"Participation Builds Unity"
"MADE IN AFRICA - FOR AFRICA"
"Participation Builds Unity"
"MADE IN AFRICA - FOR AFRICA"
PRESENTS
African Youth Tired of Waiting for Leadership
James Shikwati
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SIFE Kenya Country Director
MARCH 2004
Realizing dream for 500,000 jobs
Pretend you are a customs inspection agent. There is a cargo container that has just been offloaded from a ship say from United States of America. You read through the customs declaration form that “500,000 jobs, expiry date 2007”. Put another way, you are the minister in charge of creating jobs and multinational corporation persuades you that it can create more jobs for your country, “It’s a couple of thousand jobs that we’re exporting overseas to a low wage country”. What is a job? According to Prof. Walter Williams of George Mason University, “A job is not a good or a service; it can’t be imported or exported. A job is an action, an act of doing a task.” How many jobs are available in Kenya?
As many as 32 million! Simply engaging in a task is not enough. One must add value to the task in order to make it attractive to others who might want to make use of his efforts. In effect then, what the NARC government ought to be exploring is the question of what makes it difficult for Kenyans to add value and perform such tasks that may facilitate their earning high income? Has the government offered incentives through tax breaks, efficient licensing procedures and strengthened the law of contract to make it easier for Kenyans to invest in meaningful tasks?
Kenya being one of the developing countries offers millions of job opportunities for its people because it has millions of tasks to be done. In terms of health, many people in the rural areas still believe that sickness is caused by witchcraft; hospitals are spaced far apart and are mostly out of drugs.
Medicine and pharmacy students that seek to engage in private practice are bogged down by bureaucracy. Law graduates can set up firms strategically meant for the rural farming communities, education graduates can set up schools for the low income groups.
The agricultural sector in Kenya is ripe for innovation, instead of allowing people in the rural areas to subscribe to the argument that poor harvest means the neighbor bewitched their farm; we should unleash the power of the youth to transform and commercialize these sectors. Kenya needs small scale commercial farming too.
Many university graduates are still ‘tarmacking’ waiting for jobs tailored to their degrees. The ‘tall relative’ mentality of job seeking is rampant. This has been made worse by the promise given by the ruling coalition that they will get 500,000 jobs annually.
Students from arid and semi arid areas must be on the frontline marketing ideas of cattle ranches to their elders. Those in the wildlife sector must be in the frontline watching out for possibilities of transforming tourism and wildlife into a profit venture for Kenyans.
For instance focusing on the principles of entrepreneurship, Kenyan universities under the umbrella of Students In Free Enterprise – Kenya [SIFE Kenya] have ventured out to teach economics, entrepreneurship, personal finance success and business ethics.
This student coordinating organization is not only churning out a team of students that are already focused on business leadership but are changing Kenya. By creating jobs for themselves they are creating jobs for communities.
This a brand new group of youth mentored by university lecturers that are out to surface talent and tap the already existing initiatives by improving upon them. They are not to be found on the streets lobbying for spoons and political short term gains.
Professor George Ayittey, author of “Africa Betrayed”, observed recently, “Africa’s youth are not enamored with this colonialism-imperialism claptrap. In fact many of them don’t even relate to the colonialist paradigm – only the archaic, dead-wood professors and intellectuals stick bull-headedly to that obsolete orthodoxy”.
The 2002 election campaign in Kenya polarized the society in terms of the youth and the old generation. The ‘Dotcoms’ as the media preferred to call them were keen to take over leadership from the old generation.
Since independence, the youth in Kenya have been ‘leaders of tomorrow’; many have ended up joining the list of retirement as they wait for this leadership.
A new generation of Kenyan youth has emerged that have no stomach for colonial-era politics. They brook no nonsense for corruption, inefficiency, ineptitude, incompetence or sheer buffoonery. They understand transparency, accountability, human rights and good governance.
This young people believe strongly that poverty is not fate and or destiny and that human beings can and must change the situation that makes them uncomfortable. This youth are in the words of Trade and Industry minister Dr. Mukhisa Kituyi, “People who have experienced a crisis within themselves and are actively seeking to change their predicament.”
This is a group of young university students that are involved in community-based entrepreneurship projects. The United States International University group runs entrepreneurship projects in the Maruirui and Kibera slums in Nairobi.
They teach petty traders, hawkers, small artisans, market women and those informal and traditional sectors about simple accounting techniques, how to secure micro finance, how to secure a job, how to improve productivity of their business and how to be competitive in the market. Those in Eldoret’s Moi University started an “Incubator Initiative” that has helped set up a detergent making factory that supply nearly half of the university’s detergent.
Another group has set up a ‘goldfish’ initiative for office interior décor. Another group from Nazarene university runs a milk project that assists Oloosirikon Women add value and market their milk to the city.
The university of Nairobi group has helped link bright students from low income families to sponsors. If they are not in the field the Daystar University students are busy sensitizing the country about corruption and business ethics through Family Radio. More groups are joining in from Western University College, Maseno, Egerton and other colleges.
And more can be done. Youth both university graduates and non graduates can come together to form Information Technology Companies, they can be consultants to farmers and can create health outreach agencies that can complement government efforts on teaching Kenyans how to live a healthy life.
Youth need not form NGOs, they can start profit making companies that can market agricultural products from rural areas, they can adopt ‘boda boda’ taxis in western Kenya and help assist them draw a business plan and improve their service delivery by incorporating other products such as courier services.
The youth are simply tired of political declarations and squabbles; they are tired of waiting to be leaders of tomorrow. They are actively taking the initiative and are set to change the face of Kenya and by extension Africa.
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