Tackling youth restiveness and violence

On my mind today is youth restiveness and unprecedented culture of violence in Nigeria.

Friday 11th August is the International Youth Day, and it is disheartening to ponder on the situation of the average Nigerian youth. The general age bracket for defining a youth is between 18-35 years. I see the youths of Nigeria as pawns on the game board of politicians. Since we do not have an accurate statistics of our population, I want to guess that the youth figure should be about 70 per cent. Seventy per cent of our future left to wonder in the forest of unemployment. Seventy per cent of our strength, clueless about the political terrains of their nation, instead, for those who are schooled, schooling is unending because there are no jobs.

Many serious Nigerian youths, especially from the south have become veteran scholars not as a choice but to while away time. There is hardly any home where there is not one unemployed youth. Our nation is building more churches and mosques than industries and factories. Morality does not thrive in the land of the hungry and deprived. Ours is a nation where the elders have become “emeritus politicians”, physical strength, vision, power, vigour, innovation and youthful creativity have left them due to age, but they refuse to leave, and when they do, it is a vicious circle of reproduction in their children. The elders have stolen, but who dares put them in the gallows!

The elders have shown bravery in stealing, maiming, plundering of the commonwealth of our dear nation.  Nigeria has been gang raped several times over by serial, shameless rapists. Can the youths come to the rescue? I do not have the answer to that. The youths of my country have learnt so much from the elders, so much so that coupled with their physical strength, the youth have become another “Frankinstein”- (a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made).

The elders have made a monster of the youths- these have metamorphosed into Boko Haram, Badoo boys, Egbesu boys, million boys, yahoo yahoo, yahoo++, kidnappers, cyber bullies, and cyber robbers. Each day I wake up, I am psychologically traumatized with news of horror, of the evil the youth are bold enough to perpetrate, most times leaving no trace. We live in a nation where boys and men are fighting back at a society that has neglected them for so long. We see our sons and we are afraid of what evil they are capable of doing to us, or their fathers, their sisters, their mothers, uncles and significant others.

Dr. Adepeju Oti, Lead City University, Ibadan.