National Youth Service Training - 'Shaping youths in a truly Zimbabwean manner'

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Abstract:

Behind the mask of a programme bearing the innocuous title “national youth service training” lurks a pernicious evil that threatens not only to destroy the nation’s youth but also to subvert many of the core Christian values upon which the nation was built. It is the great merit of this report that it tears off this mask and exposes to full view the inner workings of this scheme. With the publication of this report no longer will there be any possible justification for the old excuse “I didn’t know”, whether coming from a Zimbabwean or the international community.

The national youth service training programme masquerades as a youth training scheme that imparts useful skills and patriotic values. As this well-documented report makes clear, nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality is a paramilitary training programme for Zimbabwe’s youth with the clear aim of inculcating blatantly antidemocratic, racist and xenophobic attitudes. The youth militias so created are used as instruments of the ruling party, to maintain their hold on power by whatever means necessary, including torture, rape, murder and arson. Having been thoroughly brain -washed, the youth militias are deployed to carry out whatever instructions they receive from their political commissars, on the understanding that they will never be called to account by this regime for any of their deeds. The report details the use of the militias by those who control them to carry forward the ZANU-PF political agenda in everything from manipulating election results to controlling the food distribution process to the party’s advantage.