Speech at 3rd Ministers Youth World Forum – Korea

July 11, 2013
Speech by Senator David Coltart at 3rd Ministers Youth World Forum 11th July 2013, Busan, Korea
Honourable Ministers, distinquished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am honoured as Zimbabwe’s Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture  to attend, for the first time, the Ministers Youth World Forum. I understand that the theme of the forum is “Contemplating the Path of the Heart”  and that it is aimed at empowering the youth of the world to reflect and think more deeply so that they can play a role in devising solutions to the problems that they face.
On behalf of the Government of Zimbabwe I would like to thank the International Youth Fellowship for the kind invitation extended to me and in particular Pastor Lee of the International Youth Fellowship Zimbabwe Chapter  for his assistance in arranging my attendance.
Thank you Korea for your wonderful hospitality. This is my first visit to Korea and I have been very impressed by your warm hospitality.
As you may have heard Zimbabwe goes to a general election on 31st July and strictly speaking I should not be here in Korea but should be back home campaigning to be re-elected. However when I realised that this forum would clash with the election campaign I decided to go ahead with my plans to attend because I believe in its importance. Although we have a separate Ministry of Youth in Zimbabwe, as the Minister responsible for primary and secondary Education for the last 4 1/2 years I have become increasingly aware of the many challenges that nearly all young people face in Zimbabwe.
As many of my African colleagues have already pointed out the number of young people in Africa is growing dramatically and Zimbabwe is no exception. Our schools in Zimbabwe graduate well over 200,000 students every year and our formal sector  can only  absorb a small number of those students leaving the vast majority of school graduates with a major crisis of expectations.
Even the word “Youth”  in Zimbabwe is controversial in some quarters. It is sometimes used as a pejorative term because in the past so-called youth brigades  have been associated with political violence. The youth of Zimbabwe, for several decades, have had to overcome a variety of obstacles. Zimbabwe like Korea was colonised; and just as Koreans suffered oppression under colonialism so did Zimbabwean people. Black Zimbabweans had to overcome racial discrimination and oppression under a succession of white minority Governments. In addition like Korea in our recent past Zimbabwe endured a vicious serious war in the 1970s. That was followed by very serious internal strife in the 1980s, ironically exacerbated by the involvement of North Korean soldiers who were complicit in crimes against humanity against Zimbabwean people,   and very serious political violence in the last decade. This has resulted in a culture of violence which has permeated our society and of course affected young people more than any others. As so often is the case it has been young people who have been called to arms during these times of strife by older people; it is young people who have been encouraged to use violence to attain political objectives again in the last decade.
So aside from the educational and economic challenges that our Youth face, which are so prevalent in Africa, they also have to cope with these negative practices which are so deeply  ingrained in our political culture.
Bearing in mind that background I would identify the following as the major challenges currently facing Zimbabwean Youth today:
  1. Despite Zimbabwe’s  massive economic potential our unemployment rate in the formal sector is very high and most children who graduate from school cannot hope to go onto tertiary education or to obtain employment in the formal sector.
  2. Compounding  the situation are serious deficiencies in our education system. Although Zimbabwe has one of the best education systems in Africa, funding of the sector by government in real terms has dropped dramatically in the last two decades and tens of thousands of orphans and vulnerable children are forced to drop out of school every year. A further deficiency in the education system is that it is almost exclusively academically orientated with very little vocational  subjects offered. As a result many young people graduate from high school with subjects which  do not give them practical skills so that they can easily become self employed.
  3. Zimbabwe along with many African countries school has an unacceptably high prevalence HIV/Aids and many Youth either have the disease themselves or have to look after family members who do have the disease. Youths are often  provided with very poor  examples of sexual morality by their elders which compounds this problem. In Zimbabwe  many men have what are called  euphemistically  “small houses”, namely mistresses with second families. Many young woman fall prey to so-called “sugar daddies”, older men, who use their money and status in society  to subvert these young women. In addition the advent of the internet, whilst welcome in almost every other respect, has caused an increase in the availability and spread of pornography, which in turn has lead to increase in promiscuity.
  4. Zimbabwe has suffered from the emergence of very corrupt leaders in the last two decades.  During this period there has been a growing gulf between the super rich political and military elite and the general population. The recent massive discovery of diamonds has exacerbated this problem and increasingly young people in Zimbabwe are afflicted by what I term the “get rich quick syndrome”. Very poor role models are provided by senior political  and even church leaders who exploit their positions  often to become obscenely wealthy. The  accumulation of wealth becomes the be all and end all and provides a very unhealthy template for young people.
  5. Sadly because of our violent past, as I have mentioned above, violence is now deeply ingrained in our political culture. Whilst by and large Zimbabwe has good ethnic and racial relations, ethnic and racial differences are sometimes exploited by politicians for political ends and our Youth  have been  subjected to a diet of hate speech and racial and ethnic intolerance.
  6. The use  of  partisan youth brigades and propaganda has in the past resulted in partisanship taking precedence over national pride. This has sometimes resulted in Youth having a twisted notion of what it means to be patriotic with more attention being paid to preserving the political elite than serving the interests of the Zimbabwean people as a whole.
 In my view if we are to address these challenges  the following policies need to be implemented:
  1. Zimbabwe  has a very fine education system but it is very poorly funded by government and accordingly the funding of education has to become a national priority again. A good education is the basis of hope and that can only be achieved if government invests heavily in education. For this to happen it is  inevitable that dramatic cut backs in government  spending in other sectors such as defence will have to be made. In addition the Zimbabwe curriculum needs to be dramatically revised to be made more skill and vocationally orientated than it is at present.
  2. We will need to overhaul our concept of leadership if we are going to inspire our Youth in future. Zimbabwe is desperately in need of developing a culture of servant leadership. Public service needs to be seen as just that – service – not an opportunity to plunder national resources  for the purpose of self-enrichment.
  3. We urgently need to honour and teach the concept of faithfulness. The Youth of today have been taught by our current generation of adults that unfaithfulness is acceptable and that has to change. The Youth of today need to be taught that  a strong nation can only be built, and strong leaders can only be raised, if young men and women  are faithful to their families, to their spouses, to their communities and ultimately to their nation. This entails putting families, spouses and national interests ahead of personal interests or partisan interests.
  4. If the scourge of corruption is to be tackled when we need to teach the concepts of integrity, honesty, transparency and accountability to our young people. The rapid accumulation of wealth by illegal means needs to be viewed with disdain and disgust rather than envy. We need to teach our Youth  that it takes hard work, time, diligence and determination to succeed properly; that whilst the accumulation of wealth is is not per se bad it is far more beneficial if it is achieved through struggle and innovation rather than off the backs of innocent people. Tied to this is the need to train Youth  to work through problems rather than to work around them. In short we need to breed in our young people a zero tolerance towards corruption in our society.
  5. Zimbabwe has  a desperate need to teach the principles of nonviolence to our young people. They have been given such a poor example by the previous generation who have resorted to violence immediately, persistently and consistently to address political problems. The role models of society need to be the Mahatma Gandhi’s and the Martin Luther King’s  and Jesus Christ himself rather than the Che Guevara’s. If we do not tackle the scourge of violence the cycle of violence which afflicts our nation still to this day will continue.
  6. Finally we need to give our Youth a new vision of what our nation and indeed Africa as a whole is capable of. Africa has so much potential and Zimbabwe is no exception. Zimbabwe is a country with enormous assets; it has some of the most literate people on the continent; it is richly endowed with mineral resources, rich agricultural land and a plentiful  supply of water;  as is the case with so many African countries it is stunningly beautiful with a superb climate and some of the best tourist attractions in the world. In other words we have a desperate need to give our young people a more positive outlook on life; we need to encourage them to realise that if we  inculcate all the qualities I have just mentioned in the coming generation the great potential of our Nation we will be unlocked.
  7. Another crucial part of achieving this vision will be the need to encourage innovation amongst our young people. We need them to tackle problems from a different perspective; to think out of the box if you like. We need to encourage them to recognise that simply because particular problems have always been approached in a certain way in the past that is not necessarily the best way. We need to teach them about new technologies which can radically and quickly transform our Nation For example in our agricultural sector we need to completely rethink the way in which we have conducted agriculture in the past. We need to move more towards using conservation agriculture, zero tillage practices combined with the use of drip irrigation and solar energy. If implemented these practices have the potential to dramatically increase Zimbabwe’s agricultural productivity and the same applies to virtually all sectors of our economy.
 It will be apparent from what I have said that the bulk of the needs I have  identified deal with the state of mind of young people rather than their practical or physical circumstances. It is in this regard that your theme this year of “Contemplating the Path of the Heart” is so relevant to Zimbabwe and indeed all nations. As a Nation we have often thought that the solution to our problems lies primarily in massive foreign investment and aid. Whilst there is no doubt that foreign investment and aid will greatly boost Zimbabwe’s economy I am not convinced that that is our primary need. Most of the great nations of the world have been built on the foundations of hard work, honesty and innovation.
 As I see it the greatest challenge in Zimbabwe is to convince our young people that if they change from the unproductive, corrupt  and deceitful ways of the current adult generation, Zimbabwe  can be transformed into a wealthy and vibrant state in which all their aspirations are met. However for this to happen we need to get our young people to understand why our nation has not reached its full potential; we need  to get young people to understand, for example, that corruption bleeds the lifeblood out of any nation;  we need to teach young people that the strongest nations are those built on the foundation of strong families. This can only happen if the current generation is prepared to accept the errors that have made and to enter into an honest dialogue with the young people of today regarding the root cause of many of our national problems. As Pastor Park  said last night when we as individuals can admit our mistakes and accept that we are not always right  we can stop compounding our errors. The same applies to nations and to entire generations throughout the world. Nations which accept the errors of the past, which objectively and transparently teach history truthfully, are more likely to succeed than those which bury  and obscure mistakes which have been made in the past.
 Accordingly we need to move from paying mere lip service to the notion of involving young people in the formulation of policy. There is a need for a “national contemplation” involving both young people and the current adult generation so that they can together  identify the wayward paths of the heart of the Nation in the past, so that we can jointly chart new productive paths which will serve the best interests of all our citizens, but especially our Youth.
Senator David Coltart
Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture
Zimbabwe
Busan
Korea
11th July 2013