Haki Sebina is a BScAgric student at Stellenbosch University.
Haki Sebina
This year’s Youth Day will be commemorated under the theme “RESET@50 – The Future Calls”, encouraging young people to help reshape South Africa’s future. However, a country cannot ask its youth to build the future while they are fighting hunger. I am not referring to an abstract hunger for change or progress, but the hunger for food. Throughout my childhood, my peers and I have been reminded of the courage of the youth of 1976. We remember young people who refused to accept a system designed to silence them. We remember their activism. Youth Day is not only a day of remembrance but also a prompt to ask us what kind of country today’s young people have inherited, and whether they have been given the tools to reshape it.
If the future is calling, how can we, the young people, answer? How can a child concentrate in a classroom while hungry? How can a young person innovate, lead, or dream when their body has been deprived of the nutrition it needs to grow? Before we speak about potential, leadership and living up to the great courage of our predecessors, we must speak about the thing that fuels it all—food. The right to food is not built only on morality or dignity, although it is deeply connected to both. It is essential for human life. Food shouldn’t be a luxury, a reward or a privilege, yet today it often is. It is the foundation on which every other opportunity is built. However, this foundation must be secure to be effective.
