This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on July 30, 2024. Shimbo Pastory and Raymond Joel Beauty…

Youthfulness comes with the zeal for growth and progress; the enthusiasm of the youth can be harnessed and directed towards creating a more just and peaceful society. Moreover, the youth themselves are oftentimes the target of these acts of injustices.

Coming from “Africa” is not an excuse for being of poor quality or performing below the expected standards. We are not to feed the media and popular narrative of Africa as a broken place, full of corruption, barbarism and without any potential for growth and progress. Our society does not prepare our young people to be proofs of backwardness and public victims of their history as oppressed people.

There have been extreme cases of cruelty done to children by parents and guardians in the course of behavioural correction. Such extreme or repeated infliction of pain has a strong impact in the life of the young persons. While ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ has survived to be an unwritten parenting principle, it is not the only thing that parents should offer to their children. Cruelty does not decrease resistance to change of behaviour. It has more potentiality to do the opposite, making it almost impossible to achieve the desired result.

While being young is not officially pronounced a crime, it is a criteria for numerous extreme judgments in society today. Contextualizing this discourse locally, there appears to be more negative things said about young people than the positives. If we do not challenge this mentality now, its roots will grow deeper.
If we adamantly remain stuck in the ways of the past, while adjustment will cause us no harm, our young people will always be overtaken by their global peer competitors.

As religious faith fills the gaps for realities beyond our understanding, especially in our part of the world where superstition is a constant trend, its influence on people’s feelings, emotions and dispositions for various actions towards people and concerns around us, cannot and should not be underestimated. There is a lot of misleading, brainwashing, and deception under the cover of religion, often at the detriment of innocent adherents and the wider society.

Today, photography assists human memory in keeping records of what happened, when, where, and who was involved. The society has as well grown so fond of pictures that events are not complete without them. A key social impact is that how people would appear in the photos determines how they dress and carry themselves about. Nonetheless, the vulnerability of the human person has skyrocketed in our times as we leave behind us almost everywhere (especially in developed cities), photographic footprints of our appearances in those places.

The reason why the word ‘lifestyle’ is used to cover a whole lot of rejected behaviours is its perceived neutrality. When one says, ‘it’s just a lifestyle’ it suggests harmlessness and absence of need for interference as it is ‘just’ a lifestyle; Akin to saying, doing the same thing in a little bit of a different way. oung people are not at the service of lifestyles without a damage to their own very person.

Short of appropriate limits, raising young people would become a dangerous “all-join” as Nigerians would say; A situation where everything is allowed, to any extent desired by the parts involved, for any reason, anywhere, and at any time. But this is not how life works.

Young people are influenced to be at the forefront of demonstrations, resistance campaigns, armed warfare, violations, purposed injustices, etc. In many situations, those crises would be solved if they do not participate in prolonging them.