Adamawa youths and the danger ahead

On his return to Yola, the capital of Adamawa, Governor Ahmadu Fintiri on Monday spoke about the violence some youths imposed on the state last Saturday. He inspected the warehouses looted by the youths and, after that, addressed the people.

The governor acknowledged the current economic hardship, appealed for calm since the government was working on palliative measures, and promised the prosecution of the arrested “hoodlums.”

Good talk so far. But Fintiri couldn’t resist the penchant for politicians to bury their heads in the sand. He soon went the cheap way of deflecting from the apparent issues.

Hear him: “Preliminary findings from the investigation suggested that besides the purported claim to the economic crunch, which is propelled by the imminent trend of criminality, is the inducement of some lazy politicians amongst us. There are some of us who contested and lost elections and feel that the only way to distract us is by inducing trouble that will sap our energy. We shall deal decisively with anyone who aided and abetted this callous slide into anarchy.”

The governor’s revisionism in this short speech is worrying. He trivialised and impugned on the reality of the people’s suffering and shifted responsibility to some politicians who “lost elections”. This is even though the state police commissioner, Afolabi Babalola, hinted that the violence may have been inspired by rumours that palliatives, which government didn’t want to distribute, were the warehouses.

Fintiri said “purported economic hardship,” suggesting that there was no economic hardship or that it was not enough to warrant an attack on a facility even if goods meant for the people were hoarded there. But the governor should know that hunger and deprivation are a debilitating pair, from which history records people turning into cannibals.

A governor should not downplay the destructive impact of Nigeria’s suffocating poverty in the face of the ostentation in the government.

Even though there can be no justification for crime, politicians must understand that there are limits to what a person can bear. They must also stop playing on the intelligence of citizens by attributing the fallout of the government’s failure to so-called opposition politicians.

In showing that this is futile, we should ask whether disgruntled politicians also instigated the serial vandalism of the new Second Niger Bridge since its opening in May 2023. Are politicians who lost elections also behind teenagers caught in the web of crimes like internet fraud, ritual killing, kidnapping, street robbery, drug abuse, and all such violent criminal tendencies that the country contends with? Why do Nigerian leaders pretend not to understand that refusing to pay attention to youth and children is a problem to national development.

I said this much in “We kill militants but in Vain,” published August 2, 2016. Quoting from “Building strong workforces to power Africa’s growth,” a study commissioned by General Electric, I wrote: “By 2025, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to 25 per cent of the global population of people aged 24 and younger. It submits that successfully providing jobs for this population will directly raise per-capita income, due to the resulting decrease in the non-working population.”

And since working people typically save, there would be greater domestic savings providing money for investment, which would aid immediate and future growth. The paper also notices that the gainful employment of this population will lead to a fall in fertility rates and impact the participation of the female gender in the labour force, lower the number of children per family, and free more money to spend on the education and healthcare needs of families.

The document is, however, generous in its honesty as it gives insights into the flipside of not managing this demographic dividend well. It says: ‘…without the requisite investments in skills development, infrastructure, and services, a growing proportion of youths could be left unemployed and with little hope for socioeconomic advancement. This could increase social tensions, undermining cohesion, and stability.’ But Nigeria refused to pay attention, and we are edging toward that dangerous pass.

Currently, about 70% of the country’s population is under the age of 30. According to a report published by the Foundation for Investigative Journalism in April 2023, fifty-three per cent of these youths are unemployed.

There is also the problem of education. Between April 25 and May 6, 2023, 1,586,765 candidates wrote the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exam (UTME). Less than half of this number will find placement at the end. In 2020, for instance, 1,949,983 candidates wrote the exam, but only 551,553 were admitted into various institutions of higher learning. Although the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) allocated a quota of 956,809 in 2020, the institutions could not fulfil their assigned quotas. This implies that about one million youths will not gain admission this year. So, Nigeria can neither get most aspiring young people into higher education postings nor employ hundreds of thousands of those graduating each year. We, therefore, have a crowd of agile, restless, idle, and angry youths on our hands.

We are not doing better with the children. On that front, about 20 million are out of school, and a significant number (70%) of those attending school aren’t learning optimally. The country has a dire situation, but we play politics! What is beginning to play out across the country lends credence to a Yoruba aphorism, which means that “the child that people don’t invest in will vandalise and auction all their property/investments”.

Nigeria’s story is compounded by the pandemic of poverty that has hit most parents. When parents cannot provide for children who are denied education or any means of livelihood, society has big trouble. This challenge worsens when children and youth have unfettered access to psychotropic substances and light weapons. With all these glaring difficulties, it is tragic when leaders sing the narrative of opposition figures and the related rather than swift actions to save the future.

Most important is the deliberate education of every Nigerian child, regardless of the circumstances of their birth or where they come from.

It is gratifying that President Bola Tinubu’s last speech revealed a plan to invest in education. We must, however, be careful to invest appropriately. It shouldn’t be about throwing money at the situation but reforming the entire sector for optimal delivery.

Like in other forward-looking countries, education is the only irrevocable gift that this avaricious generation of Nigerians can pass on to the next generation. And when we talk about education, we don’t mean piling children into blocks of newly renovated classrooms manned by half-baked teachers whose empty stomachs and minds conflicted.

Functional education considers the whole value chain. From an adequately targeted curriculum and pedagogy to raising qualified and well-motivated teachers, ensuring that every child gets an education, at least for the first nine years of their lives, and giving vocational education pride of place, those who lead Nigeria must do much more than merely mouth their commitment to the future. They must walk their talk and deliver good governance. Without that, we are building a country that will one day swallow its people. The education of the Nigerian child must also include a re-orientation and re-evaluation of the values passed onto these children.

In addition, this country must do something about the population growth rate, which the National Population Commission (NPC) put at 3.2 per cent per annum in 2023. There is a lot to worry about when a country has 133 million people in multi-dimensional poverty and a Gross Domestic Product growth rate of 2.3 per cent. So even as the government battles with the national economy, it must do something urgent about population planning. This is what all serious nations with eyes on the future do.

We do not need to go as far as China by prescribing specific numbers of children to citizens, but we must educate Nigerians about the need to have only children they can care for. The strength of countries like China is not just in its population but in decades of deliberate planning and execution of policies across culture, ethics, education, technology, and what have you. Nigeria’s leaders should aim to register their names in gold. They cannot achieve this by making redundant accusations against political opponents. You should get to work.

Adedokun can be reached on Twitter: @niranadedokun