THE AFRICAN YOUTH

Johannesburg - The youth of the African
continent should prepare themselves for a
rebellion against their older generation and
claim their leadership role Thabo Mbeki said
on Saturday.
Mbeki who was addressing the Youth 21
global leadership forum in Nairobi, Kenya
said two thirds of the continent's population
was the youth and that in 2045 they would
be the leaders responsible for the two billion
projected continental population.
"To ensure that [the youth] actually
exercises the leadership everybody
rhetorically accepts and proclaims is its due,
the youth must organise and ready itself to
rebel, so to speak!"
"It would obviously be unnatural that I, a
member of the older generation, would easily
and willingly accept that younger people, my
own children, should, at best, sit side-by-
side with me as co-leaders, fully empowered
to help determine the future of our people,"
he said.
He said the new generation should define its
unique and historic contribution to their
societies' development, otherwise it ran the
risk of betraying its mission which would
condemn the continent to "the out-dated
views and prejudices of the older
generations".
He said the continent's future depended on
achieving the objectives in African Youth
Charter of "peace and security, democracy
and good governance, economic growth and
development and gender equality" to which
all African Union member states were bound
to.
For the youth to take up their leadership
role, it was imperative that Youth 21 global
forum establish how the older generation
should enable them to "discharge their
obligation to exercise leadership" and
"organise itself to play this role...in the in
struggle for the realisation of its goals,"
said Mbeki.