Keynote address given at the Youth Consultative Forum's National Consultative Meeting and Annual General Meeting
6 February, 2014, Crown Hotel, Lilongwe
 |
| Youth Consultative Forum annual general meeting 6 Feb 2014, Crown Hotel, Lilongwe |
It is interestingly fitting that the
Youth Consultative Forum is holding its Annual General Meeting exactly one week
after Malawi hosted the BBC Africa Debate at the University of Malawi’s College
of Medicine in Blantyre. Is it by design? That debate last week focused
everyone’s mind in Malawi and in the BBC’s global listenership on issues of youth
and what is being termed the ‘demographic dividend.’ As you may recall, the
debate’s question was: ‘Africa’s youth population: opportunity or risk.’
The debate’s moderators, Nomsa Maseko
and Nkem Ifejika, opened the debate by asking for a show of hands: how many
people in the audience saw Malawi’s youth population as an opportunity? How
many people saw it as a risk? A rough count of the hands showed an overwhelming
response for the risk part. Many in that audience felt that Malawi’s growing
youth population was a risk. I raised my hand for the opportunity part,
although as the debate wore on, I modified my thinking and felt that Malawi’s
growing youth population could be both a risk and an opportunity. The difference lay in what policies were
enacted, what resources were made available, and how much space young people
were able to claim for themselves.
I got a chance to speak towards the end
of the debate, and said that the statistics were depressing: Malawi has 4.2
million primary school learners. Out of a population of 14-15 million, that
means more than a quarter of our population is in primary school. Now comes the
depressing part: from 4.2 million in primary school, we come down to only
260,000 students in secondary school. And it gets worse. Out of 260,000
students in secondary school, we have only 13,000 in the universities, public
and private combined. That is 0.4 percent of the appropriate age-cohort. The
technical and vocational schools have even less, at 9,000 students.
What these numbers paint is a picture of
alarming inequality in Malawi; we have an enormous gap between the rich and the
poor. The education sector is both a reflection of this, as well as a
catalysing factor of this inequality. Less than half of primary school learners,
that is 38 percent, finish primary school. For girls, it is 35 percent. The
majority of these are in rural Malawi and among the ranks of the urban poor. The
most educated 10 percent of Malawians use 73 percent of the resources
available. In the universities, 95 percent of students come from the wealthiest
5 percent of Malawians. Private schools dominate university selection; 80
percent of the university population is from private schools.
It is not surprising why most people in
the BBC debate saw Malawi’s growing youth population as a risk. As a country,
we have not invested much in the youth. At the debate, the Secretary for Youth
was unable to say what the budget for his ministry was. It was both a lighter
moment, as well as a serious one. The conclusion most people reached was that
the budget for the Ministry of Youth is so small that it would have been an
embarrassment to mention it to a global audience.
Now to be fair to the Secretary for
Youth, the amount of money and resources allocated to his ministry is not
representative on the total amount spent on the youth in the country. There are
other amounts spent in other ministries, as well as in other initiatives, that
also go to the youth. Ministries such as education, gender, health, trade and
industry, and initiatives such as the Malawi Rural Development Fund (MARDEF),
the Youth Entrepreneurial Development Fund, allocate money and resources to the
youth. As the Secretary told the BBC debate audience, some of the ministry’s
funding also goes straight to districts.
As well-meaning as are these efforts and
initiatives, the investment in the youth is still very minimal, owing in large
part to the small size of our economy. And then there are gargantuan
inefficiencies, caused by both capacity problems, as well as politicisation and
lopsided prioritisation processes. The net effect of these problems has been a
massive loss of self-confidence and paralysing cynicism, understandably
so.
But this is where the youth of Malawi
have realised they have to step in. This is where the Youth Consultative Forum is
leading the effort to reclaim the youth space. And your work is cut out for you
as you strategise on how to “Give Back to Mother Malawi.”
The country needs a different kind of
engagement with the youth. The youth of today are different from the youth of
the previous generation, yet the mindsets of older Malawians remain unchanged.
There is a generation gap manifesting itself in a clash of mindsets. The
institutional culture remains stuck in a mindset that treats young people as a
tabula rasa, an empty mind that needs filling with adult advice and
supervision. Unfortunately, this includes the education system.
Despite curricular changes in the
education system aimed at engaging students in a more meaningful and more
participatory way, many educators still believe in lecturing to young people
and telling them what to do (if I seem to be doing that in this talk, it is for purposes of debate). You can see the results of this disconnect in the
system itself. Hardly a week goes by without hearing of students vandalising
their own school and disrupting their own learning. In the larger society, the
loss of confidence in our institutions has led to an escalation of mob violence
and destruction of police stations.
The challenge is for young Malawians to
take charge and claim their space in a way that is constructive and
forward-thinking. This was reflected in the views expressed at the BBC debate.
The most important way of doing is through self-education. And the starting
point is familiarisation with current research and policy formulation so as to
reclaim your space well-informed and well-prepared.
Your contributions to the problems of unemployment
need to be cognisant of the fact that this is one of the biggest global policy
issues today. It is therefore important for you to know what the research is
saying, both domestically and globally. Your contributions need to focus on how
to increase the productivity of the youth. Economists say that the only way for
an economy to grow is for more people to be productive. For Malawi, the
question is in what ways can young Malawians be economically productive? The
answers are not easy, but the type of education available to young people is
the key issue.
You have to deal with the national
confidence crisis. While it is true that many of us feel hopeless, not everyone
is paralysed by the cynicism and hopelessness. There are Malawians, many of
them young people, who are doing a lot to make Malawi a better place. It is
important to identify these Malawians and celebrate them. This is the best way
of inspiring ourselves as a nation and re-injecting national confidence into
our society.
You need to engage with the question of
what really caused the cashgate crisis, in both its historical context as well
as in its current manifestation. And you can not analyse the root causes of
cashgate without discussing social and economic inequality, which has reached
crisis proportions. If we do not learn lessons from cashgate, and what lies at
the root of the problem, we are bound to have more cashgates generation after
generation. It does not need to be that way.
You will need to engage in the national
discussion on girls’ education, which is now taking centre stage. While the
numbers I presented earlier are very bad for most young people, they are worse
for girls. And they translate into a bigger gender problem. We are a very
sexist society, as is much of the world. Do not jump onto the bandwagon of painting
all women with a single brush of paralytic cynicism based on what is said to be the performance of
one woman.
Nor should you join those who are making
the sweeping statement that in the fifty years we have been independent the
country has achieved nothing. That statement is made out of understandable
frustration, but if you entertain that thought you are bound to let your
sadness about the country’s state of affairs paralyse you into further
cynicism and inaction. Paralysis of thought impedes progressive thinking. No doubt the
country has not lived up to its potential in the 50 years of independence, but
it is you young Malawians who can change that and usher in new thinking and new
realities.
Lastly, May 20 is approaching, and there
will be a lot of drama. It has been very encouraging to see a lot of young
Malawians getting involved in the process. Be mindful of the ever-present
danger to get co-opted into orthodox thinking and perpetuating failed practices
and beliefs about politics.
In closing, I would like to thank the
YCF executive and secretariat for working very hard to make this annual general
meeting a reality. I would also like to thank Action Aid for providing
much-needed sponsorship. Special thanks go to all of you who have come today.
I wish you a great time of reflection,
strategizing and reclaiming your space.
Thank you very much!
No comments:
Post a Comment