President Buhari needs to get his facts right about young Nigerians

Speaking at a gathering of world leaders at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Westminster on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, the President who enjoyed foreign education on the government’s tab and spent his entire career on Nigeria’s payroll,said of young people in the country that elected him into office,

“About the economy, we have a very young population, our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. This is a very conservative one”, Buhari said in a video transcript shared on social media on Wednesday.

“More than 60% 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,” he added.

As one would expect, the range of reactions has been wide. Most young Nigerians are displeased, nay, angry at the statement and it is easy to see why.

The gap between Nigeria’s youth and the older generation, particularly those in the seat of federal power, is as wide as the country’s problems.

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After witnessing monumental shifts in the nature and direction of Nigeria’s course over the years, they see today’s youth as a bunch obsessed with social media.

Where the rest of the world sees a nation of youth pushing boundaries in less than ideal conditions, they see a batch which would rather speak or garner attention with their voices and mastery of today’s technology than actually work.

Which is the only plausible explanation for the rules and levies that have made drones and solar panels less accessible than they should be.

It is a bit of a farce, when you think about it because the reason why young Nigerians are perceived as troublesome and demanding is that even before most of us “youth” were born, President Buhari’s generation made it clear that we did not matter in their grand scheme of things.

At the time of Nigeria’s independence, President Buhari was just on his way out of Katsina Provincial Secondary School (now Government College Katsina).

1960 was an optimistic year. Nigeria was quite literally a land flowing with milk and honey. It was the giant jewel and lion of Africa, a nation rich in resources that the rest of the world looked on to with optimism and envy.

A story too familiar

There was arguably no better time to be a Nigerian. The country’s economy and institutions were at their strongest; students could get jobs straight out of secondary school or take advantage of strong infrastructure and start businesses of their own.

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Buhari was one of those who benefited from the good of these times; in the years after independence, he enrolled in what is now the Nigerian Defence Academy.

In the space of three years, he enrolled in the Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, England, and later, Army Mechanical Transport School in Borden, United Kingdom.

Both study trips, as well as the future President’s upkeep, were covered by the Nigerian government, common at a time when it sent cadets who had completed their preliminary training at the Nigerian Military Training College, as the NDA was then called, to mostly Commonwealth military academies. There is no such practice now.

In the decades that followed, Nigeria went from the continent’s crown jewel to a byword for mismanagement and sycophancy.

The story is all too familiar.

Over the course of successive military and civilian governments, a generation of Nigerians, particularly the political elite, raped Nigeria of its commonwealth. References abound.

Generaal Ibrahim Babangida's regime is seen as the cabal that legalised corruption. The Gulf War windfall, estimated at over 12 billion dollars, remains unaccounted for.

IBB created a fiefdom, running an elaborate personal show with enough ruses and smokescreens to hold on to power.

Then there's Buhari himself.

Nigeria is a free market economy and has been for a while. But somehow, Buhari's socialist ideals have been like one of a leopard's spot.

His blatant disregard for law led to the Umar Dikko affair, an international shitshow that the country did not need. Just over a decade after Gowon's nationalisation and the first installments of petro-dollars flooded the economy, Nigerians, having just blamed Ghanaians for basically everything, were being flogged to stay in line in a collapsing economy.

For years, the country’s infrastructure has been left to decay.

Universities became, and are still, hubs for campus cults and horny old men.

Hospitals stopped getting funded, and doctors fled the country.

Budget allocations were carted away in Bagco bags and Swiss accounts.

When then-British Prime Minister David Cameron said Nigeria was a fantastically corrupt country, we found it hard to argue with a reputation that had been earned on our behalf.

The culture of misappropriation has become so bad that Nigerians learned to expect their leaders to rob the treasury, a fair estimation considering how leaders like Babangida single-handedly eliminated the middle class and made the naira nearly worthless.

Within that space of time, we became nearly impotent in every field of endeavour. The country was crippled to a point where the average Nigerian learned that getting by was all he could hope for.

The oil wealth which we stumbled on in the 1970s was meant to be our salvation. But then, even as it is till now, that wealth was squeezed into the hands of a few who have used it to enrich families, lineages, cabals and collectives.

What is oil money?

Oil money is a story we read in books and watched in the news, and some were unlucky enough to see in the air and their water, but we have little beyond crime-ridden cities, soot and lawsuits to show for.

Sitting here in 2018, what the generation before us has left is a barely functional country, one where rules and laws only work depending on how much power an individual commands.

Nigeria in 2018 is a country with no middle class, no jobs, an infrastructure deficit, weak borders, an insurgency, weak educational systems, crippled infrastructure, a worthless naira and a bad reputation.

It is a far cry from the country Buhari’s generation grew up in and took advantage of.

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Yet, despite the odds stacked against them, Nigeria’s youth are not lazy, far from it. Instead, young Nigerians, both home and abroad, are defying the odds and the handicaps they’re born with and into to do exploits, break boundaries and set new benchmarks.

For every young boy on the streets of Agege, addicted to drugs for escapism because he can’t find work, there’s an Iyin Aboyeji in his 20s building networks, creating jobs and adding value.

It is what we're getting for a 'Nigerian dream". That those who make it here, do so in spite of the circumstances, not because of them.

ALSO READ: Nigerian youths are not lazy, their leaders failed them

It is why, in reaction to President Buhari’s ill-advised statement, youth all over Nigeria are posting receipts to show why they are not lazy.

These tweets refer to Nigeria’s burgeoning tech space which has attracted attention from the world’s biggest companies. They refer to the music scene, one which has flourished in international proportions without the government’s help. They refer to the stories of millions of young Nigerians making the best of the little they’ve been given

It is proof that our President’s latest embarrassment is more an indictment of himself, his lack of context and emotional intelligence, a rare form of short-nearsightedness that predisposes him to blaming anyone except himself for the problems that should be too obvious to misinterpret.

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President Buhari needs to get his facts right, and I’m not referring to the allegation that 60% of the population is under 30.

When people speak of Nigeria’s promise and potential nowadays, it is not about oil or cocoa, it is a reference to the booming human capital, the boundless talent, versatility and tenacity shown by young Nigerians in various fields of endeavour.

Many have posited and with good reason that, if we are not careful, Nigeria’s biggest tragedy will be that it cannot make anything of its biggest resource: young people.

It’s easy to see why. The stark reality that Buhari’s statement at Westminster makes clear is that the person most likely to run Nigeria for the next 5 years has no belief in the country’s greatest resource.

If that’s not troubling enough, I have no idea what is.

Get your PVCs guys.