Four days to the 2019 presidential election, the “youth” thunder is muffled: a soft moan, softening into a baby’s sigh. Hardly any challenger has made a dent.
Bravo, the brave Kingsley Moghalu, and his Young Progressive Party (YPP), just received our own WS’s endorsement – applause, applause!
But the same WS has, no less, applauded the new Lagos-Abeokuta standard gauge rail, a sure vote-spinner for the old masters. So, where does that endorsement lead Moghalu and his gamely young Turks?
It appears the sensational collapse of youthful pride and prejudice (to parody Jane Austen’s classic) — not to add conceit.
Like Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s chastened protagonist, in Pride and Prejudice, these “youths” are finding out the hard difference between the fundamental (painstaking thinking) and the superficial (hasty rush to emotive judgment).
The “take it back” crowd appears eating some crow — and just as well!
“Take it back” — that’s Omoyele Sowore’s electioneering rally. But that aptly captures the temper of these callow gladiators — whatever it takes, take it back!
En route to that mission, old age had become a curse; and youth, fresh and booming, eternal blessing! But which youth doesn’t eventually get old? A campaign, by its gushing emotions, never got vainer.
Nor were ethnic slurs, off limits: blaming the criminality of a few, on a whole collective, just because you want to take down one man. Enter then, the ubiquitous “Fulani herdsmen”, the southern media’s headline hysteria!
But perhaps the most fatal — and surprising — for the youth challenge, is a laughable I-don’t-care hauteur, about the political environment. If you don’t master your milieu, or even care to understand it, how do you bend it to your advantage?
Chuba Wilberforce Okadigbo, the late Senate president and colourful Oyi of Oyi, himself once a callow youth when he dismissed the Great Zik as the “ranting of an ant”, once thundered “political arithmetic”. But these bristling “youth” don’t know political geography. Or even political optics.
That is why a band of southern “youths” would gallop into town, bawling, with maddening rush: down with the old! Youth power is here!
Yet, the sitting president, with a right to second term, is from the North; in a democratic polity delicately hinged on a periodic North-South swapping of power!
Meanwhile, these uproarious youths have no structure; hardly any reach, or even an inner eye, to see the grim optics of their show.
Neither are they masters of organized voting power, even if on paper, the youth dominate the scroll of registered voters.
All they crow is their rippling youth. All they flex is their avant-garde brilliance, in neo-modern governance.
It was a towering triumph of brilliance over gumption. In real terms though, a triumph of folly over wisdom. That explains the making of a thunderous crash, even before the first ballot is cast!
In doubt? Look at the “youth” camp, now as gentle as a baby’s sigh, to parody country music great, Dolly Parton.
Donald Duke, about their brightest prospect, on account of his nimble fox-trots as Cross River governor (1999-2007), jerked awake to see his Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket vanish! His party just declared for the sitting president.
Oby Ezekwesili, Obasanjo-era Madam Due Process, just danced herself into the ditch. She has served herself the red card she was flashing at others.
Worse: she exited in a blaze of putative campaign fund scandal, given the row her estranged Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (APCN) is making. Madam Due Process in putative campaign skewed process? It doesn’t get more awry!
Besides, check out Oby’s political history! APCN? Wasn’t that Baba Oloye’s Kwara special vehicle, to make darling daughter, Gbemi, willy-nilly governor, after the gubernatorial stonewall, from beloved son, Bukky?
How does post-modern governance sprout from such pre-medieval garden? Perhaps only on the humus of crass opportunism!
It also took Ohanaeze’s endorsement of Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, to jerk Moghalu back to reality. For all his famed brilliance, Ohanaeze has proved more astute in political arithmetic (apologies again to the late Oyi of Oyi)!
As for Sowore, the “take it back” maverick, his campaign ended with the stunt he pulled at the Ooni of Ife’s palace, breaching age-old palace protocol, because his royal host didn’t keep to time!
What Nigeria needs is an elected president, not a democratic anarchist. That Sowore gamely breezes on is proof of the youths’ dashing ignorance of their milieu.
Still, the “youth” debacle is only the symptom of a more fundamental malaise: the Nigerian penchant to yelp at pressing problems, conjuring up sweet but empty utopia, not hard thinking, as they flee.
The result? A rash of easy-does-it youth policy shamans, talking the talk!
Between 2015 and 2017, it was extremely tough, as the old PDP order had collapsed the economy.
Though former President Goodluck Jonathan was the popular scapegoat — to be fair, he contributed his own fair share to the debacle, with the freewheeling sleaze under his watch — that rot had its root in the Obasanjo presidency.
At the best of times, Nigerians lack institutional memory. At these worst of times, a distracted media fuelled this corporate forgetfulness, growling at “hunger in the land”. But they blissfully forgot that quip: no pain, no gain.
So, about everyone started shellacking PMB and his team. When the pocket hurts, the brain seems unhinged!
In that free-wheeling chaos, yesterday’s wreckers became today’s grating jeer-leaders, in the deafening anti-salvagers orchestra! A theatre never got so comically absurd!
Why, even the PDP, in a flash of delusion it mistook for transfiguration, started dreaming a snappy comeback!
Still, the president and his team have stayed the course.
Thanks to a general infrastructural revamp (roads, rail and power); and targeted interventionist schemes at the society’s most vulnerable, PMB has done much more, with much less resources, compared to the PDP era.
That has put the spendthrift PDP era in bold relief; showing the former ruling party an anachronism, on its virtual death bed.
It has also taken the sail off the loud “youth” challenge. No one, in their right senses, would entrust their future to rookies, if they can help it.
Still, the youth gunning for power is legitimate. The young, after all, shall grow! But in this case, it was a costly distraction, when what was imperative was a national consensus to spring the country from a millennial jam.
Besides in politics, a stark youth-oldie divide, is a mirage.
Even in Emmanuel Macron’s France, Justin Trudeau’s Canada, Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Britain and Bill Clinton’s United States, the so-called “youth”, which the political dice threw up, were to their parties, tested veterans, not rookies.
Flicked the other way, these youths were no happenstances. They were always the spine, behind the often elderly face of power.
So, the pride (of youth), prejudice (against old age) and conceit (of vigour) can’t gift power to the Nigerian youth. Only clinical thinking and organization can.