By Taruberekera Masara in Pretoria| Democratic space in Zimbabwe is suffocating and facing a painful death. The second Republic is seemingly determined to diminish the country into a one party dictatorship. This is particularly disastrous to the youths. They are not favoured by the policies and the politics of the day. This obtaining is a direct result of our apathy and lethargy to confront the elephant in the room head-on
Statistics from Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (2018) suggest that out of 5.69 million registered voters, only 44% constitute youth between the ages of (18-34). The figures shows how disengaged the youths are on issues that determines their lives and their future.Such stats speaks audibly on how we got to this circus that is throwing our future into disarray. We need to tap from the generational and demographic dividend that favours us.
For my generation (youths), our future is quite bleak. We may not have a pension, there are going to be no jobs, no houses for me and my friends to buy, we are going to rent for the rest of our lives. There’s is rampant corruption in the housing sector. There’s no security of investment. These are the direct results of our apathy.
Zimbabwean politics is allocative. It follows the definition that politics determine who gets what,when,why and how. To suggest this is how wealth is generationally distributed. The young remain income,investment and property poor compared to the older ones. If the youths remain outside political offices chances are that reaching for the feeding trough will be eternally a dream.
Without participating to change the status quo the youth will have to live with the choices they haven’t made. Policies made by people who have already lived their lives. When we went 2018 plebiscite the one thing we really wanted – was stability – which because of our apathy we don’t have. It is sad that we are loosing our most productive years to bickering and political misgovernment. This is partly because our voices are absent at the decision making table.
Still, amid the resentment there was some sympathy for an older generation adrift in the digital world that millennials navigate easily, and frustration about how all political parties had failed large swaths of the country.
One glimmer of hope for some is that the frustration of defeat, and awareness of what they have lost, may push young people toward political engagement.2023 might be a new dawn. Yet the painful truth is that history repeats itself. If our voices remain absent in the chambers of decision making we will get to sustain lives based on realities of the people who are not alive to our situation.
It is painful that politics and politicians have created systematic exclusionary tactics to an extent that there has been a dangerous tendency to blame voters for disengaging, rather than asking why politicians cannot inspire them. It is imperative that the respective political parties take a deliberate attempt to pull more youths into its structures so that deliberate actions on succession can be found and perpetuated.
Generational consensus is the best way of crafting timeless policies. It tends to reach out and include all demographic determinants. But as it stands the youths are in the periphery of everything. Issues that affect tend to be overlooked yet they’re are the 75% of the population. It’s not good enough. But we know how we got here
If the youths fail to surf their own ship, politicians can inflate what is essentially a rather plodding, earthbound struggle between capital and labour into a clash between generations, and keep that balloon in the air long enough, they might just distract us from the possibility of any practical solution. Power is not given it is demanded. Politicians will not think about us before they are done with their own issues. To them we are not considered a stakeholder, instead we’re a nuisance. The young have become the pigeons of the public realm, only remarked upon for their inexperience or when they leave litter in a park.
Our lamenting is not just the economic impact of the weak economy that plunges us into unknown territories, but its incalculable personal cost.We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. MDC Alliance Vice President Tendai Biti once commented that they were inundated with divorce applications. Diaspora is breaking the family unit,marriages suffer,children grow without proper parenting.
As youths we need to get our game intact. Take the baton and fight for our space. We are wasting. Without a radical pursuit for inclusion we will be forgotten by history. It’s now or never.