till on Nigerian youths and demographic disaster

Driving through the streets of Abuja last week and observing the horrendous human traffic that sprang up in some parts of the Federal Capital caused by the thousands of youths applying for the ongoing Civil Service recruitment, revived the mental consternation I experienced in 2010 after reading the British Council report on the future of the Nigerian youth. In 2010, the British Council released a controversial report which, in a nutshell, stated that Nigeria’s booming population of young people might be a great boon for the country’s economy in the coming decades, but if the Nigerian government did not take steps to engage young people, the country faced a “demographic disaster”. Three years down the line, the picture painted by the report is becoming more vivid as what I may call ‘the youth condition’ is worsening.

Unemployment is now so bad that Nigeria is rated among the countries at the top rung in the unemployment index of the world. The power situation is getting worse that even the youths that are courageous enough to start their own small businesses cannot see their ventures surviving. Then the ones whose parents could scrounge enough funds for them to go to school, come out so half-educated – because of incessant strikes and dilapidated educational infrastructure – that they are practically unemployable. I opened the newspaper two days ago and saw the photograph of a protest scene by some of the Civil Service applicants; they sat in the middle of the road in their numbers in a hopeless demonstration of their frustration at the whole recruitment process. Looking closely at their faces I saw desperation, anger, ennui, and naked hopelessness. Coincidentally, the International Youth Day was celebrated on August 13, last week. In all, it is obvious that our leaders have not yet taken that British Council report seriously.

To be candid and realistic, a demographic disaster looms if the government does not create sustainable ways of engaging the youth. In our country of about 170 million people, 60 per cent is youthful. It is projected that by the year 2020, Nigeria’s population will cross 200 million, and by 2050 the country would be the fifth most populous country in the world. Is it not scary to imagine a youth population in tens of millions which is engaged in the use of hard drugs, vandalism, internet fraud, prostitution, thuggery, and other vices? Presently, many families are lamenting the sudden involvement of once innocent and promising young chaps in drug abuse; and the trend is worsening because of unemployment, collapsing government infrastructure and lacking social welfare scheme in Nigeria.

Climate change is another villain that is now causing the Nigerian youths so much anguish. Floods occasioned by the effects of climate change have engendered a new form of dislocation of the youth population. Instructively, this year’s International Youth Day was celebrated with the theme, ‘Youth Migration: Moving Development Forward’. In search of a higher plain for farming to escape the risk of being submerged by floods, the youths migrate from their natural habitat, and in search of a better life, employment and education, they migrate to bigger cities and foreign countries. In the case of natural disasters they are the ones mostly found in Internally Displaced Persons’ camps; they are the ones to be raped; that lose their education period; that suffer the psychological trauma of trying to survive without being properly equipped for it; and in the final analysis, the ones to quickly embrace drug abuse and prostitution as the routes out of their predicament.

Nevertheless, in as much as climate change poses a serious challenge to the youths, it also has a tremendous potential to empower the youths through green entrepreneurship. This is the area the Nigerian government should look into as part of the strategy to prevent a future demographic disaster. We are now in an era of population boom, and it is instructive to note that in such a period as this, national development plans to suit the demands of the moment as it concerns the youths become a priority. For instance, after World War II, the United States of America went through a period described as the ‘baby boom’ era. Recognising the import of such epoch as it concerns the social infrastructure, the United States government amended its laws to incorporate a broad social security system that would carter for the booming youth population. That was why the youths of America could adapt to the 70’s era of multiculturalism and technology explosion. The social welfare system ensured that names like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates mainstreamed their innovative sparks with little challenge. The Silicon Valley developed as a result of the social infrastructure laid by the American Government for its booming youth population. Had the government not prepared for them, the country would have experienced a New Age Armageddon of sort.

Today is still early to engage the Nigerian youth. Among the engagement strategies, the government should design green entrepreneurship programmes as a matter of priority because the whole world is tilting towards green consciousness. Therefore, just as technology and gizmos ruled the 80s and 90s, eco-innovations will definitely rule this 21st century. Nigeria has the environmental raw materials to be the first in the world in eco-resource management and green innovations. In addition to designing local solutions to our peculiar problems while creating employment for our teeming population, these green jobs can earn Nigeria a lot of carbon credits from the international carbon credit market. Uganda and Kenya are already having some youth driven green jobs attracting these funds to their countries, while our youths are still living in a fool’s paradise of securing nonexistent white collar jobs.

I believe that we must take the lead in Africa. There are still emerging niche green jobs. For example, at its Exco meeting in Cairo in June this year, African Ministers Council on Water approved the Policy and Strategy for mainstreaming youths in water and sanitation resource management. The Nigerian youths should be encouraged; the Bank of Industry, where the funds for such enterprises are domiciled should embark on sensitisation of the Nigerian youth entrepreneurs in order to give them the opportunity to utilise it and create more opportunities for other youths. Also, just as I always advocate, the Federal Government, should design a special edition of its YouWin project strictly for the environment, not only as a tool to empower youths but as a catalyst to unlock the green innovativeness in the land.

Then, Hamzat Lawal, who represented the Nigerian youths last week at the African Youths Ambassadors Training organised by the African  Youth Panel in the Gambia, should be supported by the government and even the private sector, to organise a roundtable for the Nigerian youths in order to ignite the process of making champions out of the Nigerian young people and then mainstream youth empowerment through environment protection and sustainability, and including other developmental indices like health and welfare, peace and security, cultural and moral values, etc. This is the only way the Nigerian youth could be properly engaged. Come to think of it, those that predicted that Nigeria would break up soon might actually be looking at our future via the prism of a hopeless youth population, lost in the middle and unable to connect either to the future or to the past.

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