The endless events that will be organised by every government department this month will be meaningless. We all have seen this before and we know that every year the chorus is the same.
At municipal level, the financial year ends on June 30, and so this month is timeous for every mayor to host a summit, dialogue, career expo and a conference to discuss youth unemployment.
If so many government departments and NGOs loved young people this much to the extent of undertaking initiatives for them every year, why then are young people still the most unemployed, depressed and hopeless group within the SA population?
Why do the lowest levels of the human development index in the country point towards them; yet so many mayors and ministers will claim to speak on their behalf this month?
The answer lies in the evidence in front of us.
Government has taken the structural challenges that are trapping young people into perpetual dehumanisation and it has turned them into a commodity. The month of June in the government calendar is a transaction.
The month of June has been depoliticised off its revolutionary essence and it has been turned into a dancing concert, where popular music is played for young people to come dance and recite poems at government events.
In this process, young people get infantilised as a group who only need to see celebrities this month in order for an event to be ticked as “youth”.
Young people must begin to see these government schemes, expose them and begin to articulate their own paradigm of revolutionary development that will restore the true heritage of this month.
Great intellectuals and giants of the struggle against apartheid emerged out of the June 16 movement. These were young people who shouldered the responsibility to liberate themselves and the entire nation of black people out of oppression.
Those are the bold figures of history that today’s youth should seek to extract value from and apply their teachings to address today’s challenges.
But beyond this, young people must also realise that there is nobody who is going to come from out of nowhere to liberate them. There is no foreign direct investment that will come from anywhere to change the lives of young black people.
Young people will have to stand up on their own and begin to organise. They will have to create a mass movement with a representative leadership that will champion their generational mission.
The mission is to fight for a labour-intensive industrial economy that connects us to the necessary infrastructure with the rest of the continent to create massive job opportunities for ourselves at consistent levels.
The mission is to fight for an education system developed by Africans for African solutions to Africa’s challenges for an African future in a world that respects a sovereign Africa.
The mission is to fight to lead and command state power and yield political power according to our own terms as the youth for the total emancipation of the youth. Political power must be used to pass laws that will see the state own and control SA’s assets according to the will of the black majority. This requires an ethically designed state that will develop black life and end racism and the unequal ownership of land, assets, property and quality work.
None of these generational targets will be passed down to the youth of 2022 on a silver platter. Youth month government department events will not deliver this generational mission nor will they even bother to speak about it in its actual revolutionary form.
It is only a united revolutionary youth movement that will do that – led by workers, students, the unemployed and the rest of the working class.
Loadshedding, fuel price increases, corruption, monopoly industry and the rising cost of living are all the necessary ingredients required to begin a shutdown youth movement. The biggest victims of all the current ecopolitical crises facing SA are young people. It is young people who are unemployed, who are in student debt, who are underemployed and who cannot afford capital to become entrepreneurs that can transform our society.
These issues should ignite an organised youth movement that will craft a youth action for economic emancipation. That should be the only task preoccupying the minds of young activists this month as their own liberators; not the upcoming government jamborees that are going to be a slight irritation.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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