THE Zanu PF administration has pledged to extend a $2,5 million loan facility to graduates of its National Youth Service (NYS) programme to start their own self-help projects.
By Simon Phiri
Addressing guests an NYS graduation ceremony in Zvishavane last week, Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment minister Patrick Zhuwao said the fund will also benefit vocational training centres countrywide.
“I’m convinced that this was an effective package, which should now place the graduands in line for beneficiation under one of the three windows of the localised empowerment acceleration facility. The $2.5 million youth alumni facility, that I will soon launch, will help capacitate the National Youth Service and vocational training centre graduates to establish their own enterprises,” he said.
“The current National Youth Service training concept is based on a holistic approach that combines practical lifelong skills training with national orientation, and entrepreneurial education and training. It exposes trainees to citizenship education, livelihoods training and the designing of income generating projects.”
The NYS graduates have reportedly often been used by the ruling Zanu PF to unleash terror on opposition activists during election campaigns.
The concept is a brainchild of the late Youth minister Border Gezi, who recruited and inculcated Zanu PF ideologies into youths countrywide.
Zanu PF last year resolved to re-introduce the programme in a bid to create a “patriotic youth” at all critical levels.
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“What we are working towards is an inclusive, integrated National Youth Service training programme, which is compulsory to all youth at critical development intervals, that is, from early childhood, after Grade 7, after ‘O’ Level, ‘A’ Level and prior to entry into higher learning,” Zhuwao said.
“It’s the programmes requirement that anyone seeking for employment in future should have gone through NYS orientation and training.”
