For the disparaged Nigerian youth

During his recent visit to the United Kingdom for the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), President Muhammadu Buhari painted what many in Nigeria and outside Nigeria consider a false image of the Nigerian youth. The president had said that a lot of Nigerian youths are uneducated, do not want to work and are only content with claiming that Nigeria’s status as oil producing country entitles them to some free money. The backlash which the president’s remark attracted was instantaneous and global.

To defray the attack on the president, Mr Femi Adesina, the Senior Special Assistant to the president on media, easily found an easy straw in the opposition. He accused them of misinterpreting the president’s statement and of using words the president did not use in order to deceive the people and incite the youths against the president.

Most of the president’s supporters till today hold on to the confusion introduced by Adesina in his bid to defend the president. Like Femi, they easily point out that the president did not imply all Nigerian youths. The also say that the president did not use the word lazy in describing the youths. The observation of critics that the difference which they wish to introduce in the discourse is nothing but the type that exists between six and half a dozen, means nothing to the president’s supporters.

But President Buhari settled the matter himself. This time, in the United States of America. In an apparent attempt to set the records straight President Buhari said his earlier statement that the Nigerian youths are uneducated, lazy, and with over-sized sense of entitlement was meant as a description of the Northern Nigerian youths. I can deduce some reasons why the president made the Northern Nigerian youths scapegoats of his statements. One, the Southern Nigerian youths coordinated the criticisms against the president. Thus, in order to make them sheath their swords and secure his peace, the president has to remove them from the basket of lazy Nigerian youths.

Two, while the President seemed so sure of the votes of the Northern youths (remember he said he had Kano the most populated Nigerian state in his electoral pocket), he does not need to lose the support of the Southern youths whose votes, no matter how small, will be needed to achieve success in the upcoming election. But these reasons are far from being the kernel of this write-up.

I am concerned more about painting a true image of the Nigerian youth as I see it. From my lens, the Nigerian youth is that young person thrust into the world against whom all the odds are stacked, and on whose shoulder lies a mountain of expectation. He is born into a country where the average life expectancy is 53.4 years for a male and 55.6 for a female. What this means is that most Nigerian youths likely lost one or two of their parents before they reach the age of adolescence. In a country without any form of social welfare, some of them found themselves in the streets, the motor parks, and coven of criminals.

The few lucky ones find themselves in the house of some distant relatives who turn them into servants where they are availed with living conditions far below the minimum standard. These lucky ones among these lots end up in schools, public schools of course. While in school, they discover so early that their teachers have refused to teach them for some months because the government has not paid them owed allowances and salaries.

Since they have plenty time in their hands, they begin to associate with their out of school peers; those in the motor parks and the streets. The exchange of ideas that is consequence of this peer to peer relation explains why even the Nigerian youths in school engage in the same type of social ills as the uneducated ones. Belonging to cult group is an example of what the educated youth brings to the table which he makes his uneducated counterpart to imbibe. Abuse of drug is what the uneducated one passes on to his educated colleague.

While this is on, the luckier ones who had their two parents or even one of them to guide them end up in the university. They struggle through thick and thin to make the best out of an educational system that is rigged against them. And he does this with the full hope that his education is his pathway to an assured future. When this hope is dashed after graduation as a result of unemployment and lack of economic leverage for financial self-empowerment, he finds himself engaged in the most dangerous race for survival. He engages in crime. If he is not a drug pusher, he is an armed robber, a kidnapper, a militant and so on.

The society thinks they are irritating. But they are not. They are its creatures. When it wants to raise its voice to condemn them, voices of the luckiest ones among them who triumphed in spite of the odds erupt in revolution. “Blame them not for what you have made them. They were good. You made them bad.” Whoever that wants to raise his voice against this is easily confronted by the success stories of many Nigerian youths who triumphed in foreign lands.

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