It's mid-May 2015 and I am speaking with my young learned colleague/friend and I am shocked at his ignorance of the current affairs in our country, our continent and the rest of the world. Don't get me wrong, my young friend is not that young, in fact he's 23 years old.
My friend he like millions of other young South Africans is privileged to have a smart phone and a tablet and access to the Internet. And believe me when I say this, he spend as much time on social media (as most of them do) reading about his friends's Facebook status, tweets and viewing pictures on Instagram not to forget chatting to them on Whatsapp. Social media has compressed the world to much that it fits perfectly in your pocket and you can take it anywhere and have access to it anytime.
These platforms mentioned above and many others like them including email, search engines and Skype, have made the world we live in today a truly global village. This is era of globalisation and access to information. Today you have unlimited and unrestricted access to information about anything and everything.
What still amazes me to this day with our young people is their ignorance about world issues. They have access to information but they choose not to learn. They remain ignorant about things that directly affects them and live the responsibility of the future to the old. Young people do not understand that within them lies they keys and answers to world problems and that they not the old are the future of humanity.
Ignorance can not longer be accepted as an excuse for we live in an era of information. Young people remain not interested in any information of value and choose to waste valuable time chatting about nothing rather than reading a book (which you can do online) and developing themselves. Tomorrow will be ruled by those who have information.
Those who have information will manipulate such and rule over those who are ignorant. Africa needs young men and women who will seek information and solutions to our problems. If you don't know anything about our continent then how can you contribute to our development? The answer is you can't. Today these ignorant young needs to be taught to empower themselves with information or we risk having them add to the already burden of ilitracy and poverty.
Young must take responsibility of their learning and understand within them lies the potential to shape their future. If young fail to shape their tomorrow then someone else will. Governments also needs educational system that targets these people and that embraces the changes that information technology has brought into our world.
I'm @PowderBlaq, thanks for reading.
