By Ademola Adebisi
One of the key issues thrown up by the #EndSARS protest is the quest for the leadership of the country by the youths or younger elements. This demand is spurred by the belief of the youths that, they have been held hostage by hopelessness and helplessness because of their exclusion from critical public institutions by the elders. This thirst for inclusion is coming at a point when Nigeria’s democracy is also battling with gender insensitivity as it has been unable to keep pace with the globally endorsed benchmark of 30% women inclusion in governance. It is not only in Nigeria that there is this quest for generational shift in political power configuration. The quest has for example, equally rented the American political firmament where the alarm has been raised of the degeneration of its democracy to gerontocracy. Apart from its president who is above 70 years, its political space has been said to be dominated by elders mostly between 50-60 years of age and the fear in this trend is the possibility of political inefficiency and policy sterility.
In Nigeria, nothing seems to have theoretically prevented the youths from participating in politics, yet a group of the youth in the country came up with the Not Too Young to Run movement, clamouring for constitutional amendment to the age requirements for elective positions in the country so as to open more political window and door for the youths. The movement indeed pushed the Not Too Young to Run Bill through, as the age requirements for elective positions were reduced to facilitate early initiation of the youths into politics and governance. With this Act in place, the speedy political participation the youths had expected would attend the passage of the law, has not been forthcoming as they still have political party hierarchs, godfathers and inadequate economic strength to contend with. Little wonder then that, the youths during the anti-SARS protest, had to resort to pouring venom, abuses, invectives and disdain on the elders, whom they perceived as the sources of their frustrations.
Ageism which is hatred for and discrimination against the elderly is thus seemingly looming in our fledgling democracy. Indeed the rage of the youths against the older generation of the political leaders during and after the protest, took a semblance of serious repulsion as I discovered that, many young ones raised their shoulders high in expressing their discontent with the failure of their parents’ generation. I was indeed taken aback by the heap of insults hurled at, Professor Wole Soyinka, by some youths, when he had to caution Seun Kuti at the peak of the protest.
It was on this virulent quest for generational leadership change that this writer, in an intervention on the social media, enjoined our youths to, instead of violent approach, explore Emmanuel Macron’s approach to gaining political power in France without offending the sensibility of French elderly and establishment. Indeed, despite the fact that Macron became the president of France at 39, realising the value of mentorship, he still waited to cut his political teeth from President Chirac, and did not discount the value of experience as he served as the Minister of Economy in the Socialist government before he resigned and founded the political movement, with which he gained political power.
In that piece, I had written that, adapting his democratic route to gaining political power in Nigeria by the youths is not a tea party; and for the youth to run a government in which all Nigerians will be well pleased is an enormous task. It is these two cogent points above, I want to sensitize the youths to without sounding pessimistic. First, the youths should be mindful of the ethnic and religious complexities of the Nigerian state. Ethnicity and religion are two mistresses which flirt with Nigerian politics and which Nigerian politicians and voters can hardly avoid not to flirt with. A number of youths perceived some semblance of unity among the youths during the protest. Let it be said that, in some momentous situations like the antiSARS protest, a modicum of unity may be truly perceived. But history has proved so far that, such unity is at best ephemeral. Nothing affirms the ethnicity as the bane of Nigerian politics than the ethnic garb the northern leaders have attempted to dress the protest, the same manner the struggle for the actualisation of June 12 annulled presidential mandate was reduced to Southwest struggle and the 2012 anti-subsidy protest was reduced to northern affair.
The youths will also have to contend with the class contradictions even within their own rank. Just as the larger society is broadly divided into upper, middle and lower social strata, no doubt, each stratum has correspondingly produced its youths, each with divergent world views and disparate yearnings and aspirations which have to be reconciled and woven into a common purpose for the generational shift process to garner momentum and for it to deliver on the ultimate goal of winning political power. Put differently, class distinctions and contradictions are already apparent among the youths and constitute potential albatross to unalloyed collective political action. This potential divisive tendency will certainly manifest in voting pattern and party success or failure. The youth should also realize the fact that, they cannot win more inclusion to the exclusion of the elderly. Most modern states are run by an admixture of the old and the young. If the youth possess the energy to drive the state, the old complementarily, are the repository of wisdom, the formal and informal institutional memory and the foresight required to run the state. For this struggle not to pass for youthful exuberance, the youths have to demonstrate their grasp of the monolithic nature of the Nigerian economy, the vagaries and volatility that characterise the price of the product (oil) that is at the centre of this structural economic deformity and how to deal with it. Except the matter of graft, one thing I perceive that the youths often gloss over in their talk of gaining political power is their spirit of we can do better without bothering on where the funds to quickly give greatest happiness to the greatest number will come from. They condemn borrowing and taxes. The alternatives to these frameworks of public financing they glibly talk of. That the Buhari government fell into this pit unexpectedly, should be a serious lesson to the aspiring youths that they need more than chest-beating and rubbishing the elderly in their quest for political captainship. The youths also have to come to the realization that, the Nigerian economy is structurally a dependent economy whose fate is dictated by the imperialist powers. Even when the developed countries give aid with one hand, the reality is that they usurp it with the other hand through different surreptitious mechanisms including subversion through club governance by such groups as G-8.
If all these are the likely odds the youths can encounter in their struggle for power, are we saying they should continue to dwell in political lethargy? Certainly that is not my motive here. The message is simply that, the process of injecting the youth into governance should not been pursued via hatred for the elderly, hasty actions, day dreaming, cacophonic agitations, lack of knowledge of the country’s socio-economic and political ecology, but rather, through concerted efforts of the young and the old, in-depth knowledge of Nigeria’s economy, comprehension of the division and contradictions in their own rank, a grasp of the domestic socio-political forces and international economic relations. After all, politics it is said in a sense, is all about who gets what, when and how.
- Dr. Adebisi writes from the Federal College of Agriculture, Akure, Ondo State.
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