On Wednesday I was assigned to cover the National Senior Certificate results in Kwatsaduza and I believe this was one of those moments I was forced to reflect on life, especially for someone who was born and raised in a disadvantaged black community.
Seeing young people waiting in line all excited with the anticipation of what awaits them in the future as they waited for their turn to receive their matric statements.
These are the same young people who pushed through barriers of poor backgrounds, poor facilities and having to walk long distances to be counted among the best.
You see, even though many don’t know how they will be able to afford their tertiary fees because, let us be honest, even though we live in the 21st century, many of our parents can’t afford the exorbitant tertiary fees.
You might be seated in your comfort and position of privilege thinking that, like modern parents, they should have invested in their future and opened educational policies for them, but let me tell you this for free, many of the black parents can barely survive on the peanuts they earn regardless of the number of children they have.
Watching them in their celebratory mood reminded me of my time when I matriculated the anxiety I went through the night before the results were released. To this day I cannot remember if I was able to shut my eyes for five minutes that night.
This is because my future depended on those results.
Like them I knew that I wanted to further my studies but the monster of knowing as fees kept crossing my mind because at the back of my head I knew that both my parents could not afford to send me to varsity on their small salaries combined.
I was also scared of falling in the cracks of life that many young people fall into as soon as they completed their matric, which, among others, include unplanned pregnancies, becoming a statistic of unemployment and accepting whatever life throws in my way.
I am happy that many young people from township schools passed their matric and the percentages keep improving. This simply means that there is a light at the end of the tunnel after all.
They are heeding the call to fight for a better future by arming themselves with education and will in the future contribute to the improvement of the economy of this country. To that I say all the best and remember only the sky should be your limit.
It is not going to be easy in the beginning but carry on fighting until you make it, every successful human being on this planet had to fight at some point in their life to be where they are today.
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