By Mwalimu George Ngwane
This article originally appeared as a three-part serial essay in Eden Newspaper (February 7th,13th and 15th, 2007)
Part : A Biographic Data of Youth Governance
Preamble
Language experts, psychologists and political observers would want to give the word ‘youth’ an elastic definition of. ‘Youth is a state of mind’. It is indeed such a blanket definition that has motivated political Methuselahs to stay in power in Africa even after their political menopause.
For the sake of this essay’ I am restricting the word ‘Youth’ to the children of the post-independence era, the children born out of the holy divorce between colonialism and the search for the African personality, the children who never heard the raging sounds of the two world wars and who are hell bent to see today the fulfillments of yesterday’s promises. These are people on whom the future of this continent depends but to whom the future of this continent is seldom given.
As for the word ‘Democracy’, there are no two definitions. It is a process that aims at setting up structures to guarantee and safeguard the freedom to protest and the possibility to choose. It may have a cultural nuance but it has a universal language-the universal language is that it needs freedom of the press, opinion, speech, freedom of Association and the respect of human rights. The cultural nuance stems from the fact that while the West may have structures that can fully guarantee democracy; the African continent has always been misconstrued as being without structures or models that permitted protest and choice. So African rulers have either been coerced or cajoled to borrowing alien models that are neither respected nor adapted to local realities. The truth of course is that pre-colonial Africa had always fostered democracy and even some tight-knit societies still have Afrocentric models of democracy. This first part of the essay employs theoretical concepts of democracy, and the opportunities and obstacles that the youth of yore faced in engaging their establishments into broadening the democratic space.
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