By Teboho Serutla
The #Bachashutdown Movement has come out guns blazing, demanding to know why the minister of gender and youth, sports and recreation, Likeleli Tampane is still in office despite what they call ‘her glaring incompetence’.
This after the youth wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office on June 21, 2021, requesting him to exercise the power vested in him to redeploy or dismiss Tampane from the ministry with immediate effect, and initiate visible and tangible steps to implementation the Youth Stimulus Employment Programme.
“To our dismay, we have not received a reply from the Prime Minister’s esteemed office. Also as a follow up, the youth are seeking clarity from the PM’s Office regarding a progress report on the implementing of the Youth Stimulus Employment Programme as per our agreement.
“The youth would like to bring to the Prime Minister’s attention that your economic advisor, Maluke Letete, informed us that the initiative is now on your desk and awaits implementation, hence all the follow-ups should be done through your office.
“We expect the programme to be running in two weeks from now, because youth unemployment is a crisis and remains a ticking time bomb which lands many youths into an assortment of juvenile delinquencies and exploitations. We request a response within four working days,” the youth said in a strongly worded letter dated June 30 2021.
The #BachaShudown – a brainchild of the Transform Lesotho Initiative (TLI) – is an ‘exercise of the youth’s rights and responsibilities as citizens of Lesotho’.
The TLI has always been vocal in its criticism of the authorities for stripping away the dignity of the youth. It believes that everyone in Lesotho has the right to have their dignity protected and respected. They also have the right to be heard and the responsibility to hold public office bearers to account.
It has in the past staged protests which saw the youth of Lesotho to take a stand against exclusion and unemployment. In a previous statement, TLI has decried ‘reluctance to implement the National Youth Policy and create a National Youth Council’, which it argued was evidence of this exclusion. It insisted that implementing the policy and setting up a youth council would allow for formal youth representation in national decision making bodies.
“The high and rapidly rising unemployment is not only depriving us of a livelihood, but it is the cause of our depression, substance abuse, and other toxic coping mechanisms that render us helpless and oftentimes lead to our demise”.
The #Bachashutdown protests have been described as an indication that the country could indeed be sitting on a time-bomb. Young people have been disproportionately affected by the unemployment crisis. This trend has worsened earlier challenges and there is a concern that unless action is taken, the situation will be unsustainable, threatening social cohesion. Lesotho’s youth unemployment rate, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for 2019, was estimated at 33.68 percent.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 2020 Assessment of the socio-economic impact of Covid-19 report revealed that unemployment is high and persistent. It is estimated at 32.8 percent. The assessment also revealed that unemployment was even higher among youths aged between 15 and 24, at 43.2 percent; an estimated that 39.7 percent of employed Basotho live on less than US$1.90 a day (38.8 percent women, 40.4 percent male and 46.6 percent for those aged 15–24).
