NIGERIA: A NATION THAT DOES NOT CARE FOR ITS OFFSPRINGS
Cultism and drugs on the upswing amongst youths
When the Chinese leaders wanted to open up their nation to the world after the death of Mao Zedong, a move which will involve opening up to the internet, they called Lee KuanYew, premier of Singapore, himself also of Chinese descent. They asked Lee Kuan Yew what will be the effect of the immoral West on Chinese children if they opened up to the internet?
Lee Kuan Yew, though not a Christian told them a truth from the bible to train their youth while they are young and when they are old they will know to avoid that which is bad. Youth training is very important to the Chinese development thinking. Up till today, China has not completely opened its internet to its youth.
David, the foremost king of Israel recognized the crucial role of youth training. As king, he prayed to be rescued from foreign children who speak empty words and whose right hand is false. David recognized that thus rescued, Israel's youth will mature very quickly, that their young girls will be as 'stones polished after similitude of a palace'. He recognized that the effect of these will be great productivity in Israel. "That our oxen might be strong to labour; that there be no breaking in nor going out; that there be complaining on our streets".
Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore started about the same time with Nigeria in the 60s but while Singapore has transited to the first world, Nigeria is fighting not to fail. China which humbled itself to seek advice from a small country and took to the advise is today running ahead of the USA in all development indices and technology. Israel was strong under David and despite many afflictions over the years, Israel is still very strong.
Not so for Nigeria. The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme has ran out of steam that many commentators are saying it should be scrapped. No doubt, there are many youth policies in the files but they are just there to decorate the files. I have not seen a nation more ostrich-like as Nigeria in the manner in which issues concerning the youth are treated with so much levity and carelessness. That’s why its offsprings are rudderless.
Nigeria watched until her entire youth population became so decadent. David said there will not be breaking in and out in Israel's streets; today a large chunk of youths in the North are either bandits or insurgents. There is a daily breaking in and going out in all the streets of Nigeria. In the South, a large chunk of youth population has committed to cultism and drug abuse.
The policing system has become so inefficient that it lacks the capacity to cope with criminality and drug addiction among the youth. Policing has become a cash cow for those engaged in it. The nation talks about the youth but does nothing about them. We are not just losing our children, we have lost them entirely. Footages continue to surface on the internet of teenagers in private junior secondary schools hooked on expensive drugs.
At the #EndSars peaceful protest in Lekki, Lagos, when the youths rose up in revolt against crude policing which was directed solely at them, the government sent in soldiers who used the cover of darkness to massacre them. And the make-believe panel that the government set up, contrary to its expectation, turned in a report to confirm what government tried to hide. The report observed that youths were fired at and killed. Lagos State government rejected that report in its white paper.
Nothing is monitored about the youth. Years ago, feeding on campuses was stopped for no other reason than that the military administration that stopped it was envious about youth having good education in a conducive environment that its members did not enjoy because they didn't attend university.
The policy of on-campus residence was stopped and yet the number of admissions into the universities did not stop to increase. Off-campus accomodation was encouraged and it led to students staying in private and ill-built houses which encouraged cultism and all manner of criminalities because there, it was not possible to monitor the students.
Since 1999 when the nation transited to civil rule, thuggery has assumed the status of a profession. When political parties talk about their youth wings, they are only referring to thugs. They buy guns and distribute to these youths who help them rig elections. Usually, they are unable to retrieve the guns from the thugs after the elections. The thugs unleash the guns thereafter on the populace. Among the thugs are university graduates.
That explains why our undergraduates have turned internet scammers. Called "Yahoo boys", the university undergraduates no longer stay in schools to face the rigours of their studies and acquire skills beneficial to the nation and their personal lives. Rather, with girls drawn from the universities also, they live in hotels, they drive in expensive cars, they rent expensive flats or duplexes in choice areas and live as husbands and wives, which they are not. They bribe lecturers with a lot of money to pass their examinations. They give money to class governors or classmates to help them fill the attendance register.
The social media has continued to feature graduates who don't know what a vice chancellor of a university does. Many of them can't speak passable English. The universities lack books and instructional materials in their libraries, while campus internet facilities are virtually non-existent. Besides, graduates are turned out in fields that are not needed in the country.
For example, a senate committe discovered that graduates of Arabic studies were given employment in the nation's space research agency while there are thousands of graduates of physics roaming the streets without hope of a job.
Meantime, Nigeria has become a net exporter of youth skill to all parts of the world. It is said that if Nigerian medical doctors happen to disengage in Britain, the health system of Britain will collapse. Canada is benefiting hugely from our carelessness with our youth; they throng there because of lack of employment at home. We spend money here to train them in Nigeria but other countries reap the benefits of our sweat with next to nothing in investement.
There's the case of a patriotic medical doctor practicing in Australia. He was on Kwara State scholarship throughout his medical studies in Nigeria. He knows what his training cost the state but when he finished and could not get a job, Australia snapped him up. His conscience struck him that he had betrayed his nation by not paying back. I told him not to feel bad because it was not his fault and that he should hope that things will turn around and then he would return to serve the nation he so much loves.
Why should we spend money to train our youths and have no plan to employ them. It does not appear wise but there is no other name for what our officials do than stupid. Our public secondary schools, especially in the South have turned out to be breeding ground for thugs. The schools lack teachers in a nation where there is seeming over production of graduates.
A committed educationist and retired principal told me it was not because there are not qualified graduates but that those graduates in essential subject areas such as english, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science etc have no connection among politicians to recommend them for jobs. And so you have a school with excess geography teachers while there are no teachers for english. When the schools ask for english teachers, the ministry sends a geography teacher because it is the geography teacher that is connected among the politicians.
Moreover, teachers find it difficult to discipline the students. When they discipline students, they are reported to politicians who report them to the authority. Thus a principal will be queried according to the report of the politician, and if he or she persists in doing the right thing, he may be posted to a rural area to serve as punishment. Most of the schools are unfenced and hoodlums stroll into the school to harras students and teachers, sometimes to recruit students into cults.
Also, most of the schools are in dilapidated condition and officials feel no shame appealing to the old boys to provide chairs because the students sit on bare floors in the classrooms. Some place their exercise books on used tyres to write their notes. Even so, the university lecture rooms are also in similar shape.
It seems the notion of government is that once they are able to pay the salaries of teachers, all is done. A female student of one of the foremost schools in Ibadan in the past told me that of the eight subjects she had on a particular day, teachers came only for three. Why didn't they go to the staff room to call the teacher, she said they dare not. Was the principal not aware? She said she doesn't know. This shows general laxity in the administration of the school system.
Another student in Borno State who had to be transferred to one the new schools built by Governor Babagana Zulum in the city because Boko Haram insurgents had killed his parents, considered his transfer to that city school a blessing in disguise because in the city teachers come frequently to classes as opposed to the village schools where teachers may not show up for weeks.
What now happens in Ibadan for example is that the student are just writing WAEC examination for the fun of it; they are not writing to pass it. So Ibadan has hordes of them who are no better than what they were before they entered the schools; they have attended six years of secondary education, but they can't speak English and know next to nothing.
Because they have come of age and their parents are poor, they don't feed at home any longer. They lay ambush on 'Okada' or 'Marwa' vehicles to extort money from their drivers under the threat of violence. They smoke marijuana freely at street corners with careless abandon. They don't fear the presence of any police, they speak disparagingly of police even in their presence and at night they move in large numbers to raid houses, raping, maiming and killing.
On Facebook, a thirteen year old boy at a community secondary school displayed a knife which he said was given to him by a school mate to engage another school in a bloody fight. According to this boy, he stabbed two persons in that fight.
In the North, procreation is unchecked in the name of antiquated religious provision which allows any man, even the one who has no job and cannot feed himself, to marry four wives. Girls are married off at a tender age, sometimes to men old enough to be their grandfathers. Children thus produced are thrown into the streets as almajirai, also in the name of religion.
The almajiris of yesterday are the bandits and insurgents of today. Who says the implosion going on in the North will stop any time soon? Who says the military will stop it? The failure of the military in that regard is very apparent to reasonable Nigerians except propagandists of the presidency.
That chaos will not stop until the North is forced to revisit those religion inclinations that have been used to keep the people enslaved. Is northern Nigeria more Islamic that United Arab Emirates that is putting these religious rules under check and modernizing? Is the North more Islamic than Egypt that expunged certain verses of the Qu’ran from its school curriculum because it fears they could encourage insurgency.
In the East, the traditional Igbo apprenticeship program which had produced great Igbo traders is collapsing and is being rejected by the youths. And nobody is asking the reason for the rejection or thinking about an alternative or improvement on the system so as to attract the youths. It is the youths that have rejected this system that have turned out foot soldiers for the agitation in the East. That's the reason why the agitation will not go away soon. It will not so that the East and the nation will be forced to have fresh thinking about Igbo youths.
What about the West? Years of carelessness has produced a generation that is no longer interested in education. Teenage pregnancy is rife. Divorce is a play thing and family life is ruined. There is no more progressive thinking and the streets are filled with vagabonds who unleash violence on the society.
The six states of the South West, may have through Amotekun, the local police put together defiantly in the face of raids and kidnappings by the herdsmen, succeeded in taming the menace of the criminal elements among herdsmen, but they are finding it extremely difficult to curb youth cultism in their territory. Perhaps they don't want to tame it because they also use the cults in their politics. A budding politician told me it is not possible to be successful in government without those 'militias'.
Will the problem go away soon? It will not, until the West gets down to solve the problem of the youths in its territories. A nation that does not take care of its youth is a nation that is going nowhere.
TUNDE AKANDE is both a journalist and Pastor. He earned a Masters degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos
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