??You are not the leaders of tomorrow. That phrase is a lullaby meant to quiet your present urgency. You are leaders of now. The present belongs to you, not in waiting rooms or future promises, but in classrooms, kitchens, communities, and conflict zones. Do not inherit this world quietly. This is the message from Dr Armand Bam of Stellenbosch Business School to the youth of South Africa, shared in an opinion piece for the Mail & Guardian in celebration of Youth Month.
- Read the original article below or click here for the piece as published.
Dr Armand Bam*
The world is not on fire. That would be too generous. Fire transforms; it clears the way for rebirth. What we're living through is slower, more insidious, a kind of moral rot, where creation happens without care, and power thrives without responsibility.
Around us, a new world is being assembled piece by piece, stitched together by technology, economic systems, weapons, and algorithms. But like all creations built in haste and hubris, this one carries a haunting cost. The powerful build, but they do not stay to tend the consequences. They walk away from the wreckage they cause, cloaked in titles and protocols, while others, often the young and the marginalised, inherit the debris.
We were promised progress. Instead, we got surveillance packaged as convenience. We were promised global cooperation. Instead, we got war livestreamed with hashtags. We were told we live in the most connected moment in human history. But when genocide unfolds in real time, when an entire people is reduced to rubble and mourning we are asked to see “both sides," to perform neutrality, to scroll on.
Children die beneath collapsed homes while world leaders speak in the passive voice. Responsibility is dismembered and scattered. The hands that built the monster now pretend it's someone else's.
But this isn't only about Gaza, though Gaza bleeds. It is about how global leadership has become a theatre of denial. In the West, truth is algorithmic, outrage selective, and memory short. In the East, new empires rise, often replicating the silence and suppression they once condemned. And in South Africa, our home, we too have begun building without conscience.
We, who know the cost of inhumanity. We, whose history was shaped by resistance, are now becoming indifferent architects of inequality. Our children sit in overcrowded classrooms, while those in power debate procurement policies. Public healthcare collapses while political insiders fly to private hospitals. We speak of transformation, but our institutions remain hostile to the very people they claim to uplift. Our rhetoric is revolutionary, but our outcomes are betrayal.
We have become creators of systems without souls.
Leadership today mirrors a familiar story: the pursuit of power or knowledge without the burden of responsibility. A world built to serve its makers, not its people. A world where the youth, born into a chaos they did not choose are asked to fix what they did not break.
To the youth: This is the truth they won't teach you in leadership seminars. The world you're inheriting has been constructed by those who valued ambition over ethics, innovation over inclusion. You are expected to adapt to systems designed to exclude you. To survive without questioning the structure.
But you must question it. Loudly. Radically. Consistently.
As I am reminded by my own child: You are not the leaders of tomorrow. That phrase is a lullaby meant to quiet your present urgency. You are leaders of now. The present belongs to you, not in waiting rooms or future promises, but in classrooms, kitchens, communities, and conflict zones.
Do not inherit this world quietly.
Refuse to be cast in the role of silent witness to other people's destruction. Refuse to call cruelty “policy." Refuse to mistake technological advancement for moral progress. The machines may get smarter. But what of the humans?
You will be told to be rational. Be reasonable. But reason without justice is cowardice dressed in logic. You will be told that the world is complicated. That is their excuse for inaction. Complexity is no justification for complicity.
So build differently.
Do not be the new version of the old world. Build with memory. Build with compassion. Build knowing that every system you touch has a story, some filled with ghosts, others with blood. Build with the courage to stop walking away.
Because history is not a hashtag. It is a mirror. And it is asking you: what will you do with this broken creation?
- Photo by Stefan Els (Corporate Communication and Marketing Division)
*Dr Armand Bam is Head of Social Impact at Stellenbosch Business School at Stellenbosch 肆客足球.
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