All stakeholders in this year’s elections had better take a look at the silent generational shift that has started widening an existing disconnect between the youth population and the rest of society.
In Exodus 10, towards the end of 430 years of Hebrew slavery in Egypt, Pharaoh tells Moses and Aaron to lead the children of Israel out of the land but without their little ones.
The ruler refuses to let them take away the whole population and drives the two men out of his palace, sparking a plague of locusts which devour every herb.
In an important sense, this relates to the beginnings of post-colonialAfrica.
It can be rightly argued that the independence journey in practically all cases took off without the little ones; without the ruling classes attending purposely to the needs of the young generations.
Though youth development and empowerment plans and programmes have been touted across the length and breadth of the continent, they have since the 1960s not been enough to save the continent from disconnecting from the young in all the nations.
This disconnect was a major cause of the Arab Spring Revolution which was spurred by the young populations in the north.
LINKED
Those individuals and political parties who will campaign for votes towards elections in August should recognize that today’s youth is globally linked. On account of social media, today’s youth lives in a different world—and should be reached in that different world—as opposed to yesterday’s more accessible youth.
The Spring Revolution in northern Africa humbled the Arab nations that had prided themselves in being religiously and socio-politically stable. A revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world began on  December 18, 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution, and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings.
While the wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, conflicts have persisted in the Middle East and North Africa, known as the Arab Winter.
By the end of February 2012, rulers had been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings had erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests had broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan; and minor protests had occurred in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, and Palestine.
Even in Mali, conflicts have been attributed to Tuareg fighters returning from the Libyan Civil War which arose from the Arab Spring Revolution.
The world saw how the whole storm started on social media; and was coordinated and organized entirely on social media. It was amazing and groundbreaking historically.
Whatever pleases or displeases youths goes on air and circulates on social media without need of institutional permission or official approval from anywhere.
Today’s youths cannot be lied to and cannot be made to think as the governing class anywhere would like them to think.
In the early decades of African independence, many first generation rulers ensured that their countries either had no television broadcasting studios or controlled them alongside print media. Those were the days when censorship boards sieved broadcast material for the sake of public morality. All this is unfeasible in today’s world.
According to Internet World Stats, more than 2.4 billion people around the world use the Internet, which is one-third of the global population.
A study by the Pew Research Center Demographics of Key Social Networking Platforms shows that Instagram has 300 million users sharing 60 million photos daily; and Instagram has overtaken Facebook and Twitter as the network with the largest population of younger users. Facebook was originally invented for college students, which is truly revealing.
The LinkedIn social media network for professionals has seen some massive growth since its official launch in May of 2003.
According to LinkedIn, there are more than 347 million members in over 200 countries and territories in its network.
Today, 58 per cent of adults use Facebook; 23 per cent of adults use LinkedIn; 22 per cent of adults use Pinterest (a business news site); 21 per cent of adults use Instagram ; and 19 per cent of adults use Twitter.
It has been established that three out of four people use social networks regularly; social media has overtaken email as the number one activity on the Web; there are over 200 million blogs; every day sees some 900,000 blog posts; and 93 per cent of social media users believe companies should have a presence in social media.
For all this, there is another disconnect. Most of the leading Zambian public and private institutions are running with no Internet presence: they are happy to run their affairs without reaching the youths where the youths are by way of even a website.
A few organizations have websites, but those sites have become mere signposts that no one is paid to ever update. Some of their pages have no information at all.
And all such institutions need new clientele; new students; new memberships.
How they will gain tomorrow’s advantage today by relying on modes of communication that ignore social media or indeed the Internet as a whole is anyone’s guess.
At another level, the society has left Egypt for the Promised Land but left the little ones back in Egypt in failing to merely ‘see’ the youths.
ARTISTIC
In the early decades of this republic, parents routinely scolded and whipped their children for being highly artistic.
You got spanked for ‘spending too much time’ drawing, scribbling, painting, making a banjo out of a used cooking oil can with plank and wire, moulding clay houses or making wire cars, or for the girls; playing the chef with all the mock kitchenware; for staging ‘beauty pageants’ with the use of ‘cosmetics’ and hair decorations made from bougainvillaea flowers and all that—instead of concentrating on schoolwork.
Today the spanking continues but developmentally this time.
As at now, hordes of youths are highly artistic and are not thinking of finding employment the way their parents thought of finding jobs.
But this is not ‘seen’ in the sense that their raw talent is still howling in the wilderness.
The artistic generation urgently needs local training institutions that will readily enable their multitudes to pursue diploma and degree and higher programmes in film production, theatre and drama, fashion design, interior decoration, pottery, textiles, music, sound engineering, literature and languages and all things artistic.
That the generational shift is not ‘seen,’ let alone understood, is proved in the thinking that prevails in academic circles.
You still need mathematics, physics and chemistry among Grade 12 passes that will qualify you to study even social sciences or humanities.
That is an ancient and restrictive educational mentality that keeps hundreds, if not thousands, of artistic youths locked out.
Crowning it all, there are no training institutions for all things artistic as aforementioned.
This means that as much as we want to push nascent talent to world markets, our still ‘unseen’ artists are disadvantaged.
There is another sense in which our communities have left Egypt for the Promised Land but let the little ones in the hands of Pharaoh.
SPORTING
The acquisition of knowledge should not always arm people for jobs or trades in the traditional sense only: but because this is how we think, an entire sporting generation has emerged without any public or private sports academies.
A good start might have been made in the emergence of private-run gyms around the country; which only suggests that sports colleges and universities should begin to follow.
Skills training, as we know it, makes sense; but there is a youth population to whom only skills training in a given sport will make complete sense.
The acclaimed excellence witnessed in such glittering sports as motocross, swimming and motor rally has for all intents and purposes been private-funded.
For that reason, few indigenous Zambians have made their mark in such sports.
Today’s youth generation is highly sport-sensitive and has flashed several sparks in literally all sports—save for bowling which has an elderly appearance and seems to not reach out to the young.
Given that the town councils and municipalities routinely grind their teeth about lack of (or delayed) Government funding, they should be helped to see themselves as nurseries for all sports.
Were they to organize themselves to be that long-awaited bedrock of all sports at town level, they would not fail to secure financial and logistical support.
Those that will emerge as new councillors should moult out of the thinking that their job description is to only watch the old sports complexes left behind by ZCCM turn into churches or entertainment  joints: they should dream of creating new sports complexes. Anything short of such innovation only adds to the generational disconnect.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
In all fairness, the youths have practically no place in the scientific, industrial and technological development of Zambia. Their parents left them behind in Egypt.
This explains why no organization in the sector has tangibly acted to radically transform the lives and fortunes of those youths who are by nature scientifically or technologically minded.
The ICTs mega-companies are also content to offer the youths erratic and malfunctioning incentives and reap kwacha notes and coins off them, but we are yet to see any of them empower a group of ICTs-gifted youngsters to get into ICTs related business.
This makes irrelevant the amazing ideas some of the youths emerge with as highlighted in the mass media from time to time.
Is there any plausible explanation for letting a group of youths invent power generation equipment with mega-wattage capacity, able to simplify Zambia’s chronic power difficulties, and comfortably ignore them?
Is the National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research (NISIR) convinced that it can never raise the financing to pass say one project per year to a group of keen youths, and professionally enable them to make something exemplary out of it?
There are youths whose hearts beat with scientific and technological plasma, who would die to have a chance to invent something that the world will be shocked to see.
LAND
There is no reason why youths cannot be given land Is there?The youths are dreamers with big dreams.
But no dreams land on dry air; all dreams find expression on feet standing firmly on land.
But who are you if you own no land? And as Zambian youths do not have land, and do not acquire land because they are not considered possible landlords or landladies, they start out in life with nothing.
Our country is not short of land, but it certainly is short of mere interest in surveying, demarcating and parceling out land tracts to the youths without any lending or collateral because they are the veritable owners of it.
At a time when a new Scramble for Africa is underway as developed nations see their land spaces and natural resources dwindle to untenable extents, it will be generational insurance for Government to decide to issue out land to everyone who is 18 to 45 every year for a period of years.
If you can manage to argue against this need as logically as you can, you will only help foreigners overrun the whole landscape so that when we are gone tomorrow, today’s youths will be landless outsiders peeping in through highly secured foreign investors’ windows.
It is not a logistical impossibility to re-delimit the land into even two acres per young.
It is not a legislative impossibility to pass laws that such land cannot be sold for the first twenty-five years.
Certain districts have townships that have almost been entirely taken up by foreign tenants who will one day own those houses.
Those are signs of land pressures to come, especially so on our youths left behind in our myopic thinking about development.
POLITICAL
The political enterprise publicly yearns for youths to get involved.
And then, when they do get involved, it injures them.
Youths should be drawn into politics because they have intelligible ideas. And those ideas should be seen to be harnessed and used for the greater good.
But usually, youths are not drawn into politics for their vision; they are drawn in because they are jobless, idle and easy to exploit.
It is ancient politics to draw youths in because they are unemployed and idle.
At this stage, the least that the youths’ generation need is to be turned into stone-throwers or panga-swingers.
They need to be heard. They need to be given space to express their talents even in political enterprise.
There is a visible disconnect in the political arena where youths, like the earlier generations of youths, sideline their aspirations and toil to see their political candidate through an election, and after that the youths remain even more helpless. And in some cases useless.
Then there is that youth who does not know anything about Zambia’s current affairs, but knows everything about the Kardashians. That youth is unaware of the values of the freedom fighters and the meaning of the national days we honour. That disconnect is lethal.
One danger lies in youths who have not connected with the Christian Nation Declaration because they are not seeing why it matters in their lives. In the meantime many are hurting and losing out on life and opportunity.
Even churches have walked out of Egypt, attending to parents’ interests and leaving their little ones unseen and unheard in the hands of Pharaoh in Exodus 10.
If this election year does not turn the hearts of the fathers and mothers towards the youths, and change everything for the young people, a time may come when the majority will be way beyond the emotional, psychological and spiritual reach of their parents’ generation.
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