By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

ONE of the urgent strategic issues higher education is expected to tackle for the nation in terms of African wisdom is the challenge of youth.
On the surface, it is obvious that the youth debate is steeped in dismal ignorance. Consider for instance recent utterances by some youths targeting war veterans which the media have amplified with gusto.
The false and dangerous impression that has been created and being amplified is:
l That there are no war veterans who are also youths;
l That young people, including war veterans’ children, do not support the ethos of Chimurenga for which war veterans stand;
l That war veterans are only those bodies who fought for liberation in the Second Chimurenga and that by now they should have all perished or at best expired and ready to be discarded together with the Chimurenga ethos for which they are torch bearers. If there are any survivors, their ranks should be so thin and their physical strength so dissipated as to constitute a negligible force.
l That somehow ‘youth’ is an automatic value system and ideology which does not require any education or conscientisation to mobilise and to sustain. Therefore a few rallies and marches would prove the existence and mobilisation of a formidable movement of youths, especially against those who are perceived as obsolete or expired war veterans.
Such assumptions are the product of a three-pronged tragedy which Zimbabwe has experienced in recent years: the HIV and AIDS pandemic and its impact on African home-grown education and mentoring systems; illegal sanctions and their impact on the same and now the upsurge of so-called ‘social media’ as a substitute for journalism, public education and African home-grown instruction and training for youths and children.
It is not possible to elaborate all these issues at once.
So our readers should bear with me, so that I can explain the tragic impact of these factors over several instalments.
First of all, the 5 000-year-old African intellectual heritage and teaching practices dealt with in previous instalments were developed for youths, both within and beyond the confines of the family.
The foundation of that education was a relational structure consisting of parents, siblings, peers, mentors, elders, ancestors and God.
HIV and AIDS, illegal sanctions and ‘social media’ have wiped out what remained of that system.
From a national strategic thinking and planning point of view, there are striking parallels between the HIV and AIDS scourge beginning in the 1980s and the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the Anglo-Saxon powers since about 2000.
The first parallel is that HIV and AIDS and illegal sanctions target and devastate mostly young people, children, adolescents, their parents and those old enough to be mentors.
Illegal sanctions at their worst impact brought formal industrial production down to 10 percent of capacity.
In any economic crisis such as what Zimbabwe went through between 2000 and 2016, it is the youth population which is least capable of adjusting its means of making a living, adjusting incomes.
So HIV and AIDS and illegal sanctions affecting Zimbabwe at the same time meant that youths were over-represented among the jobless, among the economic refugees going to South Africa and Britain and among those dying of AIDS-induced diseases.
So, contrary to the myth being spread through the media, it is our youth population which is thin both in comparative numbers and in sustainable and progressive ideas.
The result is that, where most societies experience a baby-boom immediately after a prolonged war, in the period after the Second Chimurenga, Zimbabwe has experienced a bay-bust which has been worsened by panic emigration caused by sanctions.
The second parallel between HIV and AIDS and sanctions is obvious from the first: Mass impoverishment.
The older generation loses salaries, pensions, medical aid schemes and investments which hyperinflation reduces to zero, while the younger generation loses jobs, spouses and time, that is if they are not dead.
The more than 13 000 economic refugees in the UK who were being deported back to Zimbabwe in 2011-2013 found that they lost a lot of the prime time of their lives compared to those who stayed put in Zimbabwe.
Such rootlessness also creates rootlessness in values and ideas.
The third parallel is that both HIV and AIDS and sanctions have been exploited by the Anglo-Saxon powers, their donor agencies and donor-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as presenting a great opportunity to overthrow the African liberation culture of the Second Chimurenga in order to replace it with a Western-inspired, Western-driven, donor-funded neo-liberal fake.
Social media so far makes this easy by isolating young people from parents, siblings, mentors and elders in favour of contentless ‘connectivity’ with distant ‘friends’.
The result is that, it is documented that 12 years of sanctions against Iraq, from 1991 to 2003, killed more than 600 000 children; but no Western donor, Western-funded NGO or Western-sponsored journalist will ever admit that even a single child has died in Zimbabwe due to illegal sanctions on top of HIV and AIDS.
The African dariro made up of one’s own parents, siblings, peers, mentors, elders and ancestors was shaken up by other forces before HIV and AIDS, illegal sanctions, emigration and now social media.
But these new forces descended upon society close together and finished off what remained of that home-grown African relational education structure between 1985 and 2015.
The now decimated African dariro as a relational education structure constituted a mediating structure between one’s own family or community and the outside world and outside sources of information and knowledge.
It constituted an organic firewall.
It needs to be reconceived and rebuilt.
What our educationists today need to do is to go beyond the empty slogan: ‘Embrace technology’ and design a new African relational education structure in which families, communities, schools and colleges reconstitute the structure which should now include digital technology.
This is to say, lap-tops, smart phones, PCs, tablets and smart cameras can still be set-up, arranged, to serve the reconstituted circle, with the college staff, school staff or community leaders using the new technology to mediate between the group or institution and the outside world.
Madzimbahwe can reconstruct a new firewall through which wholesome information is selected for use and through which information can be shared inside the dariro and with those outside the group and abroad.
In other words, African relational philosophy and practice can be used to make digital technology perform tasks that we want, including the teaching and training of youths.
What has happened instead is that each child or youth or student has been banished to his or her own room, dormitory or cubicle with his or her gadget, thereby worsening the disintegration of society and the hopeless fragmentation of knowledge into tweets and blips which Professor Tarek H. A. Hassan was cited as regretting in the last instalment in relation to the education of doctors.