Human beings are the most valuable resource in any society. By demographical classification Nigeria's young people constitute the larger proportion of the country's millions. By assessment of socio-political and economic relevance, the youth provide a critical input in the vital components of national development. And because of their vitality and vibrancy, the Nigerian youth have in the recent past acted as a panacea for the prolonged depression in the land. Yet the youth are arguably the most misunderstood, the most maligned, the most abused, the most misused, and the most neglected segment of the Nigerian society.
The background to this benign disposition towards youth affairs is the language of national immorality fashioned by a myopic, selfish and self-centred leadership and sustained by an equally decadent elite adult polity. Our Nigerian experience has witnessed over the years a paucity of time and attention devoted to youth development despite ministerial appellations and policy pronouncements on youth affairs. A face saving exception is perhaps youth sports, yet even here government agencies hide under the shadow of individual sporting skills and endeavour (for which they can hardly take credit), to preside over and share sports related funds, facilities and opportunities.
As the end product of education in the country, our youth have suffered the most from the destructive effects of our jaundiced educational planning and development. Confronted with the deplorable state of facilities and learning conditions our youth are the targets of the rampant closures of educational institutions and are the regular victims of security agency harassment and cruelty. And as a by-product of an evolving dysfunctional society, our youth come off the starting blocks in the race of life, flatfooted, confused, effectively disoriented and utterly frustrated.
It is indeed a damning indictment of the elite leadership that our youth have been consistently consigned to the backwaters of national planning and action. Successive Nigerian governments particularly the long chain of military regimes have hardly ever articulated sustainable youth development programmes. With no visible coordinated youth programmes worth mentioning, the Citizenship and Leadership Training and the National Youth Service Corp schemes can hardly be credited with any visionary inspirations and innovations since inception. If anything, despite their idealistic origin, they have become run-of-the-mill programmes and appendages of government ministerial organisations infested by the much too familiar "Nigerian factor" of indiscipline, corruption and mismanagement.
One of the effective camouflages of the late and lamented Abacha regime was "Vision 2010," a potentially focused national development blueprint but one propounded in a fractured national forum. Always taken for granted, Nigeria's youth had no effective representation and made no coherent contribution in the visioning. And yet by the year 2010 which is the target of the visioning, these youths will be the adults running the Nigerian state. When it comes to drawing up new a national constitution, organised youth opinion is considered irrelevant. And in the on-going transition dispensation, no mention has been made of the place of the youth in a new future envisaged for Nigeria. Instead old and often discredited military and civilian politicians who have little to offer in the project of a new Nigeria are the ones recycled in the various agencies and organs of government.
Thus out of tune with the ideals of an ordered society the Nigerian youth are shipwrecked on a vacant national scenario and left adrift to the forces of national misdirection. Any wonder then that they readily imbibe the unethical lessons of the corrupt practices of the adult generation and become prone to the lure of materialism. Any wonder that they are easy prey to cultism and yield to the temptations of drug peddling, becoming victims also of drug addiction. Any wonder that they are unmoved by the moral consequences of examinations malpractice and admissions fraud, of mail and advance fee fraud, of election rigging and sundry falsifications. Any wonder then that the youth in their droves are constantly engaged in seeking ways to check out of a homeland of opportunities that have become a land of domestic enslavement and frustration.
In a country where we applaud overnight riches, where we condone and rationalise palpable injustice, where we accord and sell recognition, honour and titles to the rich and undeserving, where merit is a handicap and mediocrity is a virtue, where the domestication of state resources is the motive force and propellant behind the scramble for national power and position, where cheating and looting are glorified, and where graft and gratification have become systemic and hierarchically institutionalized; in such a country, nothing is lost on an impotent youth population who are themselves used as canon fodder in the elite perpetration and entrenchment of the sundry elements of the national death wish that sums up our social ineptitude, our political banditry and our economic profligacy.
The youth constitute the majority inmates of Nigeria's prisons and detention centres. They are therefore at the receiving end of a deplorable and dehumanizing penal system before, during and after conviction. Barren of rehabilitation programmes, if at all they survive the sub-human prison condition, they leave as hardened graduates of a frightening prison culture complete with a language and social system alien to the larger society. It has now taken the voices of very important and distinguished convicts such as a former head of state, to highlight the horrors of the state prisons where inmates virtually hold one-way transit tickets to death by instalment.
And so the youth, as victims of primary violence inflicted by a culpable elite adult class, have unwittingly become instruments and weapons for the rape of society and have become veritable tools for scuttling their own future, a future without focus, without direction and without hope. Long denied a culture of peaceful demonstration under the repressive and regimented command military, and with no identifiable place in the national order, our youth find relevance and release in thuggery, in armed banditry, in disruptive social upheavals, in transferred aggression and in sundry forms of secondary violence.
These are the manifestations of the unwholesome tutelage that a decadent national culture is inculcating in what will become tomorrow's Nigeria. These elements of social corruption portray the level of degradation to which our society has sunk. Where we are today is a disconcerting reflection of where our country is headed tomorrow, for no country can harbour an army of restless youths and make pretensions to a life of peace and progress. In our inordinate pursuit of private, ethnic and group interests in this country, the benign neglect and discountenance of youth welfare and development is as notorious as it is damnable. Our flight into escapism by the continued abuse and neglect of our youth will assuredly bequeath a potentially explosive national environment and render the country inhospitable even for the children of the elite and affluent.
That we have no other country to call our own or to run to is a familiar refrain. We cannot shy away from another truism which is that today's youth are the bedrock on which tomorrow's adult population will be judged. For as long as we sow the wind of youth discontent across the land, so long do we stand to reap the whirlwind of chaos and disorder. A nation that breeds a restless and disoriented youth population breeds a lawless society. A nation that marginalizes her young discounts her vitality. A nation that teaches the wrong moral lessons learns nothing edifying. A nation that neglects her youth condemns herself to inertia and retrogression. A nation that destroys youth aspirations destroys her future. But a nation that effectively mobilizes and cultivates her youth invests in a just and egalitarian society, and plants the seeds of peace, stability and prosperity.
