Matome speaks his mind

Editor – This year is a special year as we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the youth activism of 1976, the youth who braved the apartheid brutality to stand up against the inferior education that was imposed on black people.

It is time to take stock of our youth to see if indeed the mission of the youth of 1976 was accomplished or not.

This is a call to our government, especially our education ministry, to honour those young martyrs who shed their blood to open the doors of quality education in our country.

This 40th anniversary comes at a time when our education system is in a bizarre state.

As long as schools are still burnt by the violent protesters, we are denigrating the cause the class of 1976 fought for.

It has become fashionable for protesters to use the places of learning to vent their anger at the government leaders.

A good example is what is happening in Vuwani, where more than 20 schools were burnt and schoolchildren are prevented from attending classes.

Youth are the future leaders of this country, but in our country they have become the futile leaders. The flames of fury are destroying the same education system that the youth of 1976 paid for with their lives.

Our schools are no longer conducive places for learning. They have become a place of hopelessness and fear. A place of protest movements.

As we commemorate this 40th anniversary we should not forget the painful death of a grade 0 pupil who died in 2014 after falling into a pit toilet at Mahlodumela school in Limpopo due to poor school sanitation.

Our current education ministry is still exposing our pupils to the same bad conditions that the same class of 1976 was exposed to by the apartheid regime.

We also hid our faces in shame when the textbooks were not delivered in time in Limpopo in 2014. These are not what our martyrs died for. The future of our youth is burning. It is in ashes.

These flames and ashes of fury are nothing but a gesture of spitting on the graves of our martyrs.

We are unwittingly sending the message that they fought and died in vain. Schoolchildren end up resorting to alcohol and illegal drugs, because they have no places to learn.

If our youth is not up to the task of leading this country to greener pastures, who will lead us to the promised land? Our youth is facing more challenges than successes.

The majority of them today struggle to get easy access to universities due to financial obstacles that were created by the apartheid government. The apartheid effects are still affecting the future of our young people.

Instead of learning they find themselves fighting like the 1976 generation to improve the quality of education through movements such as #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall.

Theirs is not a good story to tell but a sad one. Rallies with loud music and rhetoric from government and political leaders are not enough to appreciate the role that the class of 1976 played.

The only appropriate way to commemorate our young heroes and heroines of 1976 is to provide quality education by respecting and preserving the places of learning. Professor Ismail Serageldin had this to say about youth during the Nelson Mandela annual lecture in 2011: “I have unlimited confidence in youth, they will craft a world in their own image, idealistic, dynamic and imaginative. But it will be a different world than that which we have known.”

Those who are burning schools should know that they are not only burning the buildings, but also burning the future of our country. Our country will remain with nothing but ashes. When we are commemorating this 40th anniversary, our leaders must come up with a good strategy to extinguish the fire that is consuming the bright future of our youth.

Peter Matome Machaba