Maravi

Archbishop Girasoli is right

Archbishop Girasoli is right
By The Editor
Thu 15 Apr. 2010, 04:00 CAT

The comments by Vatican Ambassador to Zambia Nicola Girasoli deserve very careful consideration. The observation that there is a lot of frustration among our young people related to lack of jobs needs to be taken very seriously.

A country that does not take its young people seriously is unlikely to develop in any meaningful way. We say this because it is the young people who provide a pool of human resource from which an economy which needs to develop must draw. Ignoring young people and their concerns is ignoring development and prosperity.

The comments by Archbishop Girasoli were made in the context of a graduation mass held for university students. Universities and colleges are very important producers of necessary human resource which the country needs to make progress. Special attention needs to be paid to the requirements of the universities, colleges and education in general. It is education that lays the foundation for prosperity both for the nation and an individual.

A nation full of uneducated people is unlikely to prosper. By the same token, an uneducated person is also less likely to prosper. It is Nelson Mandela who has been quoted as saying it is education that makes rich men out of poor men’s children. By saying what we have said, we are not here preaching prosperity for its own sake. We are making the point that even the children of the poor deserve to aspire to a better life than their parents may have had. Education offers them that opportunity.

It is a huge frustration for someone who may have been raised poor, having been educated, and now expecting a better life to find that he cannot get a job. These are some of the frustrations that our young people face today. Jobs are difficult to come by and when they do, they do not always offer all rewards that a good education promises.

These are the challenges that a government needs to address with sincerity. It is the responsibility of government to ensure that jobs are being created and the young people that our education system is producing are being absorbed. To do this, the government has to realise that it is not a matter of making meaningless pronouncements about how the economy is growing. There has to be a commitment to measuring the real local impact of the macro–economic indicators that the government likes to boast about.

Countries that have developed have paid particular attention to the most important resources that a nation can have – its people. People are the most important gift that a nation can have. They need to be looked after and developed. It is possible for a country to be blessed with all kinds of resources but if it does not have people with the relevant skills, financial, industrial and otherwise to help it take advantage of its endowments, such a nation remains poor.

This is something that we are familiar with as a nation. Although we boast about having all sorts of resources, there is no deliberate effort by succeeding governments to enable our people to take advantage of the resources that we have for our benefit. We always seem to think that foreigners know better than us and have got better skills, abilities, financial and otherwise to exploit our resources. This is why although we are rich in resources, we remain poor in financial terms.

There is an expectation that we are not able to exploit our own resources to profit our economy and should therefore continually rely on foreigners. There is nothing wrong with relying on others for financial resources to exploit our resources if we do not have those financial resources. But there is something completely wrong in abdicating our responsibility to think and protect future generations when we engage in such transactions.

We say this because we seem to think that not having financial resources is the same thing as not having the knowledge and technical know-how to exploit the resources. It cannot be denied that this country has produced considerable numbers of people who can provide leadership in many areas of knowledge and technical expertise but the problem is our government does not seem to believe that it is its responsibility to ensure that the economy is in the hands of its local people. What do we mean by this? The government must ensure that Zambians and Zambian talent are deployed in the economy for the better utilisation of our resources to the benefit of this economy.

It is the failure to realize the importance of education and its products, a cadre of skilled experts in various fields that leads the government to over-dependence on foreign labour, particularly in decision-making positions, to the exclusion of Zambians.

Zambian business leaders will have no choice but to think about the development of their country as they develop their business. The same is not always true with the foreign managers that we seem to want to run our economy. This is why we said it is the responsibility of government to provide jobs to its local people. It is also their responsibility to ensure that the economy is developing in such a way that our future generations will not be left in a position of uncomfortable servitude. We do not need to allow the economy to develop in a way that requires our children to come and fight another independence struggle. It is therefore imperative that as we strive to educate our young people, we think through how they are going to be absorbed in the economy in a way that is going to make maximum use of their talents and capabilities.

This is only possible, however, if we pay particular attention to the quality pf education that we are giving them and the opportunities that we are making available for them. Which government minister in Rupiah Banda’s government is intimately knowlegeable about the numbers of young people that are being released upon our streets every year and what sort of job opportunities are available for them?

What kind of policy initiatives are there to ensure that the future generation of this country are not frustrated before they have an opportunity to make use of their education? These issues may sound mundane but they are critical when it comes to the issues that really affect our people. These are the issues that make a difference in the lives of the individuals. It is not whether the economy is growing at 50 per cent or 40 per cent. No! It’s whether we can find jobs or not. Whether food or not, these are basics that the government needs to think about. When Archbishop Girasoli observes that there is a lot of frustration amongst our young people, he makes a very important observation which we can only ignore at our own peril.

Labels: NICOLA GIRASOLI, UNEMPLOYMENT, YOUTHS

posted by MrK @ 3:20 PM