Tomorrow’s leaders MUST take up their position today
For the longest time now, young people have and continue to shy away from issues that affect and to a great extent shape up the course of their very being. This is especially true when it comes to governance, administrative or political aspects of their lives. Every time the provisions of the constitution dictate for national general elections to have to be staged, lots of garrulous old men and women appear from every corner of the country to try and entice the people to vote in their favour. Understandably, one of the biggest groups to woo by the politicians is the young people.
However, at the fear of being seen as too involving in ‘boring’ and ‘grown-up’ issues, most of the young people automatically close their eyes, ears and even brains to anything coming of the political wooing. The trend is very rampant among the youth who are supposedly the enlightened ones residing in the cities and who are better-placed in so far as access to information, as opposed to their rural area counterparts. It is then the backward rural youth, the old-fashioned old who then heed the call of the pea-size brained politicians and vote.
Little do the enlightened ones realize that by shying away from participation in the national affairs have they practically handed their lives unto those who actively participate in the administrative, political issues of their lives, thus choosing their lives for them.
The trend having been started on the political arena, then grows and is depicted in the everyday life of a young person until maybe one day s/he feels old enough to want to take matters into own hands, although it is often rather too late at the stage. It is for this reason that young people have such a phobia for anything bearing the tag ‘responsibility’, because apparently responsibility is boring.
In particular this week, we look into that behavior on the musical and entertainment platform. This is where the enlightened city-life youth with unlimited access to foreign media are mostly at ease. But guess what! They still shy away from participating in aspects thereof which will determine their career in the industry.
For instance, very few of them are members of, or have even the most basic information about the Lesotho Music Rights Association, a body whose very existence is for their good. At the fear of being seen as boring, young artists leave their career future in the hands of those decades older than them just as they do on the arena of politics.
This past weekend LMRA held its elective annual general meeting whose chief mandate was to give mandate to a new lot to lead them for the next five years. Just as in other issues where they couldn’t care less, they shunned both the particular AGM as well as membership of the association. Be that as it may, they are the first ones to vent on social media when nothing goes their way.
It is time that the young person, whether profressional or political, take up their stand as the next generation of leaders. It is time the young lead the old and fragile, and not the other round.
