Social media was yesterday riled with visuals and videos of what has turned out to be the most recent display of disgrace that Nigeria as a nation is. The Nigeria Immigrations Service conducted recruitment tests but unwittingly showed the world the near comatose state of this nation state called Nigeria. We are pointedly headed to a graveyard and we do not know it. Nigeria is sunk, and underneath the wasteful centenary celebrations is a nation already being eaten up by maggots. This is no time to get political about our condition but the time today is one that requires a honest dissection of exactly what makes us so willfully accepting of suffering. Pictures of Nigerian youths hurled into an arena as large as the National Stadium should not have been the wake up call to the extent of rot in the economy, but the application to use the National Stadium in the first place! A serious administration would have been bothered beyond startled that a zonal recruitment test should hold like the camp meeting of the celestial church. More worrisome was the deployment of teargas carrying police men to the midst of hungry youths, looking to government for hope of survival.
I recall how about 9 years ago, I was in a recruitment exercise organized by First Bank of Nigeria Plc. We were 4000 candidates in the Abuja zone, while about 17,000 wrote from Lagos. It was not until after a few months that we learnt that we were over 70,000 that applied with about 35,000 qualifying for the tests. It turned out that just about 1000 candidates got the job. That number might look small, but I give kudos to First Bank of Nigeria for contributing to youth empowerment in Nigeria over the years. Intercontinental Bank, the then Oceanic Bank were also hiring youths and engaging us on a frequent basis back then. God bless the owners of those banks who helped in no small measure in reducing the towering numbers of the unemployed in Nigeria. The suspended CBN Governor, Lamido Sanusi and his policies however made nonsense of those manpower gains of the banking sector with his scare tactics and ended what would have been a continuous growth of youth employment in the industry. I maintain that Lamido Sanusi did more harm to the Nigerian youth than the government that he represented. We were the ones who lost real jobs not the Ibrus or the Akingbolas. His personal grouse was most inappropriately settled and I hope that posterity will judge him accordingly. Thousands lost bank jobs yet the CBN remained a closed recruitment zone primed only for the elite, politicians and their children.
From Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan, it is an F9 altogether for failure to efficiently manage the resources of this country appropriately. When you do only 20% from a possible 100%, it is a failure because it seems that it is only the GSM and Sure-P projects that PDP lays claims to per creation of employment opportunities in our economy. We have earned trillions in sales of our oil resources over the last 14 years but we have almost nothing to show for it in favour of Nigeria’s youths. Beyond the presidents, it is equally a shame to majority of Nigeria’s politicians especially Legislators with the privilege of providing leadership over the last 14 years. This is not about PDP or APC, this is about FAILURE. We have failed and we must admit that, the suffering in the land is not only in the North East but also in the South West.
I hate to state however that at the heart of the problem is the Nigerian youth. We are the ones waiting to be served like princes in an Egyptian court. We are carefully bidding our time like astronomers watching the stars. We have no worries, we have no agitations, we will be fine we believe. We are today engrossed with TV, Football, Malaysian hair, Swag, Range Rover Sport, and Kim Kardashian and have allowed our national leadership erode and corrode what is supposed to be our future. Do we really think we can continue to carry on as if the future is guaranteed? Or else how does one explain the docility of the Nigerian youth? How else can one comprehend the perpetual complaisance that Nigerian youths have adopted as home? And to put it out very quickly, I am not asking that Nigerian youths go up in arms, killing people and destroying property, we have Boko Haram unfortunately taking up that ignoble responsibility. What Nigerian youths lack in my opinion is a united voice. We do not have a manifesto; we do not have cords that bind us. We are tossed about by winds of political doctrines and money. I am happy to however observe that we are ripe, we have been sensitized and I think that we have been sufficiently gingered by the enablement of social media which has provided opportunities for us to vent. We must now pursue a deliberate advancement of these ideals – the articulation of what we might want to call a youth agenda.
What do we represent? What do we aspire to? What drives us? What motivates us? What defines our hopes? What defines our past? What defines our future? How do we achieve an agreed vision? When do we achieve this? Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? Where do we go? What do we say? How do we say it?
We have all settled for “normal” and so we are treated like orphans because political leadership usually always underperforms. If we therefore would like to be treated with minimal respect, we have to demand higher. The truth today is that, the future is no longer sure. We might have no nation to cling to, we might have no resources to rely on anymore and even the few jobs might be totally taken out. God forbid that recruiters in the future would have to hire Local Governments for recruitment tests! Let us forge our unity, for us and by us. Nobody will do it for us, angels in the stadium say so!
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