Watching some placard-carrying Nigerian youths at the gate of the National Assembly with different inscriptions such as, ‘Allow Saraki and Dogara to do their work’, leave the National Assembly alone’ and such like stuff, I was flabbergasted beyond words. Obviously a hired crowd of simpletons, they display acute failure of intelligence quotient to appreciate the age and time we live in. These are youths who should be drivers of the nation, demanding and grabbing their future from the spent force old political order that have siphoned our common patrimony without investment for the future. Watching the buffoonery of these youths with their histrionics, my heart bled as there seem to be no redeeming feature from the dynamic and vibrant section of the population to chase out their tormentors.
Just the same nauseating feelings one gets when you see Nigerian students under their umbrella body of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) roll out drums and confer honours on dubious individuals and minions of government officials who flaunt wealth without credible means of livelihood. They hobnob with governors who deny workers their salaries and run their states like a fiefdom. Our youths have painfully accepted the fate of despondency hoisted on them by a failed generation of political class that do not mean well for Nigeria. Consequently, the ambition of an average youth is to vote with his legs and leave our shores for greener pastures with all the hazards.
In France as in other places in Europe, a relatively unknown party formed in less than two years by a young man of 39 years old, Emmanuel Macron has just won an election and emerged as the President without previous experience. Our leaders are busy telling us that the future lies in Africa while they do nothing to put structures for that romantic future they contemplate. Our political leaders steal the treasury of the nation while the youths who should demand that they pay dearly for it gather and form a wall of defence for the pilfering vermin.
Our leaders go on campaign that we must buy Nigeria but go out to shop for foreign direct investment asking people to come with their advance technology and knowhow to the detriment of our huge number of unemployed youths. At the end of the day, the profits that the foreign investors make are repatriated back to their home countries and metropolis leaving us with the short end of the stick and a ravaged environment.
That the future belongs to the youths is not a universal truth in Nigerian context because the Nigerian youth has refused to take the future and its destiny in his hands. Why would the Nigerian youth not join league with the present government to insist that those who have abused their political offices should be brought to book no matter whose horse is gored? Ours is not a perfect society yet and it is not going to become one soon; so as imperfect as it appears, let every finger that touches oil be scotched.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Nigerians youths and the Labour Unions set the agenda for the government even in the worst of times during the military regimes. But today, Labour and its affiliates have been decimated and what is left of the NANS is a mere trash and political thugs. The Civil Society Organizations of today and NGOs remain opportunistic as ever and have never carried out a progressive and sustained campaign for good governance and accountability. They rather align with political and ethnic tendencies for pecuniary consideration. This is the greatest misfortune for us and it is incontrovertible fact that a nation without ideologically driven youths is bound to perdition.
While other youths of the world are taking over the mantle of leadership and defining the direction of their economies, arts and science, Nigerian youths are engaging in panegyric sycophancy and clapping for thieving public officials. It is a familiar lesson to us that Nigeria started off at independence with dynamic youths with unquestionable intellectual drive and principles dominated with the desire to build a strong nation. Sir Ahmadu Bello, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and their generation of leaders were vibrant energetic youths. The geriatric political dinosaurs ravaging Nigerian landscape today find safe haven because we have indolent youths incapable of defining their role in modern day society and preferring the old order of graft and ethnicity. That is why they will carry drum to garner support for public officials with criminal allegation rather than demand that they come clean of the allegations. This is the reason they have risen in support of those Nigerians whether in business or politics that are facing probes and trial for mind boggling corruption hitherto unknown and unheard of in any sane community.
The Nigerian youths ought to be worried about the current political leadership in this country that make us look like a huge joke to civilized humanity. Look at the quality of representation at the National Assembly; it leaves one to worry whether all our grandstanding about our sophistications is not just an empty cant. You have men who are not able to pass their diplomas, men who cannot separate their personal interest from national goals and ideal. At the state levels, you have chief executive of states who do not have anything ennobling and sublime; talking gibberish like gangsters suffering from verbal diarrhoeal.
The sooner the Nigerian youths come to the realization that the ruling class have no tribe and religion but united in the oppression of the masses, the better for them to get their acts together and demand forcefully for what rightly belongs to them. The stolen money stashed away in septic, soak away pits, overhead tanks and cemetery are money that are meant for infrastructure that would have provided employment for the youths, drugs for our hospitals and teaching aids for our schools. In responsible climes, citizens do not defend corruption perpetrated by political leaders because they are not elected to steal. In South Korea, Brazil and indeed other developing countries, citizens do not only insist that corrupt Presidents be removed but are made to face the wrath of the law for abuse of office. Here in Nigeria, we give puerile and infantile arguments that because other past leaders who had occupied the office were not investigated or tried, the government should not proceed against known cases of abuse. Nigeria cannot grow this way because we have to start from somewhere and nobody is going to do it for us. The Nigerian youths should discover its destiny now and rise to the occasion because all said and done, it is their future that the dying dinosaurs are consuming; this is their chance.
- Kebonkwu Esq writes from Abuja.