Beyond statistics: Engaging the Nigerian youths

And the truth of the matter is that however we hate the figures and statistics, they are the closest to the reality about the challenge of the youths face everywhere. Nobody can contradict these figures because they reflect a demographic dynamics which portends an ambivalent future for all mankind. African nations, and Nigeria in particular, […]

And the truth of the matter is that however we hate the figures and statistics, they are the closest to the reality about the challenge of the youths face everywhere. Nobody can contradict these figures because they reflect a demographic dynamics which portends an ambivalent future for all mankind. African nations, and Nigeria in particular, have a very significant place within that ambivalent future. On the matter of the youths, facts and statistics are in tacit collusion.
Facts are stubborn things, says Tobias Smollett, the Scottish novelist. And they stubbornly portray a depressing reality about the youths the world over locked in a vicious cycle of unemployment, crime and lawlessness. The most essential fact that confronts the world today is that there is a demographic bulge consisting of untapped youthful energies which seems, albeit arguably, to be without any perceived purpose. And this fact is not an African peculiarity alone. The youths all over the world seem listless and without direction. This demographic fact is however complicated within the African context.
What are the gloomy statistics? Unemployment is usually the yardstick for measuring the (non-) performance capacity of the youth. The ILO titled its Global Employment Trend for Youth 2013 document ‘A generation at risk’. For the ILO, it is a difficult thing to be a youth in today’s labour market. This is because current statistics reveals that in 2013, there are 73 million unemployed youths which add up to 12.6% of global youth unemployment rate. This is as close as the world can ever be to a crisis point. The enormity of that crisis is magnified within the developing regions which housed 90% of the global youth population. Africa is the youthful continent par excellence. And that fact is not cheering. In 2013, according to the World Bank, youth unemployment is at an all-time high of 38%. This is all the more depressing because the youths constitute approximately 70% of the total Nigerian population.   
Crime and violence also provide a critical index for assessing the performance of the global youths. This is essentially because crime and violence constitute a framework outside a productive engagement of the abundant energies the youths are capable of. According to the WHO fact sheet, 41% of the total number of global homicides occurs among the youths. This comes to 250, 000 youth-induced deaths. The individual risk factors associated with this statistics include hyperactivity, impulsiveness, early involvement with anti-social beliefs and attitudes, low educational achievement, etc. at the societal level, the risk factors are basically high income disparity, absence of non-violent alternative platforms for engagement and the low quality of a country’s governance dynamics especially with regards to education and social protection.
What does this statistics tell us? The first and most significant implication is that youth unem-ployment, and its automatic corol-lary of youth violence, initiates a psychological depreciation which inevitably reduces the social func-tioning quotient of the youth. This means, in other words, that the average number of exuberant youths able to make the transition to the working age group declines sharply. And the consequence of this, especially in Africa, is that the continent loses the advantage of utilising the demographic dividend which providence has bestowed on it. The demographic dividend refers to the socioeconomic benefits derivable from the extension of the average life expectancy of those who belong to the working age group of a country’s population. This dividend automatically reduces the spending that goes to the dependants—children and non-productive adults—and eventually stimulates economic growth. How beneficial the demographic dividend becomes is however directly proportional to the number of youths that make the transition to working age group as well as the capacity of the economy to absorb them productively. And this is the crux of the matter.
The youths have never been totally in the national picture of many countries. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, most national economies consign their youthful population to the unregulated informal sector of the economy that breeds discouragement, frustration and violence. The informal sector is temporary and its wages are below subsistence. The second reason is that the platforms for engaging the youth at all levels are rudimentary at best and absent at worse. In Nigeria, for instance, these rudimentary youth organisations have not provided the necessary dialogic structures and platforms to insinuate themselves into the development conversation that Nigeria requires to make robust progress. Most of the organisations are locked in a cycle of opportunism and politicking.
So far, we have an insight into how we should not go about resolving the youth challenge. First, lamenting the statistics of youth crime, violence and unemployment is frustrating enough. It does not get anything done. Second, it may be less than proactive for the youths to wait for the older generation to craft suitable frameworks for getting them into the national dialogue. The older generation may be right to assume that they are too concerned on youths challenge to see this as an issue. Life is too engaging, and the youths must engage it by themselves.
According to George Bernard Shaw, ‘All that the young can do for the old is to shock them and keep them up to date.’ To shock the old, in this context, requires that the youths become seminar in being heroic. A hero is anyone who understands the enormity of the forces arrayed against his/her progress, and is prepared to confront his/her own fate. Sisyphus is such a hero for me. Confronted with the terrible ordeal of ceaselessly rolling a heavy rock up the top of a mountain, he promptly got into the task. The Nigerian youths are also facing their heroic moment. If the gloomy unemployment statistics reaches its crisis point, both the youths and everyone else would bear the brunt of the backlash. The alternative is to snatch respite through self-induced advocacy for institutional relevance by populating youth institutional platforms with development-minded knowledge workers and redressing its current domination by opportunists. Returning the youths to the centre of the national dialogue on development is a Sisyphean task. It demands confronting the current institutional imbalance through a robust and proactive process of leveraging enabling platforms that speaks to that imbalance.
And the first condition towards empowering a youth advocacy platform is the rejuvenation of the educational framework of the Nigerian state. Education enables empowerment. I am talking about the youths rediscovering their voices and inserting them into the ongoing discourse. No one will speak better on this than those at its wrong end, feeling the pain of accumulated policy somersaults. Louis Pasteur, the French scientist, once remarked that ‘chance favors only the prepared mind.’ Preparing to engage the institutional arrangement arrayed against youth participation demands a stringent advocacy for a reform of the educational system in a manner that favours integrating the education of the youths into the dynamics of history and development. This kind of education has the potential of sensitising the youths to their historical mandate as the engine of national transformation. The challenge facing the youth is therefore to step out of an opportunistic and myopic lamentation zone which locks them within present gratification (if any) that sacrifices future fulfilment.
This is the best of times to take advocacy to a height never dreamt of in history. The digital age presents a unique opportunity to enlarge the advocacy space. If we must escape the looming crisis predicted by statistics, then we must turn statistics on its head in reversed demographics. This requires a heroic effort. And this is the heroic moment. If we will neither be villain nor criminals, then we must be heroes!     
    
Dr Olaopa is a Federal Permanent Secretary,  <[email protected]>;