PDP slams President over "unpatriotic" comment about Nigerian youths

The opposition party said after the Buhari has finished "de-marketing his own generation, the president is set to destroy the future of younger Nigerians."

In his keynote address at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, Buhari had said that some Nigerian youths wait for the government to do everything for them because the country is oil-rich.

"We have a very young population; our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free", the President had said.

The statement has sparked outrage and backlash from the Nigerian youths who have been showing 'proof' of their hard work on Twitter with the hashtag #LazyNigerianYouths which is currently the number one trending topic on Nigerian Twitter.

Joining the hundreds of Nigerians criticising Buhari for such comment, the PDP national publicity secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, on Thursday, April 19, said Nigerian youths are the opposite of what the President described.

He said the youths in the country are one of the most industrious sets of individuals across the world.

He said, "Nigerians find it extremely shocking that Buhari could make such a false, derogatory and unpatriotic comment against our citizens at a time the nation was looking up to him to properly present our potentials to the global business community.

"It is alarming that, at every international event, the president makes it a favourite past time to de-market, paint and denigrate our dear nation and her citizens in very negative light, an indication that he has stopped believing in Nigeria.

"It is saddening that after de-marketing his own generation, the president is set to destroy the future of younger Nigerians. The president’s latest salvo is totally unacceptable and must be condemned by all right-thinking people to avoid further verbal assault against our country, particularly at international fora.

"Here is a president, whose administration has in its three years of governance, contributed nothing towards providing opportunities for our youths and who has not initiated or implemented any development project or set up any industry to provide jobs for our aspiring youth.

"Here is a president under whose watch factories and businesses have shut down resulting in over 24 million job losses, and under whom no meaningful foreign direct investment has been attracted to the country.

"This is a president who daily watches Nigerian youths sweat on menial jobs under very strenuous conditions on the streets of Abuja, Jos, Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Bauchi, Calabar, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Onitsha and other major cities, yet he unsympathetically described them as lazy.

"These are the same set of Nigerians who, upon being afforded the right opportunities in other countries of the world, are known to have excelled in various fields of endeavour."

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Ologbondiyan further said that Buhari's continued habit of making statements that put Nigeria in a bad light anytime he travels abroad will not encourage any foreign investor to come to the country.