The Sunday Mail
The education and development of all young people is critical and that is a subject that the Second Republic has continued to emphasise and give increased attention to.
This is so they can take their place in society, play their part in growing and developing Zimbabwe, and, most importantly for every young person, live a satisfying, creative and productive life.
Out of the more than one million youngsters now in high school or tertiary institutions, perhaps two will one day be elected President and a dozen will make it into Cabinet, with a few score heading major corporations quoted on our stock exchanges, even safely assuming that there will be a lot more in a couple of decades. So, obviously, we need to go beyond the “leaders of tomorrow” cliché. In one sense, it has truth, that the new generation will be, as a whole, leading Zimbabwe into a far better future if we manage to get them properly started so they can chart their course and then back them as they do so.
One problem, that of our education system, is now finally being addressed. This was largely an extension of the old colonial setup designed for the settlers. But we need to remember that in the last three decades of settler rule, a quarter of white school-leavers joined the civil service, another large batch joined the railways and other State enterprises, a good block went home to work on daddy’s big farm with the intention of one day taking it over, and another good block got a job from one of the parents’ friends. Women were side-tracked into temporary employment before marriage.
Initiative, creativity and similar positive virtues were not really developed. While a few managed to become far more innovative and productive by building new businesses, this went beyond their education and background that was too linked to the ideals of the minor public schools in England.
Education was for employment into secure jobs. For the majority of Zimbabweans, initiative was about the last thing the settlers wanted. Primary education was pushed, so unskilled workers were literate, a few went slightly beyond so they could fill gaps in the semi-skilled areas, and the odd person was allowed to progress further to fill, begrudgingly, the tiny gaps in the skilled workforce.
We have now learned this is not nearly enough for a modern, growing country that needs to mobilise its entire population to their fullest capacity. But it took some decisive leadership to overturn inherited attitudes and take action, rather than talking. It has taken some committed people to make the changes so no one is left behind. And more is needed.
We can now start seeing the changes. Communal lands were seen in settler times as the dumping ground; there were major efforts to change this after independence, but there was still an aura that they were for those who could not do better. Land reform opened a lot of opportunities, but as audits are showing, some just wanted “a piece of land”, and even those who wanted to farm seriously were not in many cases given adequate backing, although rough and ready input schemes were introduced.
The Second Republic came into office wanting to change that in a major way, with innovative farming systems and serious backing to convert the “left behind” into proper commercial farmers, earning a decent living. There is still talk of Pfumvudza/Intwasa being for “household food security”, but when you look at the programme, it is easy to see that while that is there, more output should be commercial, and that is just the starting point.
As a result, we are already seeing a lot of go-ahead young people who are now applying for land so they can farm as a business. With the results of the land audits now coming in, we hope that land originally offered and not being used will be reallocated to go-ahead young people who want to farm and know how to farm, as businesspeople making a good living, not as someone scraping subsistence.
We have been recording some of the individual successes of this new generation of young farmers and quickly see that when all are in this group, Zimbabwe will be on its way to being an upper-income country, not just middle-income.
Technical education, and tertiary education in general, is being revamped to encourage practical creativity and innovation, without forgetting the necessary theory.
Today, we publish an article by a young engineer just graduated from the Harare Institute of Technology (HIT), who has clearly benefited from this, spending a lot of his final year in the HIT innovative hub, converting the theory into something that works and is needed and breaks new ground. HIT had the equally practical policy of assigning experienced engineers to mentor the students, without getting in their way or growing impatient and doing the work themselves, and that shows education at its best.
With that natural engineer’s ability to write clearly, lucidly and logically without misplaced flourishes, we quickly see that this young man, and we hope his classmates, will soon be breaking new ground in the big world outside the halls of HIT. It gives us a lot more confidence in the future of Zimbabwe. For this is our future, young people whose abilities are being developed to the full, whose interests are being harnessed, who are being encouraged to think outside the box, who want to create, to build, as farmers, as manufacturers, as engineers and as producers.
There is another old cliché, that Rome was not built in a day. But taking the sort of young people we are now developing, give them a few decades and we will see that something far greater has arisen.
