By Nwodo Chukwuemeka John
SIR: I will like to draw attention to the poor reading culture that is observable nowadays among Nigerian youths. Gone are the days when serious minded students could not do without reading one academic material or the other.
In the days of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, etc, reading was an inescapable part of youth culture. In their time you find people ready to go the extra mile, to burn the proverbial midnight oil, in order to achieve one academic goal or the other. They sweated, read, gave themselves over completely to their books so that they could carve a niche for themselves and have a guaranteed future for themselves and for posterity.
But all that has changed today. Nowadays, the android phone with its many features and capabilities, have destroyed whatever is left of reading culture among Nigerian youths. What we witness nowadays is a situation where you see many youths with ear phone plugged to their ears, humming one tune or the other as they listen to one thing or the other in their phones. The android phone has killed the discipline required to enable them to sit down, open a book, and read it through to the end.
How many Nigerian youths nowadays can boast of finishing the books in the African Writers’ Series? Books like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter and so on and so forth. When the students of nowadays read at all, you find out that what interests them are romantic novels. No wonder their psyche is affected. When they will be in class, instead of listening attentively to the teacher, their minds will be busy playing and re-playing back all the nonsense they read in romance novels.
Entertainment T.V is another culprit responsible for the dearth of reading culture among our youths of today. If the statistics are to be taken, I am sure parents will be amazed at the number of hours their children spend before the television in their absence. Rock music, rap, hip-hop and all manner of entertainment abound in the cable networks of today. These are the things that steal the interest of our youths that they cannot concentrate to read their books.
If our young people continue in this way, what will become of this country in the future? Who will step into the big shoes of the erudite scholars of today if the upcoming generation is only interested in merriment and lackadaisical attitude towards disciplined reading culture? If chatting on the social media will produce intellectual giants, then I can say we have hope as a country but chatting on the internet will never and can never produce sound professors and academicians who can hold their own in any field that they find themselves in.
The joy of any parent is to see the children become highly successful in life. Disciplined reading culture is the one key that will enable this expectation to become a reality. But if our youths continue to browse away their time and lives on the internet, I am afraid that the desired haven where we all desire to be in the future as a nation may just turn out to be a mirage.