EDITORIAL - Shallow discourse on youth

WE CONFESS to having some sympathy for youth leaders who last week expressed disaffection with Olivia 'Babsy' Grange's management of the youth portfolio in the Golding administration.

However, Mr Ryan Small and others who threw barbs at Ms Grange at the forum organised by this newspaper must know they did not shower themselves with glory with mere criticism of the minister. There needed to have been more, to which we will return.

First, we place no significant value on the argument by Ms Grange's junior minister, Senator Warren Newby, that he has oversight for youth policy in the Ministry of Youth and Sports and, therefore, his boss should have been spared the attacks. It is Ms Grange who sits in the Cabinet and is accountable to Jamaica for policy related to her portfolio. Ms Grange, therefore, could not hide behind her subordinate - which she has not attempted to do - if, indeed, Mr Newby has been derelict on the job.

We do not suggest that Ms Grange's ministry does nothing to support youth-related programmes, such as the National Youth Service or various sports programmes. Indeed, such initiatives appear to be the primary focus of the ministry, which allows it to deflect criticism of underperformance with complaints about inadequate funding, as Ms Grange and Mr Newby have done.

But neither boss nor subordinate can, on the face of it, claim any great credit for articulation of a deeper and transformative vision for young people in a better Jamaica. If they have, it is a well-kept secret.

This is where we take issue with Mr Small and the chairman of the National Youth Parliament, and others who spoke at last week's forum. According to Mr Small, the youth portfolio was "not being managed properly" by Ms Grange, leading to the "suffering" of young Jamaicans.

But there was not from Mr Small, or André Stephens or Ruth-Ann Lawrence, Jamaica's youth ambassador to the United Nations, any sense of what these problems are or how they might be addressed.

For instance, there was no offering of what might be done about the crisis of an education system from which only a fifth of its secondary school graduates can matriculate to university; or an economy in which nearly 30 per cent of its young jobs seekers are unemployed; or that 45 per cent of its murder victims are under 30 and 67 per cent of its murder accused are in the same age range. Nor did these young leaders have much to say about the debate on rebalancing government spending on education, or the fact that more than 70 per cent of the 8,600 students who receive government students' loans are female.

There was, or rather is, simpering vagueness about things that are wrong and the absence of resources to fix them.

But worse than these young people, it seems to us, is a ministry that has failed to bring coherence to the issues and to engage youth in a credible discourse on them. Perhaps it is a matter that should occupy the mind of Prime Minister Bruce Golding.

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