A cross-section of the youth in Wau town in Western Bahr el Ghazal State have denounced the prevailing gang culture and violence and said they want to be productive members of the society.
The youth representatives were speaking on Tuesday at the Wau Youth Center during a youth leadership consultative forum organized by a local NGO, Agriculture Youth Action Development Agency (AYADA), which is supported by UNDP.
AYADA’s Executive Director Okello James said the consultative forum aims to collect views from youth on how his organization and developmental partners can help them.
“The reason we are conducting this consultative forum is to create a conducive environment for youth groups to express their needs with the aim of reaching consensus on what can be done to create opportunities for their groups,” he said.
Kerubino Mario, one of the youth representatives, said many youths have joined gangs due to the lack of jobs.
“80 percent of the youth are jobless and we are just struggling in the town with some pushing wheelbarrows to survive,” he explained. “Secondly, some youths are homeless. In the villages where we come from, we have nothing to eat and that is why we moved to town.”
Mario said some youths formed a group to discuss their predicament and decided that they should interact freely disregarding where they hailed from.
“We formed a group to brainstorm and understand ourselves so that we can overcome tribal conflict. If I am a Dinka, I should make friends and associate with the rest of the tribes in Wau and South Sudan,” he said. “We decided to interact and make friends across the tribal divide and now you will find youths from different tribes sharing rooms and those with a little money even got to school. We have a spirit of peace and will not let Wau town down band our parents should be proud of us because we are not spoilt kids.”
“Today we came to tell them that we are not for violence but for peace,” Mario added.
Meanwhile, the state chairman of the National Youth Union, David Lawrence, reiterated that the biggest challenge the youth are facing is the lack of jobs.
“Most of the challenges we face arise from lack of jobs. When a person has no job, they end up on the street where they can create problems or they resort to alcohol which is an additional problem,” he said. “My message to the UN agencies is that we need long-term projects.”
According to Lawrence, last year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) together with Community Empowerment for Progress Organization (CEPO), introduced a cash-for-work program to support the youth in Wau but there was no follow-up on the project.
“There was a cash-for-work project last year and we thank the organizations that supported us but there was nothing that followed,” he said. “They did not follow up to find out if the youth gained.”
On her part, the director general in the state ministry of youth and sports, Mary Gabriel, tasked the youth to be job-creators and desist from taking alcohol.
“I have heard that many youths joined gangs because they lack jobs. As a youth, you have to create yourself a job. There are master’s degree holders and some are doctors who have no jobs,” she said. “Some of your sisters are making tea and some of your brothers are doing carpentry yet they have university degrees but have no jobs. That is why they created jobs till they get other opportunities.”