not lead them to satisfactory jobs. Instead, our young people – both with and without O-levels – hawk air-time on street corners, cross borders in tens of thousands to do almost anything to survive in neighbouring countries, turning deals with the expertise of hardened criminals or, worst of all, are transformed into brutal torture machines in the service of an aging president. What happened? Why can our young people not succeed with the education they have been given? Why can they not find jobs or generate sufficient income through self-employment? Why do they prefer to confront the risks of illegal emigration rather than remain in their native country? And what of the consequences for them and for Zimbabwe ? What can be done to rescue this situation? The problem is not unique to Zimbabwe; it typifies the position of youth in much of Africa and, more recently, in many nations of the developed world. However, while globalisation and technological and social changes underlie a shared dilemma, the difficulties facing Zimbabwean youth have particular characteristics that need to be understood in the national context if any viable local solution is to be found. We might also define youth as those young people who are in transition from dependent childhood to self-sustaining adulthood.5 In order to achieve this transition satisfactorily multiple factors must come together, of which we will focus on three only: the need for an appropriate education, the need for access to employment or some form of income-generation and the need for socialisation by adults into a moral order. In Zimbabwe, there have been failures in all of these three areas, with the biggest problem being a misfit between the first and the second: education has not been adequate to prepare youth for achieving economic independence and the economy has not provided sufficient employment opportunities. When we add to that a lack of appropriate socialisation, particularly in recent years, the outcome for many youth has been devastating. In this chapter we will look primarily at the inadequacies in edu- 254 YOUTH IN ZIMBABWE – A LOST GENERATION cational policy in relation to the performance of the economy and the consequences for the youth. We will also mention more briefly the economic failures and the perversion of the legal and political systems that have been described and analysed at length in many other publications .6 We will also touch on the failure of appropriate socialisation of youth. Post-independence developments in education We...