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The problem of youth empowerment

President Mahinda Rajapakse was addressing his mind to an unrectified, decades - long power imbalance in this country when he said that he intended creating an environment which would enable even rural youngsters to become Prime Ministers and Presidents of Sri Lanka.

With this observation the President has identified one of the root causes of the political turmoil this country has been heir to in its post-independence years. We have already had two extremely bloody youth upheavals in Southern Sri Lanka and one that is continuing to rankle in the country's North-East, which we hope would soon be resolved by political means.

The stark fact is that youth frustrations have been mounting in this country since the early Seventies and such dangerous disgruntlement has been no respecter of regional and ethnic boundaries. Unfortunately, the problem of defeated youth aspirations in the North-East has been further compounded by the country's ethnic tensions.

Needless to say, political power is the key to the fulfilment of the people's aspirations and this is the reason why we are badly in need of a system of government which would be more democratic and inclusive to enable deprived sections, such as our youth and ethnic minorities, to fulfil their basic aspirations and ideals.

This is unfinished business. If we possessed a system of government which met the power aspirations of all sections of the people, rampant political violence would not be a fact of life in this country today. The point is unavoidable that we still do not possess a governance structure which addresses the key concerns of particularly deprived sections of local society.

This is a question of State restructuring and we hope President Rajapakse would endure on this path of establishing a polity which would be fully responsive to the needs of all sections of the people.

The youth in particular need to have a degree of faith in the democratic way of life. Their unhappy experience a few years after independence was that, although we possessed democratic institutions, these were proving ineffective in securing for them their basic needs, such as, suitable employment.

Nor were they generating in our youngsters a sense of self-worth. On the contrary, the country's governance structures were manned, essentially, by a self-serving power elite which was largely insensitive to the aspirations of our youth.

It was only a matter of time before mounting frustrations reached fever pitch and erupted in volcanic youth violence; first in the South and later in the North. It was in response to these phenomenal bouts of youth-centred violence that a commission was established by the State in the early Nineties with the principal aim of locating the causes of such violence and recommending remedial measures to it.

One of the commission's recommendations was that a greater number of the country's youth should be enabled to contest elections at all levels of governance.

Close on the heels of these recommendations, electoral regulations were changed to enable more of our youth to vie for public office.

However, what needs to be also addressed is the problem of empowering the deprived and the marginalised.

The challenge is to sufficiently democratize our governance structure to enable the more deprived and powerless sections of our youth to vie successfully for public office. This is the task before President Rajapakse and we hope he would be in a position to cut this Gordian Knot in local governance.

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