Young people have described as unfair the threats by
CABS and CBZ to take legal action against youths who have failed to pay back
loans received under the youth development fund. Some of them argue that merely
allocating the youths money based on their project proposals without assessing
their capacity to run a viable business was a trap for young people.
“The young
people were not capacitated, making the implementation of these projects very
difficult. They ended up misusing the funds,” said Jacqueline Ndlovu a young
woman residing in Mpopoma.
She added
that the Zimbabwean education system was teaching people to be employees and
not employers and that indigenisation and empowerment was being treated as an
event not a process, a point that the Government is missing.
Adding to
that, Ndaba Mloyi, a corporate banker and National Youth Development Trust
(NYDT) board treasurer said; “Unless and until we recognise that the problem
facing SMEs and start-ups is not just money, and then we will always throw
money at them and throw them in jail when they fail to pay back.
He added
that the starting point was to realise that not all young Zimbabweans are
entrepreneurs, and that people without business skills require a lot of
capacitation and hand holding for them to develop the capacity to run
businesses profitably and sustainably.
“Therefore
any program that seeks to empower youths through enterprise development must
start with identifying real entrepreneurs not just unemployed youths with some
project. Once they have been identified, a holistic approach to arm them with
technical and business management skills, in addition to giving them seed
capital, has to be adopted, “ said Mloyi.
He
proposed business incubation as the ideal model for such youth empowerment
projects in Zimbabwe.
Other
young people argued that the amounts given to young people as loans were barely
enough to set up a viable income generation project.
“Honestly how did you expect youths to start and run
a project with $2000? The economy itself was not conducive for new businesses. It
was an unfair political gimmick to lure the youth to a certain political party
so as to use them,” said Lindiwe Maphosa from Gwanda. However other youths argued that vendors were
making a living from capital which is far less than $2 000 and other viable
businesses were probably started with less than that.
Some young people also felt that the failure to pay
back the loans had nothing to do with failed income generation projects but was
a reflection of the culture of impunity that has been embraced in Zimbabwe.
“The cancer of impunity is now raising its ugly
head. The practise has been that individuals take loans from banks and they
never repay. So some youths thought the practice was still the same. I do not
think it’s all about capacity, maybe to a lesser extent but mostly its
patronage and impunity, “said Michael Mdladla Ndiweni from Bulawayo.
“I feel sorry for the poor youths who are now
victims of a system that nurtured them. But I doubt anything will happen to
them. The government will probably encourage them to pay then the issue will
die a natural death,” he added.
