Cape Town – Tourism Minsiter Derek Hanekom has urged young people not to let the sacrifices made by the Class of ’76 go in vain.
The Minister said the youth of today should strive to gain as much knowledge as they can in order to take up education and career opportunities in order to make a difference in their lives and the lives of other people.
He said this when he spoke to young people at the Westridge Civic Centre in Mitchells Plain in the Western Cape on Tuesday as part of the commemoration of Youth Day.
“Today is about you and what you do for yourselves to change your own lives.
“There are opportunities here that didn’t exist 39 years ago.
“In 1976, more than 700 young children were shot and killed, and you must ask how do we benefit from the sacrifices that people made during that time?
“[Former President] Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in jail, did he do it for nothing?
“No, you must make sure that those sacrifices were not in vain,” he said.
Minister said this to hundreds of young people in Mitchells Plain as part of nationwide events that saw South Africa reflect on the tragic events of June 16, 1976, where school children were shot dead by security police during what was dubbed the “Soweto uprising”.
At the time, hundreds of black school children lost their lives when they protested in the streets of Soweto against the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in local schools.
President Jacob Zuma led the commemoration of the main event at the Tshwane Events Centre in Pretoria, while several Ministers and Deputy Ministers held local commemorations in their Parliamentary constituencies around the country.
Minister Hanekom, who was arrested together with his wife during a peaceful protests following Soweto uprising, said he was later exiled after he joined many South Africans who felt everything about the apartheid government was wrong.
The Minister said today, young people should grab all the opportunities that he, together with his generation and the generation of President Mandela, did not have.
“A lot of people say youth is about the future, you are the future. Of course you are. But you are also the present, you are here today and it is for you to make the difference today and the difference that you make will determine the future,” he said.
He said young people should not allow themselves to be bullied by the circumstances around them, including the ills that are associated with Mitchells Plain like drugs and gangsterism.
“In fact the majority of the people of Mitchells Plain are decent, good people. So all these decent people of Mitchells Plain should stand up against what we know is wrong. You don’t want to limit yourselves,” he said.
The event was organised by the Mitchells Plain Skills Centre and the Northlink College.
Lisa Tom, 24, from Montana near Gugulethu, is a young commis chef who took up an opportunity to pursue her passion while she studied for something completely unrelated to cooking.
Tom, who now owns her own catering business, said she graduated from the Silwood School of Cookery after she was granted a bursary by the Department of Tourism’s National Youth Chefs Training Programme.
She said she learnt about the programme while searching for bursaries on-line when she was still studying towards an industrial psychology degree at the University of the Western Cape.
The National Youth Chefs Training Programme sponsored Tom, along with several other graduates, with uniform and chef’s knives, and gave them training in the industry.
She is now enrolled for a Consumer Science Food and Nutrition course at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
Speaking during the event, Tom said: “Thank you so much to the department. To you it might just be a sponsorship but to us it is a big thing in our lives. I am not speaking only but for the students who took part in this programme who say it has changed their lives,” she said. – SAnews.gov.za
