One of my favourite quotes is from one George Bernard Shaw when he says:
Youth
is wasted
on the young
Each day that elapses and I understand what he was saying just that little bit more.
If I were to go back just five years in my life … by golly!
But I digress. When talking of this amorphous term “The Youth”, who exactly are the youth?
Think back. I’m sure many a time you have been told “You are the leaders of tomorrow.” This you fondly believed and encouraged you. You keep hearing that term and then one day to your surprise when you hear the very words they are not actually being addressed at you.
Funny isn’t it?
The transition between you being the leader of tomorrow and the leader of yesterday is almost seamless. Paradoxically it creeps up on you and at the same time sprints at you.
Recall if you will, how agonizingly long it took for the forty minutes to elapse between each ringing of the school bell. And fast forward now, to when you can swear it was January just the other day and already the year is coming to a close.
Ah, how time sweetens with time! How its value appreciates with each advance of the second hand! And how that much more bitter the realization that the second that has just elapsed will never come again!
Increasingly I find that 24 hours are not nearly enough to half the things I wish to accomplish in a day. Not nearly. Ideas struggle for the opportunity to see the light of day. And it is at such times I think wistfully to the generous amounts of time I wasted in years gone by that I could have done some of these things.
I find it increasingly difficult to swallow the idea that the purpose of youth is to “have fun” while they are young. This beggars a couple of questions:
- What is, after all, having fun?
- Is having fun linked only with the young?
- And after having fun, then what?
The more I think about it the more I don’t buy this entire meme at all.
The youth are so pre-occupied with “having fun” and “enjoying life” that they don’t actually realize that very many things are passing them by as they purportedly sip the elixir of their youth.
Things like leadership opportunities. Self discovery. Knowledge. Expanded minds. Exchange of ideas.
There is no way the youth are ever going to be taken seriously when they spend all their free time from Monday to Monday ”having fun”.
Think about your average Joe. Has a degree in hand and 4 years of working under his belt. He has developed the typical rut. Wake at 6:30, in the office at 8, where he will work till 1. Over lunch he will discuss the ample charms of the office buxom, Manchester United vs Arsenal and how bollocks the government is. He will then work till 5:30 or 6 after which he will meet friends in town for a few cold drinks as they decide where they will go out.
Joe will arrive home with the morning milk, in time for a shower and a repeat of the same.
Few things are as ludicrous as Joe one day waking up and demanding leadership. Why should he get it? What does he have to offer? What, besides youth, does he bring to the table? Will Joe’s administration be better than Daniel’s? Or Emilio’s? Just because he is young?
In his nice cocoon of work, home, friends and clubs, Joe is blissfully unaware of the colossal morass of ignorance he wallows in.
He does not realize the howling irony of complaining about tribalism and yet he forwards stereotypic jokes.
He does not realize that a good leader starts off by just being knowledgeable, period. Not book knowledge per - se — but plain old knowing what’s going on.
He does not realize how he can refine his ideas and ideals by listening to different, or even opposing ideas without taking offence.
He does not realize the vital importance of cause and effect, and why he cannot, as he repeatedly tells his friends over a frothy glass, abolish all taxes under his administration.
And most importantly he does not realize that he can demand leadership until he is blue in the face but is not going to get anything of the kind. Real leadership must be worked for.
People will eventually forget Daniel Moi and his iron rule. People will even more quickly forget Mwai Kibaki and his hastily cobbled controversy ridden government.
But people will never forget true leaders like Nelson Mandela. Martin Luther King. Gandhi. Jesus.
Now, I’m not asking everyone to go home at 5 and analyze the works of Adam Smith, Lao Tzu, Machiavelli and for a light read, War and Peace and Morte d’ Arthur.
Far from it.
All I am saying is that the youth can no longer have their cake and eat it. Whether they like it or not the youth will have to “enjoy life” and “have fun” a little less and work a bit harder if the expect to lose the unfortunate reputation they have in society: that they are an ignorant, party loving lot, best seen and not heard, useful pawns in the political process.
The youth must begin to take an interest in things outside their narrow comfort zone of family, friends and work. The youth must not see life through the bottom of tankards, or rose tinted glasses, or the TV screen but raw, with their very own eyes.
The youth must start to be more ambitious, and dream bigger dreams. When asked, say, where they want to go on holiday the youth must stop fronting cliches like “sun and sand”, “the beach” and instead “climb Mount Kenya” or “See the pyramids”.
“A people get the leadership they deserve” is not a light statement. People do not become good leaders suddenly. They take a lifetime.
Yes, the youth had better get cracking.
AOB
Kenya hosted a Conference on Youth Development that begun this past Wednesday. Gracing the occasion where President Mwai Kibaki (75), Defence Minister Njenga Karume (77), Security Minister John Michuki (74) and Livestock Minister Joseph Munyao (66).
Indeed, God has an excellent sense of humour.
PIC OF THE DAY
Is it just me or does John Bolton look like a Dixie Colonel?
Shania Twain – From This Moment