Youth Minister Moses Mawere says it was not true that government is only concentrating on empowering youths who are aligned to the PF, arguing that even youths from areas where the party performed badly in the 2016 elections are being empowered.

In an interview on the sidelines of the 2019 Youth Day Celebrations, Tuesday, Mawere said the PF was not selective when rolling out development programmes.

“It is not true that we are only empowering youths from the PF, and you as the media should help us to kill that propaganda. Because there are regions where we were not voted very well but we are taking development there, so what does that mean? It means that we are not selective in terms of who to empower, we are in government right now, we have a mandate from Zambians to develop them and help them. SO we cannot lower ourselves to the levels where we go on partisan lines, we are going to grow this country together and politics will come in 2021, the Zambian people will see what we would have already done for them. So that insinuation that we are just targeting one group, is not true. We are a government for everyone and the President has mentioned from time to time that he is the president for every Zambian, not just a small group of people,” Mawere said.

And Mawere said government was happy that youths turned up in huge numbers to celebrate their day despite some people spreading falsehood that the celebrations had been cancelled.

“We are very happy as government that the youths turned up in large numbers despite ill intended people who wanted to sabotage this day by giving falsehoods that there was no youth day celebrations today. What we expect is that young people should take up the mantle now, they liberated this country in terms of political liberation, now we want them to liberate us economically. So that’s why you have seen that we are opening up as government, we want to create an enabling environment for them to be able to explore and reach their full potential economically. We want them to be the drivers of this economy, we want the young people to be unlimited and that’s the reason we came up with the theme ‘unlimited.’ They are very much unlimited in their thinking and whatever they do,” Mawere said.

Meanwhile, Mawere said government could not create employment for all youths without their involvement.

“We want together with youths to create employment for ourselves because we have realised that the government alone cannot create employment for all the youths. What we want is to engage the youths together with the corperating partners to ensure that the youths take up the business opportunities which are around, not only leaving them to foreigngers, so that they are able to create opportunities for others as well. SO together, we will continue working together. We will not sit and plan for them, we will plan together,” said Mower.