Category: Olatunji Ololade

The call for a military coup in Nigeria will end in a splash of spittle and curl of the tongue inwards. Yet it is curious to see the champions of coup d’etat fondle splinters of fury into fragile fictions of change. They forget that should soldiers march on the Presidential Villa to seize power, the freedom they exploit incautiously on social media would become forbidden to them. The freedom of speech that they take for granted would slip, indefinitely, out of their reach – among other rights.

The coup agitators, mainly comprising Gen X and Gen Z youths, and some misguided seniors, parade themselves as Nigeria’s self-appointed digitally woke divide. Many of them were placebo seekers who sought a magical escape from the Nigerian nightmare through the placebo aspirant at the 2023 polls.

Having failed at their ill-fated enterprise, they are out to reenact the parable of the frantic electorate who would burn Nigeria to a charred rubble to birth nirvana out of rage.

Their passion connotes spurious purpose. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode rimmed with crystalline teeth. Their bromidic chant resounds as a soothing lullaby; it’s akin to rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.

Amid the racket, dreams of progress bloom like a fictitious retreat. An emotive simplicity. It’s a  Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail, as Gardner would say.

Once again, no one who had survived military dictatorship would wish it upon Nigeria, except the proverbial headless, mindless mob – who have seen a lot to treasure in the slew of coup d’etat pirouetting across Africa.

Every coup manifests as a war; war against peace, security, and a myriad of freedoms. War has no appeal. It is never sexy.

While the protracted war between Russia and Ukraine signals an existential rhetoric about the changing nature of sovereignty and threats to national freedoms, the picture changes with the inclusion of grisly African characters.

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A new pandemic spreads and spirals through Africa as gun-totting bloodhounds barge onto the corridors of power in a series of terrifying coup d’etats.

The culprits – mostly young soldiers and members of presidential guards – all chant their intent to salvage what’s left of their plundered nation-states. No thanks to “corrupt civilian leadership.”  

The most recent coup was executed by military officers in the oil-rich Central African nation of Gabon. The officers said, early on Wednesday, that they had seized power and were overturning the results of a disputed election that returned the incumbent, President Ali Bongo Ondimba, for a third term in office.

Appearing on state-run TV hours after Bongo was declared the winner of last weekend’s vote, the officers said they were cancelling the result, suspending the government and closing Gabon’s borders until further notice.

Gunshots boomed through the country’s capital, Libreville, from the vicinity of the presidential residence soon after the announcement. Hours later Bongo, one of France’s closest allies in Africa, appeared in a video posted to social media and authenticated by an adviser, pleading for international help.

The takeover in Gabon is just the latest in a string of coups that have taken place in recent years and comes just a month after soldiers took control in Niger. On July 26, 2023, members of Niger’s presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum inside his palace, declaring on national television that they were seizing power to address the “deteriorating security situation and bad governance.”

Abdourahamane Tiani, the commander of the presidential guard, was named the new head of state a few days later by the military junta. The leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have been in talks with the Junta to reinstate constitutional order, noting that they will activate ‘standby forces’ if diplomacy fails.

In Burkina Faso, there were two coups in 2022; the first coup was executed in January by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba who ousted President Roch Kabore citing the latter’s failure to contain violence by Islamist militants.

However, on September 30, 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traore seized power from Damiba to become the country’s new leader.

In Chad, the army seized control of the country in April 2021, after President Idriss Deby was killed in combat while visiting forces engaged in fighting rebels in the north. The president’s son, General Mahamat Idriss Deby, was named interim president, which contravenes Chadian law, where the speaker of parliament should have become president. The unlawful transfer of power sparked rioting in N’Djamena, the country’s capital, which the military eventually quashed with extreme force.

Likewise, in Mali, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was overthrown in August 2020 by a gang of Malian colonels under the command of Assimi Goita. But following a clash between the coup leader and the interim president, retired colonel Bah Ndaw, the junta staged a second coup in May 2021, and Assimi Goita, who had been acting vice president in the meantime, was promoted to president.

In Guinea, President Alpha Conde was overthrown in September 2021 by he army’s special forces leader Colonel Mamady Doumbouya after the former altered the constitution in 2020 to circumvent restrictions that would have prohibited him from running for a third term, which led to severe unrest.

ECOWAS thereafter imposed sanctions on Doumbouya, junta leaders, and relatives, rejecting the promise of a transition to democracy in three years.

There have also been failed coup attempts in Guinea Bissau, The Gambia and the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.

The recent coup d’etat in Gabon, however, deepens the pattern of instability across Africa’s Sahel and jeopardises what has been a rare process of fairly steady democracy building in the region.

The previous coup in Niger that ended abruptly the country’s democratically elected government is equally lamentable given the country’s valued contribution to African and international efforts to stabilize the Sahel against its web of insurgencies, extremist movements and military coups.

African States have experienced over 200 military takeovers between the 1960s and 2012. Many analysts believed that coups were ‘going out of fashion in Africa’ by 2015 due to the limited cases on the continent. At present, however, coups are widely seen to be ‘on the rise’ or ‘dangerously back in fashion’ in Africa, as some countries including Gabon, Niger, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Mali, Chad, Sudan, and Burkina Faso, have experienced a series of successful and failed military takeovers over the last four years.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), on its part, cannot afford a protracted war with the military juntas as it would be fighting on many fronts. This would only aggravate the incidences of insecurity, poverty, displacement, declining economies, and other afflictions of the continent.

Yet the contagion of coups should never be allowed to spread to Nigeria. No matter how seductive it seems to silence hope and amplify our woes, we must persistently look to the sunnier side of things.

We must shun the enticement of silver-bullet coup d’etats and doomsday predictions, lest we wring life totally out of our fragile nation.

Nigeria, especially, must not commit itself to such a fruitless venture. The country has its hands full at the moment battling internal strife occasioned by armed banditry, ethnic conflict, terrorism, and the most unpatriotic citizenry perhaps in the history of Nigeria.

The military coup d’etat should never be a Nigerian option. To prevent it, the political class must quit treating Nigeria as a soulless void. 

Fathers earn and sons spend. Moguls acquire and sons deplete. Pacesetters in politics, arts and business hack their way through mortal wilderness to acclaim. They forge their path to identity, amassing fortunes and a name that they bequeath to heirs. The latter, having it all, however, suffers the burden of freedom.

 Freedom binds them to the slaughterhouse of choice. When they make the right choices, they soar into trance and society salts the earth they walk upon. If condemned to wrong choices, freedom chillingly shut their eyes to the truthful and humane, in a deadly game of blind man’s bluff.

 In the latter scenario, ignorance becomes Eden and the sanctuary of heirs, where too many sons of famous fathers become spendthrifts, alcoholics, drug addicts, and dilettantes. They deplete what their fathers procured.

 The son, often heir to fortune on a silver platter, has nothing to measure or be measured against, except the accomplishments of his father – most of which gets squandered.

 Fathers build and sons destroy. But not every child depletes what his father built. A generation may forcefully reinvent itself out of the declining fortunes of its forbears.

 The current generation of leaders, for instance, could recreate the Nigerian dream from its deplorable state as the fantasy of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers into progressive, realistic and awe-inspiring vistas.

 To do, so we must rid our souls of moral lesions, conflict and contradictions; we must quit being shameless and grand in disarray.

 Whatever rationalisation is advanced to justify Nigerian senators’ receipt of about N2 million each as allowance before proceeding on a seven-week vacation, flies in the face of reason, particularly during these hard times.

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 The country’s upper legislature has been on the wrong side of the news since it approved about N218 million as holiday allowances for the 109 senators. The bank alerts were reportedly received by the senators on August 8, just before the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio told the senators that some money had been credited to their accounts to enjoy their holidays.

 However, the management of the National Assembly has since attempted a justification of the spending claiming that the N2 million paid to all senators was not a vacation allowance. The assembly said this in a statement by its Secretary, Research and Information, Ali Umoru, on behalf of the Clerk to the National Assembly (CNA), Sani Tambuwal.

 After screening and confirmation of the ministerial nominees on August 7, the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, informed senators that money had been credited to their bank accounts to enjoy their holiday, which started that day.

The action, predictably, incited the ire of many Nigerians who berated the lawmakers for being insensitive to the masses’ plight. It flies, in the face of reason, that lawmakers who are tasked with the protection of the citizenry’s interests would engage in such a brazen display of insensitivity at a time that millions of Nigerians are grappling with atrocious increments in the cost of fuel and skyrocketing inflation of the prices of food, transport services to mention a few.

 At the heel of widespread condemnation of  the payment to senators amid hardship in the country, the senate has said in its defence, that the N2 million paid to each of the senators was part of the running cost of their offices and that it was budgeted for.

 “It should be noted that the Two million Naira is part of the running cost of the office of each senator as provided for in the 2023 budget.”

 The Senate Chief Whip, Ali Ndume, subsequently argued that there was no big deal in all the senators receiving N2 million each for their vacation allowance, noting that it was not unusual.

 The N2 million allowance given to the senators has, however, been described as illegal as no such provision is made in the remuneration package approved by Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), the body authorised by law to prepare salaries and allowances for public servants. But under the law, lawmakers are entitled to a “recess” allowance which is 10 per cent of the annual basic salary of each legislator and is paid once a year.

 There is no gainsaying Nigeria, has for several years, suffered the lack of a humane culture of leadership. The incumbent senate must avoid a reenactment of “business as usual.”

 Where it is “business as usual,” the citizenry is expected to maintain a stiff upper lip, whatever the devastation wrought on the state, even as the political class engages in the pursuit of selfish interests. They are expected to buy into the fantasy of progress promised at the end of the pillage.

 We need a legislature capable of  working with the executive to humanely reconstruct the power equation, redistribute social privileges, and reinvigorate civil societies, and dormant economies.  

 Public healthcare, public education and the manufacturing sector, for instance,  must be overhauled with better social safety nets and driven to earn foreign exchange. This can never be achieved where public officers breeze through the corridors of power with intent to diddle and plunder.

 Something’s got to give. En route to the 2023 polls, renaissance hierarchies  clashed in the noisy climax of gladiator politics. Within the melee, the average voter re-emerged decisively as the political personae of a renaissance Nigeria.

 It’s about time Nigerian senators  equally re-emerged as the cultured  patriots and workers of marvels they were expected to be. The farmer, painter, plumber, sculptor, street trader, teacher, student, unemployed graduate, and manual labourer, who voted for them, anticipate their calling as fearless change-makers – irreconcilable to visions of them as looters and unfeeling political elements.

 In the ongoing duel with hardships triggered by the removal of fuel subsidy and accentuated by inflation, the ultimate purpose of families, states, and nations, is to breathe. It’s a sublime irony: Nigerians labour to breathe in an atmosphere corrupted by political leadership and their labour for material wealth.

 At a time like this, the Nigerian senate must quit participating in heavily choreographed or soulless sessions, in which the demands of corporations, individuals, and banks are paramount.

 Each senator must vie to represent  Nigerians’ interests. The elections are over. Slogans and scathing bromides have lost their resonance with the long-suffering masses; they expect their elected representatives to work together to reclaim Nigeria’s soul from the fangs and talons of a raptorial corporate state and political class.

 A new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the economic  and political freedom of the citizenry. Against the backdrop of this, we face a far more difficult problem: Nigeria’s affliction by an electorate nurtured by bigotries and savage materialism. In the run-up to the general elections, voters emerging from two societal extremes, the haves and have-nots, coalesced in ghastly politicking that rocked the foundation of the country and threatened our unity.

 This is the time to foster national healing. But how can the lawmakers counsel the masses to be painstaking if they are suspected of insensitivity? How can they teach the citizenry to embrace patience and sacrifice while they are accused of profligate spending?

 How do they reconcile themselves to the belief that politics should never be about accumulating obscene, illegitimate wealth to splurge or show off, but about the passion to live life more fully and engage more expansively in the perpetuation of humane leadership?

This minute, conscience manifests as a feeble tick on the World Wide Web, eluding creed by a Nigerian  detour. And rancour sheds citizen blood to irrigate its spasms. Like Egyptian Ammit, it burrows deep to harvest hearts from fresh crops of the dead.

We say the internet is our patriots’ sphere but there, we relive the infernal crud of the Nigerian personae: the political animal, the apolitical pacifist, the hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ and the data-fabulous millennial ‘netizen’ scud to the shore of national consciousness on the world wide web.

Ultimately they cuddle one insolence and cringe  from the other as their vanities dictate. They would call this the politics of expedience. Thus this minute, cyberspace  becomes a spectacle where citizens clash in defence and furtherance of random bigotries.

In this public space,  everyone is a wilding  dealing in pseudo-idealism and  rancid    wit with alarming  gusto. They  claim to do this for the culture. The internet has become our monument to pseudo-realities and events. The guts and sinews of every stereotype, theme-park hatred, and  sentimentality are validated by mind-numbing sophistry and sloganeering.

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A casual visit to Facebook, Twitter (X)  manifests as a pilgrimage of sorts; the esplanades of public discourse pander and unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with the affliction of ethnic and religious dogmatism, and the hassle of incomprehensible logic.

Everyone pontificates on the internet. Folk  mutate from philosopher  to savage pawn and vice versa – oft dealing jazzy and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.

There, we have encountered Nigerians of vast mental stripes: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.

As the bickering persists, we see the savage mutations of Nigerian personae: persons of presumed higher learning,  persons afflicted by poverty, persons of  affluence,  authority,  and high glamour. The lambent complexion turns muddy. The aura vanishes. Integrity is innately borne and espoused as a kernel of character but respect is a gift under no one’s control. It peaks and ebbs as spectator mood at a crunch soccer tie.

A familiar decline from admiration to disillusion, hope to disenchantment, festers in the citizenry’s public engagement with each other and their elected representatives

But our greatest undoing would be our inability to douse the flames of bigotries and hatred incited by our utterances and cutthroat politics.

Now that we have survived the 2023 polls, contrary to doomsday predictions at home and abroad, our politics must be rid of discord. There is no excuse for maligning an individual, group, or social divide for its political choices and preferred candidates.

Where such mayhem subsists,  everybody gets burnt: the ruling class, opposition parties, the entitled elite, and the rich upper class. At the bottom of the cauldron, however, roasts the incorrigible hordes of the boondocks, or the electorate if you like.

Through the inferno and chaos, we seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. Strikeout patriot; it’s about time we redefined the political Nigerian in the tenor of his deeds: think of him as a clownish, simple creature, at times even enchanting within its limitations but ultimately foredoomed to fulfill a prophecy of blind folly, ethnic rascality, irrational lust, and inclination to self destruct. 

Behind this intolerable temperament lurks a postscript, and predictably, regret – that emotive shingle that often succeeds disreputable nature.

Yet we stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, craving the essence of humanity and freedom, only to forsake it for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time.

This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots. If we look carefully inwards, we will find that beneath our toxicity, selective morality and utter cowardice stir gruesome airs and a quest for self-preservation.

Time and over again, a few critics and self-appointed leaders of thought have decried our ethical fraudulence, cutthroat politics, and lack of guts; such curious kinks of the Nigerian populace unfortunately do exist at a grievous price and must be reckoned with. Yet these shameful twists to our psyches make us even more vulnerable as fair game to the predatory  political class.

The  latter cannot be wished away or successfully weeded out by violence or  bloodshed even if we tried. Yet the surest way  to deny them  continual access to leadership and power is for us to engage constructively in the ongoing transition process.

We must shun the urge to emerge as  grisly manifestations of the  ‘Nigerian factor.’  We must quit personifying the monstrosities  standing on our path to humane civilization, progress, and common decency.

It’s about time the youth, in particular,  shunned toxic politics. Education is the key out of this mental and moral jail cell. A different kind of education borne of our critical faculties and divorced from the high-priced occupational  training by which the modern university turns several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.

While violence and terrorism are often part of revolutions, the fundamental tool of any successful revolt is the non-violent conversion of the forces deployed by the oppressors or the state to hoodwink and enforce dominance, on the side of the rebels. Most successful revolutions are, for this reason, fundamentally non-violent.

Revolutionary measures, however, fail in Nigeria, because the arrowheads of the movements continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous chant. Such hackneyed dialects have become a barrier to national development and  communication.

It is the same dialect adopted, at election time, by the political and corporate con artists to bait the electorate and reel in their votes, only to hoodwink them afterwards and rig the political process and financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their elite psyops and propaganda labs.

To attain true stability, unity, and sustainable development, a new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the mental and moral freedom of the citizenry by communicating in a language comprehensible to the common man.

This was barely achieved in the 2023 elections. The ongoing dispensation, however, offers a good time to restart national communication. We must begin to teach the Nigerian voter: graduate and undergrad, street urchin, trader, commercial transporter, the armed forces, and unemployed, the benefits of patriotism, self-restraint and critical and realistic thinking.

We need not bury the lessons and the process in obscure or esoteric lingo. Teach them to scorn the public officers cum vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share corn meals and hold town-hall meetings at the dawn of every general election or bye-election.

Teach them to scorn the presidential aspirant scudding to acclaim on a sea of lies, sophistry, and half-truths. Teach them to scorn the legislative representatives, who commit crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower their constituents with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.

Teach them to ask their elected representatives, why they must blindly support the latter’s battles with perceived political detractors or opposition. After all, we are one Nigeria. Teach them to scorn violence, vote-selling, and hooliganism.

Help  them understand that a loss at the polls should never translate to  bitterness and  withdrawal from the Nigerian enterprise;  political  violence  and hooliganism are never acceptable resorts in nation-building.

A better tomorrow can only be achieved via humane, visionary politics tailored for the collective good.

Nationhood thrives as political theatre. And Nigeria offers one big stage to be entertained, informed and misinformed. The process, in recent times, assumes the course of indoctrination by courtiers.

The latter manifests as our most malignant affliction. Comprising journalists, politicians, NGOs, and various shades of rights activists, their machinations are oft inimical to  nationhood, individuality, and growth – ultimately because they are deployed as weapons of adverse programming.

This may no doubt resonate as far-fetched to individuals and groups profiting from the status quo, especially the press and civil societies. That is understandable. It is in the nature of bacterium responsible for a pandemic to deem itself the next best thing to happen to earthlings.

For a people programmed for conquest, Nigerians carry on with unabashed ignorance and arrogance. Arrogance is pitiable. But ignorance is expensive and quite scary. Yet Nigeria  soldiers on unperturbed by the ramifications of it all.

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This is what happens when a nation becomes unmoored from reality. It retreats into a fictive nirvana. In this predetermined cosmology, reality is redefined to suit dubious whims and facts are manufactured to soothe  relative bias.

If Nigeria seems unmoored from reality, it’s because our lives and national discourse are dominated by fabricated events. From exaggerated grief over insecurity, misgovernance, and national disasters to  celebrity gossip and  pageantry of political artifice, the  country is  sold to desperate narratives at home and abroad.

Whether it is the soaring price of Premium Methylated Spirit (PMS), the terrorist creed of violence resonant with brainwashed minors and young adults, or the virulent manifestations of partisan politics, the compelling nature of the grievances articulated and the  pervasiveness of despair are wielded  to justify the  rationale for  Nigeria’s creed of  carnage and the country’s  enduring portrayal as a banana republic by foreign governments and consulates.

A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, has equally morphed into a major source of widespread dissatisfaction towards politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement by the masses.

These sentiments thrive in greater depths across geographic and virtual space; as Nigeria rejuvenates from the intrigues of the 2023 polls, a wave of validation and  reproof of the incumbent political class and the opposition  seeking to dislodge it has produced a supercharged atmosphere of warring critics and apologists, cynics and anarchists.

Of the latter, majority parade flawed presence because they have no real persona and moral substance. Yet en route to the polls,  Nigeria suffered their storm of spunk and slogans.

Several media houses and journalists pitched their tents with certain candidates, but at what cost? More news media and civil society groups parrot the official propaganda of foreign governments, consulates, and so-called non-profits pushing their ”enlightened self-interest” as “impartial observers.”

The participation of large segments of the press, academia and civil society pre and post-elections has been driven by funded partisanship but like Arundhati Roy would say, “I’m not against people being funded—because  we’re  running out of options, but we have to  understand, ‘Are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Who’s the dog and who are you?”

The situation triggers existential questions about the quality of political participation before and after the elections. How do we determine real and funded patriotism? Are Nigerians inured to  the precepts of partisanship  astride the politics of reality and illusions?

The jostling over reality and illusion becomes most intense in an oppressive clime where both distort to preserve the status quo of exploitation or repudiate it.

Hussein Bulhan addresses a similar anomaly in his treatise on metacolonialism as the latest modification and presentation of colonialism in the more savoury euphemism of globalization – which enlarges the  distortion of events in memory because written history is mostly about the valour and  benevolence of the  European coloniser.

The media, many of whom are aligned to the  doctored history of the presumed sophistication,  unassailable civilisation and god complex of the metacoloniser soullessly  propagate the latter’s  imperial agenda to a society unmoored from its roots.

Students suffer this indoctrination in school, and libraries preserve it, norms and statutes freeze it in time, and the media disseminate it. In short, our material world exudes, reflects, and perpetuates the reality and illusions of our coloniser.

The narrative valorises the coloniser and  morphs into a potent weapon of subjugation while it  invalidates and vilifies much about the new Nigerian  colony  along with our culture, epistemology, ontology—indeed our very existence as human beings.

Nigeria thus exists to fulfil the needs and conveniences of its contemporary colonisers  aided by the media and other cultural agencies of imperialism  deployed by the colonisers. To this end, journalists, novelists, musicians, actors,  dramatists, activists,  health workers, NGOs, academia and religious institutions are “empowered” and deployed as ”self-discerning social actors” by the colonisers.  But in truth, they are expendable and misguided tools used to further Western hegemonic plans  (enlightened self-interests).

Local news media, academia, and female movie makers, in particular, are beneficiaries of such sullied fodder. They, in turn, fulfill their role as pathogens, dispersing the spores of a cultural and political pandemic thus exacerbating our regressive state.

A citizenry shackled to such stricture is forever susceptible to subtle and pronounced  state capture. They are unquestioning, passive, and weak before the colossal might and influence of their colonisers. This is the Nigerian predicament.

A flawed persona, skewed intellect, lack of pride and moral substance have rid too many self-confessed patriots of grit and foresight. Consequently, they play court  sycophant and pawn to foreign  interests.  Together, they constitute a medium of wheedling and imposition of pathologic  rites and culture to the detriment of   Nigerianness.  They elevate belly  and bum over fealty and forelock in a  flagrant  rite of political intercourse.

The elections are over thus the  imperative to seek more  altruistic means of political   participation. Journalists, in  particular, must seize  the moment to regroup and recommit  to a viable media practice founded on humane principles of professionalism, nationhood, citizenship, and nativism.

To achieve this, we must purge ourselves of inclinations to redefine our reality  according to foreign interests: the Western plot to recolonise Nigeria – and Africa in general – is being funded and fathered through foreign consulates, cable TV, sponsored terrorism and humanitarian agencies.

The bid to stifle Nigerianness or redefine it in tune with obscure, pathologic civilisations from abroad must be resisted henceforth. The story of the colonised often remains untold due to censorship and social amnesia enforced in crude or subtle ways, notes Bulhan. It’s about time Nigerians penned their own stories, not as politically-correct content, but as the unimpeachable, national narrative.

The local media must quit winnowing out our reality to reject all that some foreign actors deem too radical or proof of idiosyncratic compulsion to challenge their dominance or excavate a long-forgotten past too uncomfortable  to recall.

It’s about time the media espoused progress  relatable to the Nigerian reality. To what end are finely crafted homilies and treatises on the youths’ newfound political awareness if they won’t inspire their  creditable and constructive participation  in the political process?

It is never enough to parrot some foreign consulate and non-profit’s fosterage of Gen-Z’s virulent politics, particularly their disregard for historical context. What are the likely consequences of such toxic partisanship?

Progressive citizenship requires more evolved and purposeful engagement in politics than wanton theorising and spouting on barrel heads to be seen.