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Why are our youths stranded in a desert of unemployment?
2005-08-10 07:28:46
By Editor
A new social spectre is haunting Tanzania. An increasing number of youths have become a frustrated lot, probably having recognized that their hopes and aspirations for dignified lives through better jobs, have been shattered.
As a result, an increasing number of youths have resorted to drug trafficking and abuse, and the modern day slave trade, renamed by the international community as human trafficking. Some of our resourceful youths risk their lives by illegally stowing away on international shipping-lines to unknown destinations. We are all aware of reports that some have even been thrown overboard by ruthless seafarers and their captains to cherish the carnivores of the ocean’s depths.
Latest statistics tell us that more than 300 Tanzanian youths are languishing in foreign jails mainly for crimes related to drug trafficking. Curiously, some of the jailed youngsters are sons and daughters of some of our well known big shots.
The situation has reached alarming proportions in some countries where Tanzanian youths have been arraigned, and ultimately imprisoned for drug trafficking, and are seen as a source of prisons’ over-flooding.
The 2005 United States of America’s report against human trafficking lists Tanzania as one of the African countries from which women and children are shipped abroad for the sex trade.
So, a stream of young men are fleeing the coop, heading in all directions like unguided missiles. One, among other possible reasons, rests on the reality that the domestic economy has failed to generate decent jobs for the youth that would enable them to command some sort of dignified livelihood.
Tanzania’s combined school system produces in excess of 800,000 students each year, most of whom lack the basic, necessary training for immediate job placements. To a great extent, our basic, secondary and tertiary levels of education are still not specifically geared for globally competitive jobs.
Up to the mid 1990s, the public sector was the major employer, and, it was almost guaranteed that all graduates at secondary and tertiary levels of education were absorbed by the bloated government and parastatal sectors of the economy.
Now, as the private sector increasingly becomes the engine of growth , our curriculum should succinctly reflect on the direct needs of what has now become a global sector.
A smart way of ensuring that the youths enjoy the fruits of our growing economy is to turn them into entrepreneurs so that they employ themselves as well as employ others. Every level of our learning system must strategically concentrate on entrepreneurship as an integral element of education for a brighter future.
In the interim, those sectors like agriculture, tourism and general services, which have the potential to multiply the workforce, should be given extra fiscal incentives in proportion to the number of jobs they can create exclusively for locals.
There are also unfounded myths which have so far hysterically poisoned the minds and consciousness of our youths which we have to remedy. Beliefs abound among the youths that the USA, the EU, and South Africa , are lands where the streets are paved with gold , and honey and manna are freely provided by providence to whoever is lucky enough to set foot in these heavens on earth.
So, the question of relevant skills or education that would be a prerequisite for one getting any job in any labour market where joblessness is rife, has, unfortunately, not yet crossed the minds of our desperate youths.
Even the so called educated persons from Africa (and elsewhere), who have found their way to these mythical ’greener pastures’, find the going very hard because labour avenues temporarily left for them include chiefly end of the road vacancies like babysitting, care of the aged, service jobs in the hospitality industry (as waiters)-all very low paid jobs.
It is important, therefore, that we mount a massive demystification campaign about the non-existing glory across our country’s borders, and re-mould psychological and supportive mechanisms able to rekindle hope and confidence among the youths.
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