Making a change in my community.

(On the 1st of July I spoke to recipients of the FNB Bursary on certain issues. We did not receive enough time to go into all of the topics we were meant to discuss. I then decided to continue the conversation on the blog. The following is one of a series of blogs on the topic, “Making a change in your community.”)

One of the biggest mistakes I see from both my friends and other fellow varsity students is that we get degrees, we get jobs in the corporate world, people buy cars, live in good suburban homes, start to travel etc. but they stop being driven. They lose that fire they once had, that desire to make a difference, that desire to be a world changer, agent of change and confront the issues of the world head-on.

They achieve these wonderful things, and believe me these are worthy achievements...but they are not the end.
We are not mere intellectual beings, we are not mere professionals, we are so much more than that.
We are beings whose existence is connected to other beings.

One of the things I am sure about life, is that just as much as we have abundance on the inside of us, there is another voice on the inside of us and that is the desire to make a difference in the world.

I know I spoke about the voice of abundance, but another voice which is connected to the voice of abundance is the voice that says, “I can make a change in my generation.”
Equal to the hunger to make a mark in the world, is the hunger to make a change in the world.
Equal to the desire to be somebody is the desire to help someone else be somebody too.
It is there, we are born with it!

But what kills it, what kills the voice of change, the desire and hunger to make a difference?

Before I answer that question I must answer this one...briefly. “What kills the voice of abundance, what kills the voice that tells us we are great?”

There are 2 short answers I want to touch on:

1) Life: some of the challenges we face in life hit us so hard that we are forced to draw a conclusion that we are not as great as we (think) are. It may be the fact that you didn't get the marks you wanted in class, or you did not get into the university you wanted, or you got in but had to drop out because you realised that you did not love the course, or a relationship that failed and you got hurt, or a business that failed...all of these failures or struggles are enough to force some people to think of themselves, "as not so great after all”?

Some of these challenges are enough to make people abandon their dreams, and think, “Oh maybe I should be like everybody else and travel the road most travelled.”

2) The feared "Comfort Zone": The comfort zone is as horrible as the friend zone.
A person who is comparable to a person in a comfort zone is a person whose belly is full. I don't know if you've been really hungry, you know that growling hunger that forces you out of the comfort of your chair into the street to look for something to eat.
I don't care how comfortable you are, but if you are really hungry you will get up and make a plan. The effects of hunger are so lethal that in Zulu we have a saying that "Indlala ibanga ulaka" (directly translated means, hunger causes anger/violence/fury). All of us know or have experienced that it is not wise to mess with a hungry person, a hungry person will deal with you now, "Not yesterday, Today" *Leon Schuster Voice*

But there is a feeling on the opposite end of the spectrum, the feeling that one gets after they've just had a satisfying meal. After a meal, all I want to do is sit and relax as my digestive system goes into full gear.

That's the same with contentment, it kills the drive to go and look for food. It kills the drive to look for opportunities, for growth for development...so you're fine...you've got a pay cheque every month, why should you go to school and study some more. Why should you read all these books? Why should you develop yourself?

Just like food satisfies the drive for man to look for food to fill himself, so does contentment satisfy the need for man to look for tools of development and opportunities for growth.

Now what kills the voice of change, the voices to be agents of change?

Well that's even more complex...

1) Passing the buck:
I think during the transition of democracy, one of the biggest mistakes we all made, as a country , is we took to much power and/or responsibility and put it on government and politicians. That is one of the biggest mistakes that we all made. The job of building a country is too big for a political party.

In doing this we shifted the responsibility to institutions and made it their sole responsibility to fulfil some of the challenges in our country. This mistake was a grave one, because it also lead to people assuming that they need to be elected or hired into certain positions in order to make a difference.

The mistake of passing the buck to government has only served to exonerate us of the responsibility to play an active role in our society. And that's why we as a country are good at complaining, we cry about the quality of education, lack of leadership, lack of accountability. We do this because it makes us feel like the real failure is the government, and not us the society.

It is important to note that it is not political office that suffers directly when young people do not have the tools to express themselves and resort to drugs. It is the community that suffers when these young people resort to criminal activities in order to finance their habits. It is the community that suffers when young ladies get pregnant at young ages and have to leave school early in order to support their children.


2) Exodus:
It is common knowledge that when most young people dream, they dream to leave the township. There is nothing wrong with this, I would easily leave a double storey in Diepkloof to live in a Sandhurst mansion. And Soweto is a very advanced township, as President Mugabe alluded to: it is not a bar.
All townships were created to be oppressive, the system that created them was a well orchestrated system of oppression.

The problem though is the unintended consequences: When the good crop of people leave for the suburbs they leave behind a township that is short of role models. People to whom the young people will look up to, whom the young people will seek to model their lives around.
When the people who have the experience, skills and education to help alter the situation in townships and rural areas...leave the township, they leave a void that is hard to fill.
The same principle holds when they put their children in private schools, and participate in those school governing bodies...the result is the great divide between the private and public school education systems right now.

When the proverbial "out of sight out of mind" process happens, the desire for change is slowly overshadowed by other pending more urgent matters.
Both of these are contributing factors...the list is not exhaustive, there are other reasons, but these are the 2 most prevalent.

(To Be Continued…)

-Simon Mtsuki and Ziyanda Khumalo