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The major effort now in progress to round up dealers and pushers of illegal drugs, and to force bottle stores, bars and night clubs to obey the law about those under 18, while necessary and deserving of maximum support should not blind us about the virtues of so many young people.

Of course there are youths who abuse alcohol and buy and use illegal drugs, and the number is probably rising as it becomes easier to buy drugs, so we need to take action, both to round up the dealers as well as persuade youngsters not to wreck their lives in the drug world. 

But we should not smear everyone who is young with the title of drug user, and those who have anything to do with many of our young people will probably agree that while those who need help to get out of danger of addiction are a significant minority, they are still a minority. 

The majority of our young people are generally well-focused young adults who want to further their education and training and get stuck into making a decent living, preferably doing something they enjoy and are good at.

We see so many examples of this, very hard working students living in fairly basic accommodation as they study to get the diplomas and degrees that will open doors into a better future, those thousands of young men and women who go through training in farming skills, so they can either take over the management of their family farm from elderly parents or hope to get their own farm in the next batch of allocations.

There are so many, and those who have the job of training and guiding them are finding that we have a lot more clear-headed young people who are keen on taking advantage of what is available to build their lives and earn their successes.

And these are not drug-induced dreams, but serious calculations. 

They will learn from those they think have something to offer, but then they want to build on that, and that is how we advance, each generation moving beyond what came before.

Newspapers are continuing writing about the successes of so many young people. 

In today’s edition, we have the latest, a group of four sixth formers from Maranatha Christian High School who developed an app that works on a mobile phone to help learners cope with disruptions such as Covid-19. 

Their school beat the rest of Zimbabwe schools in the local innovation competition, so they went to the African finals.

They beat the rest of Africa, and went to the world finals, one team from each continent, and they won again.

And they are going to use their US$15 000 prize to capitalise their new company, rather than squander it. 

They want to build their own business. We expect they will succeed.

There are, of course, those who have given up, and now hide the pain by taking drugs or getting drunk as often as possible, but we do not seem as a majority, but we do see them as people who need help and need to recognise that they need another go at a decent life.

We need to also recognise that even the best young people are not stuffed dummies accepting everything they are told. 

From the start of agriculture young people have experimented a bit with alcohol.

Most find out where their limits are, often the hard way, and then remain within those limits. But the odd party drinking is hardly gross abuse of alcohol, and we just hope their experiments are within a fairly safe environment.

A smaller group go a little further and try out an mbanje cigarette at some stage.

It rarely goes further and many reckon it is a bit daft. But again the majority of those who experiment are not going to become an addict, just as a majority of those who have the odd drink are not going to become an alcoholic.

So we need to be careful when we warn the young and when we describe the young, that we do not look upon the new generation as a bunch of no-hope alcohol and drug abusers rather than what they are, probably the best-educated and most skilled generation so far of Zimbabweans, with a great deal more innovative ideas and entrepreneurial attitudes than many before them.

And our approach needs to take all that into account. They are pushing back and they tend to be more intolerant of cant and hypocrisy than earlier generations.

Of course we can do what we can to protect them, such as the enforcement of age limits for alcohol and even then safe environments when they try more than one drink at a party.

We can make it harder for drug pushers to reach them, by taking more drug pushers off the street. 

But in the end we have to hope that we made a good job in our families and schools of bringing them up properly so they can see the stupidity of surrendering to drugs and alcohol. If there is little demand for illegal substances there is little in the way of selling.

We also have to realise that most alcoholics, the serious alcohol addicts, are middle-aged and elderly, although we agree there are some young people who seem determined to join their ranks. 

Many of those who smoke mbanje and take crystal meth are well out of the youth age groups, so it is not just the youth who are in danger. It is all of us. 

And since young people dislike someone who overdoes the alcohol lecturing them, we perhaps need to think about our own lifestyles when we discuss the dangers of the modern world. 

In other words we think a lot of the programmes we want to develop need to be developed with the young people, rather than for the young people.

They have their innovators, they have their leaders, they have the majority who are decent people who want to move forward. 

They have some casualties and perhaps the best schemes would be other youth encouraging those casualties to seek help and get clean. 

In many ways we can trust the majority of our youth, and perhaps we should.