GilbertMakore's Blog

My generation of Zimbabwean youth seems lost (at least for the moment). Our brothers and sisters went to college for ‘free’. The government funded their tuition and living expenses through grants and loans. My sister could afford all trinkets such as a tv, a cd player etc, all on her stipend and all before she finished college.  Going to college was possible. The main barrier would mainly be your inability to do well in your high school exams. Not so with my generation. Our generation of youth cannot access government loans and grants. We study hard and struggle through high school but cannot go on to college because the system is somehow broken. College has certainly become the preserve of the well off. For how can the daughter of a teacher/nurse (earning below USD500) be expected to be able to afford tuition of over USD800 and living expenses of over USD100? And so we feel disillusioned and lost. Those of us who, by some miracle, make it through college cannot find jobs in formal employment. We have to fiercely fight it out for the very few jobs on the market and we are under-employed if we lucky to get jobs at all. So we have highly qualified unemployed and under employed youths with framed certificates that hold little promise for the future.

We are not lazy.We feel the burden of under-achievement. Sometimes it feels like we have failed. We cannot look after ourselves. How then are we even expected to look after our parents and siblings? So we feel unaccomplished and alienated. We grew up in what was supposed to be a free nation with promise for everyone that worked hard. Our parents, our heroes imbued in us a love for our country. Independence and heroes holidays held so much meaning for us. We celebrated them. Went to the stadiums for the functions. Not so much now. They have almost become burdensome, a reminder of what we could have been and what we are not. We have no voice, we have to censor ourselves and live in fear of each other. We have become willing instruments and tools of violence against each other and against our parents. Because we are lost, disillusioned and alienated.

Youths

Those that have emerged as the ‘youth leaders’ among us, among the political parties, seem not to have a vision for the youth. If they do, they seem not to be able to communicate it well. Everything seems to be on hold until the next elections. When the politics are ‘sorted’ out once and for all, then everything will be fine and we will start focusing on and talking about the stuff that the youth want to talk about. So we identify with ‘comrades’ and the ‘struggle’ but are essentially radar-less, driven only by angst and expressive only through agitating.

Yet we know that our problems just arent going to be solved that easily. We know there is no commitment. Everyone is looking out for their own. So there is all this rhetoric of ‘youth empowerment’, ‘youth are leaders of tomorrow’, ‘youth are leaders of today’. No. We know and we dont buy it. We know that cheap politics wont help us. We know our challenges wont go away with more money being thrown at youth projects. Our challenges run deeper. More a loss of identity and faith in the system. We are struggling to find relevance in a society in which we struggle to match or surpass the achievements of our parents’ generation. Our frustration and search for relevance leads us to alcohol, violence, sex and an adoration for flagrant materialism.

This is also not necessarily a Zimbabwean youth narrative. It may indeed be a global narrative. The demography of the protesters in the Arab Spring, the London riots and the Occupy Wall Street movement may be telling. We are frustrated and burdened by the fear of failure. We may not fully understand the complexity of our challenges/problems, we may not have all the answers but we do know that we do not like how our lives (and those of our young children) are panning out.

These are difficult posts for me to write. The global media narrative on Zimbabwe presents a jaundiced doom and gloom picture. Yet there is more to us as Zimbabweans. Yet I also do not want to paint a picture of how everything is now fine and everything is working and we all happy. As the youth, we have it tough. I find hope though in the stories of triumph in the despair. Indeed, our parents probably had it tougher than us. Yet they managed to create a future for us.