Richard Oware retweetet
Barely three weeks ago, I published the following piece in French and spoke about how African governments gaslight their youth , promising them that education is the path out of poverty, then creating no job opportunities, and telling them their failure is a result of their laziness.
And today, I stumble on this comment made by Ghanaian MP.
Here’s the translated article:
Growing up in most of our African countries, fundamentally impoverished, means hearing one simple message: to live with dignity and escape poverty, the clear path is education. Not just any type of education: the academic one. Parents invest everything they have: time, money, hope, into their children’s schooling, convinced that it is the key to freedom and the way out of misery.
They sacrifice themselves, pay for private lessons, hire tutors, sometimes at the cost of their own survival, stretching every resource, in the hope that one day this investment will bear fruit. The promise made to the youths is simple: work hard, focus on your studies, and the world will open up to you.
But the world, in these countries, is not built to receive these efforts. Schools are often broken, incapable of functioning properly. Teachers go on strike for lack of pay. Infrastructure crumbles. After years of effort, the child, now an adult, emerges with a diploma in hand.
And then comes the brutal reckoning: no jobs. The market is saturated and these young people sometimes find themselves learning a trade, work once reserved for those who had “failed” at school. The skills once deemed inferior become their only refuge.
This is where the psychological manipulation begins, what is known in English as gaslighting. The system has betrayed them, because the state failed to create the necessary opportunities. It now seeks to make them believe that their failure is personal. They are told, repeatedly, that it is not the government’s job to employ them, that their difficulty finding work is the result of their laziness, lack of creativity and that true success lies in entrepreneurship: they must “create their own opportunities.”
Entrepreneurship, presented as emancipatory, is often nothing but a veil. It conceals a structural failure and transfers the weight of the system’s collapse onto the shoulders of young people who were promised the world if they followed the rules. The narrative is so skillfully crafted that it sounds like wisdom. It urges them to work hard, be self-reliant, take charge of their own lives.
But behind this illusion lies a cruelty that dares not speak its name. The failure is not theirs alone; it belongs equally to the society and to the state itself. We live in a world where injustice hides behind the language of personal development. To survive, young people must carry the weight of a state that cannot or will not support them. Many do so, in silence, believing they have failed when in fact they have simply been betrayed.
The bankruptcy of the state and the betrayal of trust can no longer remain invisible. We must fight for a society where education is not a gamble on hope but a genuine bridge to opportunity, where governments build real pathways for their citizens to prosper, and where young people are no longer blamed for a system that crushes them. One that was never designed to ensure their flourishing.
Farida Bemba Nabourema, A Disillusioned African Citizen!
GHOne TV@ghonetv
Young Ghanaians should start looking at entrepreneurship as a way out of unemployment... - Francis-Xavier Sosu (Madina MP) #GHOneNews #EIBNetwork #GHOneTV #NewsAlert
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