We have a very young population. Our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. This is a very conservative one, more than 60 per cent of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free,” has been credited to President Muhammadu Buhari as part of a statement he made at a business meeting in London. And this statement has, not surprisingly, spawned polarisation in Nigeria between critics and defenders of the president’s assessment of his country’s youth population.
A close look at the entire speech that contained the unsavoury comment indicates that President Buhari could not have presented his assessment of the work ethic of Nigerian youths as an empirical observation. For example, Buhari’s assurance in another section of his speech at the same meeting, “I am very pleased with the successes in agriculture. We have cut rice importation by about 90 per cent, made lots of savings of foreign exchange, and generated employment. People are now going back to the farms. Even professionals are going back to the land” starkly contradicts his assessment of the country’s youth, particularly as the president did not show in the speech that it was only the country’s oldsters that had rushed to the farms to ensure food security.
However, President Buhari’s style cannot but upset serious-minded youths and their parents as one unfortunate statement that did not have to be made, especially abroad, more so that it did not derive from empirical research. The paternalistic tone of the president’s statement must have emerged from his desire to act as the ‘Father of the Nigerian State’, a role not uncharacteristic of heads of state in many countries. But fathers do not generally leave home to castigate their children outside, as this may amount to washing the family’s dirty linens in public. It is, however, remarkable that President Buhari had not in the three years of his tenure made such derogatory statements about Nigerian youths at home. Since such comments are not part of his antecedents, it is proper to see this facile generalisation as a slip and not an attempt to stigmatise majority of the youths visibly yearning for solution to the country’s hydra-headed problem of underdevelopment.
Nigerian youths cannot be denied of working and hoping to see their country become advanced like other countries they see on television, and which many of them risk their lives to live in when they embark on dangerous trips to escape to Europe and the Americas. Further, the youths who succeed in reaching Europe, Australia, and the United States, are generally cited for doing well academically, professionally, and vocationally. For instance, Nigerian youths are recognised as one of the most educated immigrant groups in the United States. Even many of those at home, encouraged by promise of the ethic of change in 2015, helped enthusiastically to organise President Buhari’s campaign for office in 2015 and many are already in the vanguard of his campaign plan for second term.
Without doubt, there are many young people in Nigeria, as in other societies, who flaunt a life of leisure and indulgence. Such youths do not amount to a sufficient number upon which to make the type of definitive description of the character of the country’s youth made by the President in London. There is no gainsaying that majority of youths at home, unlike their counterparts abroad, are experiencing more difficulties in whatever they engage in than their parents, be it in terms of access to electricity, potable water, health care, transportation, good public education, etc. The few youths who act as free loaders or economic parasites with a sense of entitlement to oil wealth are almost invariably children whose parents have outsize access to oil wealth in the country, largely through corruption or abuse of office, which President Buhari has come to fight.
The president is right about the few youths with a head start for a life of leisure and affluence, but most of the country’s youths are adding value to the society and are eager to do more if opportunities are created. Like their counterparts elsewhere, Nigerian youths at home and abroad only need understanding, support, and encouragement—personal and institutional—of every adult in the polity and society.
