THIS week, President Samia Suluhu Hassan will address the youth in Mwanza City. I don’t intend to insinuate what will be on her plate, mine is just to shed some light on what is ailing the youth of this country.
Some politicians, public intellectuals and members of the clergy have already dubbed Tanzania’s youth “a ticking time bomb”. As a university teacher and a public policy researcher, I interact with young people on daily basis. I have come to learn that many of them believe they were unlucky to be born in a wrong country or a right country with wrong leaders. This frustration is not unfounded.
Tanzania is one of the youngest countries in the world. Over 77% of Tanzania’s 60 million population is below 30 years of age. It is very clear that, there is lack of integration between education and the requirements of the job markets.
With majority of the youth lacking the requisite skills and the narrow formal service and manufacturing sector to employ those with minimum skills, the informal sector has become the major alternative sources of employment and/or opportunity for disguising themselves through self-employed.
Today, thousands of young talents a being wasted away in Dar es aalam streets and slums, engaging in all sorts of economic gambling on their own lives.
Thousands of young graduates spend their lives engaging in sports-betting or surfing the internet in search for opportunities abroad to do casual jobs in the well managed economies in East Asia, middle east and Europe, while others are sending their grandparents’ land to buy boda-boda.
Some have reached the extent of selling their body parts such as kidneys and traffic narcotic drugs. That is how bad the situation in Tanzania is getting.
The Myth of Youth Fund
Anyone serious knows that targeting the overall youth cohort is the only way to address the development challenges of a developing country such as Tanzania. The youth are catalysts for change given their greater willingness to adopt new ideas, concepts and technology.
Your government, Madam President, must start by doing something practical to tap into this renewable resource. The CCM government has in the 44 years attempted to harness young people’s ingenuity, energy and resilience to create opportunities for themselves and drive the government forward but there very little to show. No genuine projects or programs have been designed to roll out to make Tanzania’s youth productive. Young people are only remembered during elections.
Madam President, over the years, our government has promised the youth a number of projects and funds. I remember in 2010, 2015, 2020 during your election campaigns, your party consistently promised to build workshops around Dar es aalam and the major towns across the country to train the youth in crafts and artisan activities. To date nothing of the sort has been implemented.
Instead, we have heard government announcing very opportunistic programs such as the massive youth fund, ostensibly to enable the youth access cheap start-up capital to create employment for themselves. Of course the youth can’t get this money. But even if they were to get it, little would be expected to happen because money is not the foremost cause of youth unemployment in Tanzania.
The main challenge in Tanzania is that the young people leaving school are not only employed; they are unemployable. A total overhaul of the education system is needed to provide a suitable permanent solution to Tanzania’s unemployment problem.
Our training institutions are producing thousands of graduates whose skills do not match what the job market wants. Young people are still fighting to get to SAUT and tens of other universities in the country to get a degree in law, mass communication, literature, social sciences, development studies, human resource management, office management, business administration etc.
Manipulatable Youth
What does Tanzania need now? Engineers, builders, metal fabricators and carpenters( to boost the fast growing construction sector), factory workers of all categories( to industrialize the country), veterinary doctors, agronomists and agribusiness experts( to modernise the agricultural sector), human doctors, pharmacists and nurses( to keep us healthy and alive), a few bankers, economists and accountants( to keep our savings safe) and few lawyers ( to defend our rights and get us out of the trouble).
The reason we see many youth going to SAUT and study languages and social sciences is exactly because of the vulnerabilities and malaise in our society caused by the mismatch between training and job market demands.
Due to rampant unemployment, Tanzania has become a big horror movie, where most young people engage in activities that necessitate the services of social scientists and/or human rights lawyers riots, homosexuality, petty robberies.
Madam President, the events of the Arab Spring should provide you leaders with a suitable example of what happens when leaders act like Kariakoo market vendors who keep on rebuilding their fire breaks out and destroy it.
Tanzania is no different from what happened in the Arab Spring countries. Although some leaders may think it is like projecting a black swan event, the realities are different. In the last two decades, Tanzanians have gone to school.
Most of them have graduated with degrees or diplomas in degrees that are not employable in Tanzania as I explained above. They are getting frustrated and desperate. In the meantime, the cost of living is getting high every passing day, with raising food prices, housing costs and deteriorating value of shilling, a spark to explode. That spark might come from unexpected quarters and at unexpected point in time.
Madam President, ten years ago, a high level plenary meeting of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly sit and recommended that countries around the world; particularly developing countries start to think about the post-2015 development agenda. It should be remembered that the(MDGs) that countries agreed to pursue hit the final deadline in 2015. What was next after 2015? This is a very question the UN asked itself, and in a bid to answer it a task team was created to craft a vision for the post-2015. The task team suggested three key issues to address; that is, inclusive economic and social development; environmental sustainability; and peace and security.
Like I have argued before, our economy is not inclusive at all. The economy is getting bigger but its citizens are not growing with it. Opportunities get to those who already have(and they are very few) leaving behind the masses, particularly the youth.
The tendency by you leaders to quote for people high GDP figures; how the economy has grown ten-fold; how the national budget has grown ten-fold; how primary and secondary education has become universal etc leaves them uninformed about the true realities of Tanzania’s society that is getting more unequal, with a desperate young population and a leadership that seems to think that is good for politics because a desperate population is also easily manipulatable. And I see boomerang on this strategy.
Madam President, I pray that when you meet the youth in Mwanza, you will address practical solutions to our challenges.
Madam President, Kazi Isiendelee!
