A letter to my country; a youthful reflection

A letter to my country; a youthful reflection

"Unity and Innovation for a Smart Zambia" is the 2017 Youth Day Theme.

Today Zambia still relies on the 1996 Science and Technology Policy yet we aspire to be a knowledge based society.

Today Zambia's aspiration is to be "a middle income and prosperous nation by the year 2030"..again this also shows our lack of ambition as a country and as a people.

Zambia was once a middle income country at independence in 1964 and a few years after. So what went wrong?

We need to answer this question and again ask ourselves what is it we are doing different to become what we once were, "a middle income country."

What should be done?

We need to train the youths in essential skills for us to build a competitive, mordern, knowledge based economy and cyberspace that 'll drive an efficient state or an e government and information society. Our univesities and institutions of learning should be centers of excellence to generate knowledge to transform society.

To do this, we need to invest in technology and research for our country to survive this globalised digital economy and increasingly complex geopolitics which our country is no exception.

Any country's best asset are its human resource. Thus it is only by investing in a knowledge economy that our country can create jobs for our youthful population and eradicate poverty.

We need to be pragmatic as a country and stop these mere pronouncements.