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“In the little world in which children have their existence,” argues Pip in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, “there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice”. Pip was right. But a strong perception of manifest injustice applies equally to ‘young adults’ as well, as succinctly put by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen who observes, “What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate”.

People react not because they generally strive for a perfectly just world but because they want to remove clear injustices to the extent they can. Remember Tunisia and Egypt? But when they fail to do even that, chaos sets in, which even if it fails in translating into an immediate dramatic grandiose revolution, the ensuing incessant turmoil unfailingly ensures the gradual deconstruction of all semblance of order. And we are witnessing the latter phenomenon right here at home.

Hundreds of millions of Pips walk around haplessly while keenly aware of the manifest injustices plaguing their everyday existence. In a country with 60 percent of its180 million citizens being under 29 years old, and millions more being added every year, one frets visualizing the consequences of a violent popular reaction to the criminal socio-economic injustice. Add to that the harrowing poverty figures and the volatility of the situation is not difficult to fathom. About 72.9 million of our population struggles merely to survive under the poverty line – a staggering 41.2 percent of the total head count. And don’t forget, 60 percent of them are young men and women with endless energy, but limited patience.

Pakistan’s biggest asset is its human capital, which if ignored, is also its greatest threat and may cause it to implode. But do we see any reflection of a realisation of this immense potential, and threat, in our national policymaking? None. Did the currently tabled federal and provincial budgets carry any innovative measures aimed at creating a motivating environment of opportunity and responsibility for the youth? Barely.

We need to engage our youth by refocusing it, giving it a sense of responsibility, and allowing it a meaningful role in participatory democracy. It must be transformed into an agent of socio-economic (and consequently political) change by dovetailing its interests into the economic policy. Micro-finance for youth is needed on a war footing because we are in the midst of a social war with an overwhelmingly young and alarmingly disempowered youth. The mantra of Finance Minister Hafeez Sheikh needs to be micro-finance for the youth. And here’s why.

Lowering the voting age to 18 is meaningless unless the role of the young is meaningfully enhanced. Japan came out of its war-induced recession not through its industrial giants but due to the collective buoyancy of its individual small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The same holds true for South Korea, Germany, China and many other countries. It was no coincidence either, that the bulk of these SMEs were the bold initiatives of young men and women, driven by their unfettered passion and the irrepressible exuberance of youth that loves challenging risks so abhorred by those advanced in years, and with tampered experience. A youth’s business initiative may fail but the youth itself doesn’t. The youth does not fear failures as it has time on its side. And it is this verve that our country needs to build upon.

A national scheme of Youth Loans must be launched to provide small loans of say Rs 500,000 to holders of masters’ degrees and graduates of recognised vocational diploma schools. These loans must be offered at a negligibly low mark up and the collateral must only be the project itself and the personal bond of the initiator. The youth should be asked to present innovative and less-capital intensive ideas, or a reasonable business plan based on an existing need or niche. Moreover, Rs 500,000 is a decent viable startup capital and resources could also be pooled by the budding entrepreneurs to start relatively bigger projects.

All our youth needs is a helping hand and a defining sense of purpose. Surely, many will fail but even if the failure rate is a whopping 40 percent, the remaining 60 percent who do make it will still give us a massive new business class running into hundreds of thousands of young energetic motivated entrepreneurs, who would in turn spawn another wave of similar initiatives. At the same time, we would also deprive the prying negative forces of their fertile recruiting grounds. A few billion rupees spent in this scheme will unquestionably yield a billion times better results than doling out Rs50 billion through the Benazir income-support fund. That arguably has its own merits but our priority must be to teach people how to catch fish rather than handing out the proverbial fish to the hungry.

Of course we must expect the finance ministry mandarins to predict 100 percent failure of this ‘fanciful idea’. But even in such a virtually impossible scenario (ongoing micro-finance projects in Pakistan have already proven it otherwise), these ‘wasted moneys’ would still end in the Pakistani economic cycle, unlike the hundreds of billions stolen by the traditional ‘big dependable business borrowers’ and stashed away in foreign bank accounts.

Last year alone, thanks to the incompetence of our ‘competent’ economic managers, millions of dollars were paid out to foreign lenders as “commitment charges” – the other name for failure. Surely, our youngsters can perform better.

The past bureaucratic policy of excluding the youth, the largest portion of our human capital, from playing a ‘game changing’ role in the nation’s economic endeavours has proven a failure. So what do we have to lose in taking a chance with the segment harbouring the greatest potential, may I ask?

Agreed, a million other things need to be done also for the youth like education and capacity building, but an immediate beginning has to be made somewhere. By empowering the youth, the nation’s ability to cause a sustainable socio-economic change starts early, and equally importantly, the youths’ personal success gets intertwined with that of the society and the country. From being disempowered and disillusioned, the youth becomes a critical stakeholder and guarantor of the system.

Ours is a country having unimaginable youth potential, a country of the future with an uncanny ability to transform and perform beyond expectations. All it needs is one good idea, and half a leader to implement it. The question is: Is Hafeez Sheikh even half the innovative leader he pretends to be?