President Paul Kagame has reminded the youths of Rwanda that the future of the country depends on the youth and their commitment to work hard to restore the nations’ dignity, cultural values and seeking solutions to their problems with resilience to any challenge.
Kagame said that this can be attained if the country continues to build on raising children with a good life, a good education and ultimately attain the development which all Rwandans are currently focused at.
He said that all development can be useless if it is not based on the young generation which has to start loving the country at an early age and work for its development as a collective people (nation).
“if we don’t start with youths, whatever we do for growth is baseless because it has no foundation…We don’t want to build baseless things, we want to build things based on a firm foundation which is you-the youth” Kagame emphasized.
President Kagame was addressing over 37,660 fresh high school graduates under a national civic program called ‘Urugerero’, at the second MeethePresident forum held at Petit Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, this June 15, 2013.
He stressed that the reason why Rwandans should focus on building a new Rwanda, starting with the youth, is because the past history of the country was marred by poor upbringing of the young generation- which was involved in the genocide instead of using the energy for nation building and development.
“We have a history of building from nothing. All we had in the past was built on weak foundation- there was poor education and upbringing of children from birth time. “A child grew seeing the neighbor as not important, valueless and enemy” he noted.
However, the president said that he was positive that this will not happen again in Rwanda and the government was supportive of the youth so that they can come up fast to be at the center of the country’s development.
“We don’t want to be in that history again, we instead want to give value to ourselves and to our nation. To share, work together and seek knowledge from these programs. This should be the time to get fertilizers of the mind, to give fertilizers to what we have in the minds. To make it fruitful and harvest something good” he said “If someone slaughters another person, that means this person is incomplete, something is wrong with them and there is no fertilizer given to the mind
“Without these ‘fertilizers’ in the mind and good upbringing means that we are doing nothing – putting bad seeds in you that would bring back what we had in history and grooming no future of the country. But we have gone beyond that and as youths and Children of Rwanda, I would like to see you base your acts on things that will build the country” he stated.
He also reminded the youth that in order to achieve this, it requires discipline and commitment, determination and seeking solutions with patience and not losing focus of the set goals. And also giving value to oneself and the nation so that whoever sees a Rwandan would immediately identify them with qualities of: dignity, discipline, commitment to development, hard work and resilience.
Kagame also called for the need of citizens viewing themselves as Rwandas who know what they want and working for it with pride as Rwandans, and also believing in the possibilities of the desires and aspirations being achievable through hard work and commitment to their individual and national goals.
He said that there is hope and this hope can be made possible by the youth. “You are the youths that will get us to where we want to get and you need to be given hope to be able to attain this goal. We want to give you that hope and that is our roles to give you hope so that you can do this faster and better than us” he said.
“The opportunity is there and you have to use it well so that you build your own country. So you should start early to cultivate this sense of being Rwandan and wanting to get to where we want to…Achieving our goals as a nation depends on you. You are part of the new Rwanda that is focused on the future”
The event was also followed by youths across the country. They have undergone civic training programs through the national service program, commonly known as Intore). They spent seven months working in our local communities building houses for the poorest, building roads, planting trees, helping tackle soil erosion and many other activities and also committed to help stop the spread of HIV/AIDS in their generation!
Morale was in high gear as Urugerero youths waited to meet the president. The president was received amidst applause, jubilation and thunderous chants from the crowd in an electric atmosphere as President Kagame entered the crowd packed stadium.
The biggest issue raised was on education and they asked the president- What is being planned for those who will not continue on to University and raised concerns on the issue of bursaries for students in government institutions.
Kagame said Rwanda is one of the few countries that facilitate education and the government wants to have a balance between both access and quality education so as that everyone can go to school, but noted that the government works within the budget and resources available but also search for home grown solutions- such as the Gacaca courts that worked out well for judicial cases on genocide.
“We are well aware of the challenge & we are concerned about your education but we have to facilitate the poorest. You understand that the funds come from the national budget and the national budget deals with many challenges in all sectors. We are working within our means and we studied in depth this issue, the scholarship categories were created to help those who can’t continue without…We will continue to evaluate to make sure the scholarship categories are getting to those who need it most” he responded.
Kagame thanked the Urugerero youth for their contributions, hard work & for coming to meet him and challenged them- as food for thought- to think of what they can do to make sure that the country continues to move forward.