Tessa Dooms | South Africa’s greatest opportunity is its youth

We need to make the sacrifices and investments that will allow a new cadre of young people to lead South Africa into the future, writes the author. (iStock)

May we, who have the opportunity to partner with youth today, choose to make the sacrifices and investments that will allow a new cadre of young people to lead South Africa into the future, writes Tessa Dooms.

I have been a youth development worker for more than 20 years. I started on this journey as a church youth leader as a teenager, in the township of Eldorado Park.

Surrounded by young people who were smart, motivated and committed to a church community, I watched how so many people with talents and great potential would often succumb to the allure or pressures of social ills like violence, substance abuse and the disruption caused by unplanned pregnancy, at the age of 15, I started on a journey to become what I hope has been a force for good in the lives of my peers and now decades later a new generation of youth.

Youth is more often than not framed as a problem in our society. It’s a period if transition in the lives of children and young adults that we almost be default begin calling young people lost, difficult, unsure or rebellious.

As adults we do this as if we easily have forgotten how confusing, challenging and demanding that period of life can be. Most importantly, given that youth is a time when people make life changing decisions often with very little support, we have forgotten that one of the defining features of youth is vulnerability.

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Until a child is 15, they are required by law to attend school. This is an environment that is for many people from particularly poor resourced communities and poverty-stricken families, a place of structure, stability, safety and even access to food.

At around the Grade 9 mark, South Africa experiences large numbers of youth exiting school due to factors including, but not limited to, poor academic outcomes, family pressures to become economically active and the consequences of poor decisions related to some of the aforementioned social ills.

By the time young people reach 18, the legal age when childhood ends, many are already deeply disadvantaged by a combination of a broken society and their own brokenness.

Making most of life’s chances

Yet, over the years as a youth worker, I have never struggled to find youth who remain determined to make the most of their life chances. They come to youth interventions and programmes enthusiastically. Even in rural or township areas with a lack of access to basic things like water, sanitation, good schooling infrastructure and very few economic opportunities, young people show up for themselves when we show an interest in them.

It’s young people like Sthe in Kliptown who keeps me believing. He in his youth didn’t complete matric, but has gone on to be a community activist that fights for better conditions in his community and during lockdown as raised funds and made plans to feed thousands of people through the distribution of food parcels.

Young women like Pearl, who from a single-parent home in Chatsworth, used education to lift herself and her siblings into better opportunities, and who is now a member of the NYDA board championing opportunities for other working-class youth which helps me look to the future. It’s young leaders like Phethani, who, after multiple degrees in Law, gave up a career on the rise in Cape Town’s suburbs to return to Venda in Limpopo to teach maths in rural villages that help me see what servant leadership can look like even in your 20s.

Generational mission

There are thousands, if not millions of Sthes, Pearls and Phethanis working tirelessly in this country serving communities, creating opportunities and showing leadership whose existence tells me that if we focus on the future rather than the past, potential rather than bad experience, support rather than chastisement, we have a generation of people who could make South Africa a place that is better than any of us could imagine right now.

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Frans Fanon famously said that every generation must find its mission, fulfil it or betray it. For me, as a person who is no longer a youth, I challenge people of my generation and older to consider that perhaps our generational mission is to make space for, support and invest in youth.

Not as a problem that we need to solve, but as one that carries a potential future we hope for. The youth of people who grew up during apartheid was stolen by the regime’s inhumanity. The youth of those of us who were raised in the early years of democracy has been squandered by people who refused to allow us to participate in the making of the new South Africa. May we, who have the opportunity to partner with youth today, choose to make the sacrifices and investments that will allow a new cadre of young people to lead South Africa into the future.

– Tessa Dooms is a political analyst and Director of Jasoro Consulting, and director of Rivonia Circle.

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