Location

President of Tanzania calls African youth unemployment a security threat, asks for international help

In a speech to the UN General Assembly yesterday, Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete called youth unemployment in his region a security threat, despite improving security conditions in his region of late, with neighboring Burundi finally having settled its civil war.

Of unemployed young people, who make up 37 percent of Africa's population and 60 percent of its unemployed, Kikwete said:

They easily fall prey to war lords, criminal gangs and political manipulators to the detriment of peace and stability in their countries.

He went on to say that Africa can only face this problem with the help of the international community, calling for fundamental reforms in "underlying assumptions."

History is replete with illustrations of how nations, immersed in crises, changed the underlying assumptions by which they acted, and created new institutions and tools to solve problems, and emerged from the process as stronger societies.

The speech lacked specifics on what new institutions and tools might be created to solve the African youth unemployment problem or the unemployment problem in general, but the sentiment is correct. Only a true multilateralism will begin to provide the resources necessary to address adequately the many problems our world faces.

These problems are all connected. Youth unemployment in Africa is rooted in the same fundamental problem as middle class unemployment in Michigan: capital is not being deployed properly, and money is concentrated in too few hands for it to circulate properly.

New tools and institutions, anyone?