Ministers join youth leaders as Somalia marks International Youth Day in Mogadishu

MOGADISHU (SONNA): Somalia has marked International Youth Day with a two day gathering at the Jazeera Palace Hotel in Mogadishu, held by the Ministry of Youth and Sports under the theme Different Contexts, Common Aspirations, with the support of the United Nations Population Fund and the Korea International Cooperation Agency.

Youth and Sports Minister Mohamed Abdikadir Ali told the opening that the theme reaches the actual position of young Somalis. Insecurity, unemployment and other pressures bear on them in different ways, he said, and yet they hold one ambition in common, which is to build a country at peace and developed enough that later generations can take pride in it.

The Minister said the day exists so that countries can set out what young people have achieved and examine what still stands in their way, and that the programme had been assembled over two weeks by the Ministry’s planning, administration and finance departments together with young people who contributed their own views to its design.

The clearest commitments of the two days came from the Chairman of the National Youth Council, Abdikafi Mahmoud. He said the question the country should be asking is not what young people have, but how they can turn what they have into national development, and that Somalia needs to move past describing young people as the future and treat them as leaders in the present.

He said young Somalis hold ideas but lack three things, capital, training and someone to guide them, and that the Council will work with the Ministry to establish a Somali Youth Fund providing investment programmes to support enterprise and job creation, alongside training intended to build the experience and skills young people bring to the country’s development.

His second announcement carried a date attached to it. He undertook that a National Youth Centre would be built in Mogadishu through voluntary contribution rather than by approaching an agency for funding, working with the Ministry and other ministries, and that the aim is to see it completed within this year, serving young people from every region of the country.

The most striking remarks came from the Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation, Mohamed Abdi Hayir, known as Maareeye, and they were not the encouragement that usually fills such occasions. Young people are the flower of the country, he said, and the government is creating opportunities for them, and they should use their strength and their minds to produce.

He then set out what they had not been given. Young people need quality education, support to develop what is in their minds, training they can work from, and an environment that allows them to produce something from their capacity. Somali young people have carried a burden in each of those areas, he said, and it is plain that over the past thirty years they have not received support of that kind in any complete form. Some of the responsibility for that, he said, the government accepts.

A minister conceding a thirty year failure of the state on the day set aside to celebrate the people it failed is not a routine line in a ceremonial speech, and it was made without qualification.

The Minister set his argument against what young Somalis have achieved without such support. Somali athletes are known internationally in distance running, he said, and have reached that standing without the backing he had described. Young Somalis have taken on Africa in commerce with no government behind them at all. The question he put was what could be produced if the missing pieces were supplied.

He also placed young people at the centre of the political change now under way. Elections have been held, he said, and men who once took seats easily now expect to be challenged for them, with the outcome resting on the votes of the young.

The Chairman of the National Youth Council made the same point with figures. Young people, he said, made up the great majority of those elected in the Banaadir local elections, in South West and in Galmudug, and that in his view demonstrates that the federal leadership has opened a way for them.

What the two days demonstrated most plainly, however, was not argued from a platform at all. Two sign language interpreters, a man and a woman, worked in alternation through every speech of the programme, standing beside each speaker in turn. Alternating interpreters is what sustained signing requires, since no interpreter can carry a full programme alone, and their presence across both days was an arrangement someone had planned and paid for rather than a gesture made once for a photograph.

At the same event a young artist named Abdirahman, who is visually impaired, presented work depicting the difficulties facing young Somalis and the situations he perceives in the country around him. The Minister of Youth and Sports described him as a living example that the only obstacle before us is the one we create for ourselves, and said the sight of the mind is stronger than the sight of the eyes.

An event that provided for Somalis who cannot hear while giving its platform to a Somali who cannot see enacted the theme written on the banner behind it more directly than the speeches delivered in front of it. Different contexts, common aspirations is an abstraction until a room is arranged so that people in different circumstances can take part in the same occasion, and that is what was arranged here.

The Director General of the Ministry, Ahmed Yusuf, opening the programme, said the day had been designated by the United Nations so that the world could examine the good examples and the innovations of young people and look again at the obstacles that remain, and thanked the young Somalis whose advice shaped the two days.

What follows now is delivery. A youth fund has been announced without a figure attached, and a national youth centre has been announced with a completion date but without a construction budget. Both will be visible or absent within a year. The Ministry has said young Somalis shaped this programme, and the same young people are in a position to say whether the two commitments made in front of them at the Jazeera Palace Hotel were kept.