This year, we mark 50 years since June 16, 1976.

You know this history.

But today we are not recounting it for the sake of remembrance.

We are recounting it to ask you an honest, uncomfortable and overdue question.

So stay with us.

Look at that photograph again.

Really look at it.

Mbuyisa Makhubu — running, arms full, carrying a dying child through the dust of Orlando West toward a car he hoped could still save a life. He was nineteen years old.

Hector Pieterson — limp, bleeding, twelve years old, shot dead on a school street before he had lived long enough to know what he was dying for. He only knew it was worth it.

Antoinette Pieterson-Sithole — running alongside them, mouth open in a scream that became a photograph that became history. She was seventeen. She has been carrying that day for fifty years, being the only person still alive from that photograph.

These were not trained activists.

They were not graduates of a leadership development programme.

No NGO had empowered them.

No SETA had issued them a certificate of job readiness.

No government department had designed a learnership for their development.

They were children.

Children of the same streets, some of you walked everyday.

They had no external support structure.

No funder.

No budget.

No institutional backing.

No theory of change was written for them by a consultant from a suburb.

They had each other.

They had clarity about what was wrong.

They had intelligence that no system had been able to destroy despite its best efforts.

They had fury that had been refined by lived experience into something precise and purposeful.

And they had a fierce, uncompromising love for their community, their people, and a country that had not yet decided to deserve them.

From inside all of that, with all of that and nothing more, they developed themselves.

And then they went out.

And they changed everything.

Fifty years later.

You, their children, their grandchildren, the inheritors of those streets and that sacrifice, are living with this:

Certificate after certificate from training programme after training programme with no sustained income to show.

Community after community promised development, delivered dependency, and left exactly where it was found.

These are not numbers.

These are names.

These are people.

These are the grandchildren of Soweto 1976, sitting at home in the same townships, the same peri-urban settlements, the same rural areas, with the same hunger, the same intelligence, and the same fire as the generation whose photographs hang in museums.

This is YOU.

The country owes you an honest accounting.

Not a commemorative event.

Not an official wreath-laying ceremony with a ministerial speech that will be forgotten before the flowers wilt.

Not another scorecard-based programme delivery report showing the government met its quantity targets while the youth unemployment rate climbed.

Not another launch of another policy framework for another initiative that will not be evaluated and will not be renewed, and will not call you to ask if it helped.

The country owes you a youth development system that actually works.

One designed by people who understand your reality, not by people who visit it once in three years.

One governed by people accountable to your community, not by people accountable to funders and political principals who have never walked your streets.

One measured by what changes in your life, not by what looks good in a quarterly progress report submitted to a department that stopped tracking you the day the programme ended.

That is what fifty years demands.

That is what the grandchildren of June 16 are owed.

Before we go further, we need to say something that should not need to be said.

You did not break this.

The economic crisis you are living in was not created by you.

The load-shedding years that broke businesses and destroyed livelihoods before you were old enough to own one, not you.

The so-called selective state capture that collapsed institutions that should have been building your future, not you.

The infrastructure collapse, the failing municipalities, the looted SOEs, the corruption that consumed the resources meant for your development before you were old enough to vote, none of it was your fault.

Austerity measures are preached to the youth as if they’re the cause; NO, young people are the victims of this austerity, and no young person should allow the government to utter a single word about the austerity measures when they have to deliver services to them.

These measures are meant for irresponsible adults and not the youth.

The youth deserves better.

You were children when those decisions were made.

You were in classrooms or trying to be something when the state was being ransacked by people who are still drawing salaries and pensions from the wreckage they left behind.

You inherited a damaged economy with a $6 trillion national debt that you will be expected to pay for your entire life.

You will be handed an empty shell in the form of a government.

You are navigating a system that failed you and being told, implicitly, that the failure is yours.

It is not.

This is a lie.

You are not responsible for this crisis.

But because history has always worked this way, you are the ones who will have to respond to it.

Not because it is fair.

Because it is yours.

Because you are the ones with the most to build from the ashes.

Because the generation of 1976 also inherited a system they did not break and they refused to be defined by it.

Next week:

While you navigate this crisis, while 10.6 million of your peers are outside the Labour Force today, we need to talk about what your government is actually busy with.

It is not building a new architecture for youth employment.

We are going to name it directly, in full, without softening.

Because fifty years of youth's sacrifice demand nothing less.