Pat UtomiIf there is a clear victim of Nigeria’s failing experience it is it’s young people. They have been denied the promise of becoming the source of the demographic dividend we need. They are called lazy by those who epitomize laziness, brutalized by law enforcement officers, and killed as if they were stool pidgins for target practice when they protest abuse, and still, they erect pillars of soft power for Nigeria with an industry like the music, movie, and fashion ventures they built with no support.
On this Independence Day in 2023, I celebrate them and wish them freedom from the forces that strip off their freedom every which way you look. Viva. Your liberation is near at hand.
Atedo Peterside was recently quite profound with the opportunities Nigeria gave young people when he was in his 20s and 30s and how those open doors have been shut on today’s young and the streams of opportunity are made dry for people of that age today.
To found a Bank and be it’s CEO at 33 was phenomenal but not so unusual back then. General Gowon was Head of State at that age, Alfred Diette Spiff had been Governor at 27 just as I had reached a Presidential Advisory position at that same age of 27 with the only godfather at the back being two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. and a perception of capacity by leaders who saw virtue in a meritocracy.
Why have the people who benefitted from so liberal a culture pulled the rug from beneath today’s young who are generally better educated at the same age? Are these now aging men more shortsighted than selfish and greedy, as they are often imagined to be.
The naked truth is that the generation of Nigerians now in their 70s and 80s have constricted the freedom of younger people to act in a manner that brutalizes, dehumanizes, and criminalizes youth and makes them lose self-confidence.
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I am told bizarre stories of what happens to young people at police checkpoints. I had assumed that after the EndSARS protests the police would have found it so bad a report they would seek a makeover in conduct. It would seem the street terror rained on young people at checkpoints remains.
The youth must be able to exhale and find freedom in a time of Independence. Like Donna Summer sang they should find their state of Independence.
Throughout history, most societies that have lost their girth have turned to their young to get them back on the saddle. But we poison the purity of youth with the injection of ethnic hatred into their consciousness in a way that gives the day to emotion and not reason. The youth suffer the double whammy of turning on one another rather than those who shut them out.
In story telling mood I like to recall how in 1975 as a student leader I argued it was our right and duty to affect how the dominant policy issue of the day, foreign policy regarding the Liberation struggle brought me to the office of the Foreign Minister, the then Colonel Joseph Nanven Garba in a dramatic break of protocol. He accepted my invitation to come to Nsukka to debate us and felt strongly enough to come while an abortive coup d’etat in which the Head of State was killed, was still in progress in February 1976.
Why should a generation I know is smarter and better exposed than I was at 19 when these things happened not get their day in the Sun before the passion finds calm.
So I pay tribute to a generation that has persevered in spite of being bullied; a generation of hustle that has kept going in a time of job drought when in our time many had three job offers to choose from before going for NYSC; lives in subhuman conditions in Campus Dorms today crowded eight into rooms where two of us woke up and went to class knowing our bed would be made and clothes laundered, not find justice.
This is a hero generation They cry for freedom and their day of Independence shall come.
Patrick Okedinachi Utomi, Political Economist and Professor of Entrepreneurship is founder of the Centre for Values in Leadership.
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