Every day we gnash our teeth. Every day we wish to play Andrew and check out. By ‘we’, I mean the youths. We are an angry generation. We feel the generations before us, especially the immediate past, have failed us.
This feeling of frustration led rights activists such as Samson Itodo, the Executive Director of YIAGA Africa, to work assiduously for the actualisation of the Not Too Young To Run bill. His team worked with Tony Nwulu in the House of Representatives and AbdulAziz Nyako in the Senate to get sections 65, 106, 131, 177 of the Constitution altered. The alterations were meant to reduce the age of running for elective positions for House of Assembly and House of Representatives from 30 years to 25 years, Senate and Governorship from 35 years to 30 years and office of the President from 40 to 30.
Itodo and his team made many an advocacy visit, including to Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, between May 2016 and mid-2018 when President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the bill. The National Assembly, however, refused to reduce the age for governorship and National Assembly membership. That notwithstanding, not a few felt a milestone was recorded.
Like young people who felt the need for the alterations in the Constitution for them to have a pride of place in the leadership chamber, women have also been complaining of low representation. A paper delivered by Nse Etim Akpan of the Department of Political Science, Federal University Wukari, Taraba State titled ‘Men without Women: An analysis of the 2015 General Elections in Nigeria’ shows that women are under-represented.
Women, Akpan said, do not often receive the support and mentoring they need to compete with their male counterparts in politics. The researcher added that even voters do not fully appreciate the benefits of having a mix of men and women in government. The percentage of women’s participation in elective positions, Akpan found out, nose-dived from 2007 to 2011 and now 2015.
My grouse about all of these is that women and youths and women have the figures to call the shot, if only they will unite. Statistics released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) supports this. The breakdown of the 84,004,084 registered voters shows that female voters constitute 47.14 per cent, which is 39,598,645 voters; male voters constitute 52.85 per cent, which is 44,405,439 voters. Youths between ages 18 and 35 constitute 51.11 per cent, which is 42,938,458 voters. Those between 36 and 50 constitute 29.97 per cent, which is 25,176,144. Those between 51 and 70 constitute 15.22 per cent, which amounted to 3,100,971 voters. The septuagenarians and above constitute 3.69 per cent, which is 3,100,971 voters.
The youths, especially, are not using their power. Many rather become tools for the same generation they are complaining about to keep themselves out of power.
In the current electioneering, young people have been helping politicians to use fake news as weapons against their opponents. So bad is the situation that Osinbajo and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka recently called for criminalisation of fake news. For Soyinka, fake news has the capacity to cause the Third World War.
They spoke in Abuja yesterday at the BBC Conference, on Nigeria 2019: Countering Fake News.
Osinbajo at the conference on Nigeria 2019: Countering Fake News painted a picture of the destructive power of fake news, which he said has the capacity to cause personal harm and lead to violence.
“I have also been a victim,” Osinbajo said, adding: “Fake news may also cause you marital peace. About three weeks ago I got a call from my wife in the office and she said, Yemi what are you doing with strippers. There is this story on a very famous blog that said, ‘Osinbajo caught with strippers.’ And there was also a photograph of me standing in between the perfectly clothed ladies and under the photograph, the same ladies now not wearing much. It turned out that I have taken photograph with the ladies at an entertainment event when they were perfectly clothed.
“The capacity of fake news to cause great arm is not in doubt at all. It has been the realisation that it may even mislead. I think it was Wilson Churchill who said a lie gets half way round the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. But why fake news is now news, is obviously because of the greater dimension of content of harm that it can do and then the scope.
“A lot of these are as a result of the advancement in technology, especially in the past few decades or so. But I think as for the damage done to the credibility and integrity of public information, the capacity of fake news to cause alarm, fear and even violence has been demonstrated again and again.”
Fake news is a danger to the general elections. Politicians are using fake news to gain advantage. And youths are the major culprits helping them to foul the political space. This is the season of lies. The airwaves, online, offline and so on are seeing the young telling barefaced lies and keeping a straight face. And even when they are caught, they will explain away everything as part of the game of politics. Everything is fair in war, they will say. No time but now is Femi Anikulapo-Kuti’s song ‘Truth don die o’ more relevant.
Aside the lies, I am also pained that almost twenty-years after the return to democracy, we are yet to start crawling, not to talk of walking, and far away from running. Our politicians are just a little better than the military. In a lot of sense, many of the players on the political scene are yet to be cured of the military hang-over. A sizeable number of the key players even have garrison mentality. Ours is a democracy without democrats. Selfish interests are masqueraded as national interests. The good of one is sold as the good of all.
Will the youths ever realise their power and use it to their own advantage? The answer seems to be blowing in the air. No thanks to violence. Politics in Nigeria is all about cash. The youths only have the number but not the cash! Numbers without cash amount to zero in our polity.
My final take: Politicians know the youths have a collective power they lack the capacity to use. This is because millions of youths are under the jackboot of poverty and this makes them easy prey for all sorts of nefarious activities, including hooliganism. Electioneering periods such as these are when they recruit young men to do hatchet jobs and our society is the worse for it.
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