Lawmakers have pushed the government to include vocational skills into secondary schools as a way to provide young people with employable skills and lower unemployment rates.
According to parliamentarians, unemployment is contributing to the country’s rising drug and substance usage rates.
This call occurred while addressing the incidence of drug usage among residents and Zvimba South MP Taurai Maunganiso stated that the reason most young people are unemployed is that they do not generate work for themselves.
Maunganiso said youth ‘are learning to seek jobs and not learning to create jobs.’
The MP said job scarcity in the country has led to numerous idle people who were resorting to drug abuse.
“A lot of our youths in both the rural and urban areas are idle, many of whom are to be found in streets or at the corners of every street and bridges. The problem is unemployment, but why unemployment? I believe our education system, until recently, was designed in a manner that would create job seekers rather than creating job creators,” Maunganiso said.
“I would therefore, believe that it is prudent for the Government to vocationalise our secondary education as opposed to constructing a lot of vocational training centres because from secondary school, the majority of our youths are coming out already addicted.”
However, MP for Pelandaba-Tshabalala, Joe Tshuma, pointed out the problem of drug abuse is not ‘entirely’ a fault of Zimbabwe’s economy, but that of discarded culture.
Tshuma reiterated that parents have a crucial role to play as far as their children are concerned.
“When we were growing up, we knew 6PM is 6PM and you are supposed to be inside the gate of your parents’ house. Today my heart bleeds when I drive around town and around the locations in Pelandaba or Tshabalala or wherever, you will find young girls, as young as 13 years, 14 years, standing in street corners at 10pm. You then ask yourselves, what is going to come out of this person with this kind of attitude and behaviour and loss of control?” Tshuma said.
“We need to understand that the issue of drugs and substance abuse must begin at home. We must first start as parents to actually discipline our children to remember that it takes a village to actually raise a child. Today’s society is so polarised so much that if I try to rebuke someone else’s child, the parent will come back to fight with me about why I am doing that if I am not the parent.
Tshuma said communities must revert back to their culture in order to eradicate drug abuse.
“We can speak and speak or we can try to find solutions, but the biggest solution lies amongst ourselves to say let us not adopt cultures that are not ours. We have got our own culture, let us go back to that culture,” he said.
“That culture will determine and tell you that a child was never allowed to come near adults, a child was never allowed to be drinking with adults. Today, you will find children mingling with adults, drinking and sharing everything with adults. Those are the kind of things that will make this thing uncontrollable.”
Tshuma added: “So it can never be about economics, it is about our culture, let us go back to that culture that we know. Hunhu hwedu, ubuntu bethu. Those are the things that will make us be able to curb this serious scourge that has threatened even our future as a country.”
