CAN YOU MEET THEIR NEEDS 'THESE NIGERIAN YOUTHS ARE NOW TOTALLY HOPELESS, WE WILL GO TO WAR, WE WILL FIGHT TILL WE DIE.'

CAN YOU MEET THEIR NEEDS 'THESE NIGERIAN YOUTHS ARE NOW TOTALLY HOPELESS, WE WILL GO TO WAR, WE WILL FIGHT TILL WE DIE.'


SOME months ago, before the recent sectarian violence which engulfed some states in the Northern part of Nigeria, the Minister of Youth Development, Senator Olasunkanmi Akinlabi, had alerted the country that about 80 per cent of the country’s youth population was unemployed. In 2007, a former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission had said that Nigerian graduates were unemployable which was even a grimmer picture of a certainly dreary reality. This is because a greater percentage of the country’s graduates of tertiary institutions are youths, whose future have been, in a manner of speaking, circumscribed.

IF Nigeria had an effective policy for its youths, probably the Boko Haram tragedy which recently spread across four states in the North would have taken a different dimension. Certainly, it would not have been possible for the sect to recruit such a vast army of desperate and despondent angry youths into its fold and it would have been more difficult for it to wreak such an unspeakable havoc on the country’s socio-political landscape as it successfully did, recording an untold toll of avoidable deaths and dislocations.

IF there was any hope before 1999 that the new political class, which was to be ushered in then at the return to civil rule or democracy would tackle the effects of years of the military’s planlessness on the youth, the last 10 years have dashed such hopes. The political class, which took over from the military, has shown nothing but selfishness and various ideas about how to reverse the trend especially in terms of giving hope to the youths.

IRONICALLY, a handful of the youth have had the opportunity of being in prominent positions of influence politically, yet there has not been any effective programme on the ground to rehabilitate the youth and secure the future for the upcoming generations. It is easy and convenient to blame an ailing economy for the problems and challenges confronting the youth, yet the country failed dismally to spend its resources judiciously on the youth when its main product, oil, attracted high prices in the international market. The political class would rather embark on corrupt acquisition of symbols of opulence.

NOW sadly, the country is in a quandary. Its angry youths have turned to crime as armed robbers, militants, kidnappers and foot soldiers for aberrant religious groups. The revenue from oil has declined significantly due to reduced activities in the industry and damaged infrastructure at the hands of the militants.

THE average Nigerian youth is a despondent unemployed or underemployed hand. Many of the youth are commercial motorcycle operators and gradually, the various professions or vocations are beginning to witness a lack of apprentices. Yet, a lot of them are with big dreams to drive big vehicles and live big without any job to sustain such. Another vast majority of them are into internet frauds and many of them are hell bent on travelling abroad in search of the proverbial greener pastures or better opportunities for self expression all of which are deemed to be nil in their fatherland. In the process, many have died, many are in jail in foreign countries for one offence or the other.

ALL of these have happened because the Nigerian state has presented itself as a hostile environment to the dreams and aspiration of the youth. In the last five years for instance, the Nigerian economy has thrown up a lot of vast opportunities for the youth in the entertainment industry. Nollywood was recently adjudged as the second largest in the world at least in terms of the volume of production next to India. Some Nigerian stand up comedians are making waves and getting international acclaim, yet the Nigerian state has been unable to impact positively on this trend and regulate it in order to protect its own in this fledging industry.

THE Nigerian youth then is a victim of a crass and visionless leadership. A leadership which is bereft of both vision and inspiration and which is corrupt to boot. It is a leadership which is culpable of having abandoned its youth to a helpless and prostrate essence.

TODAY is the International Day of the youth and the theme for this year’s celebration is; Sustainability; Our Challenge, Our Future. We hope that all tiers of government in Nigeria will be able to take the challenge by kick-starting programmes which will give the Nigerian youth opportunities for self expression so that they can influence their socio-economic environment with the vibrancy and creativity usually associated with the youth.

THE Nigerian reality is worrying and we believe that only a doomed country will allow its youths to be swayed by the vagaries of its own contradictions. There is a desperate need to build a generation of focused and purposeful youth. There are so many brilliant minds in Nigeria that have been wasted, to use the popular term employed by the Nobel Laurete, Professor Wole Soyinka

There are so many that are still being wasted and it is imperative to put a halt to the wastage.



Most people believe Yar'Adua is about to make Osama Bin laden start targeting Nigeria

Embattled President Umaru Musa Yar’adua is seeking the help of the United States to counter the rising incidence of sectarian violence which authorities believe might have opened the doors to foreign Jihadists and other radical Islamists groups, including Al Qaeda.

Huhuonline website has learnt from authoritative sources in the US State Department that Nigeria has made a formal appeal or anti-terrorism funding from the United States and the issue will feature top on the agenda during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s upcoming visit to Nigeria. In return, Nigeria will join the “coalition of the willing” by providing combat and support brigade troops of Muslim extraction to join the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Although the final details are yet to be worked out, intelligence officials are said to have expressed strong reservations; warning Yar’adua that sending Nigerian troops into Afghanistan or Iraq will attract the anger and possible retaliation of Islamic fundamentalists groups and make Nigeria a target of attacks like the US embassy bombings in East Africa.

But facing mounting political pressure from within his own northern Muslim constituents, the President has vowed to go ahead with what a Presidential source described as “cash-for-troops” deal with the Americans, arguing that most of the Nigerian soldiers will be Muslims who understand their Muslim counterparts in Afghanistan, including the local language. But the source dismissed the President’s optimism as misplaced; saying Yar’adua is fighting a battle for his own political survival.

With the Niger Delta amnesty threatening to unravel; and a fragile cease-fire reigning in the poverty-ridden north where sectarian violence claimed over 700 lives and displaced thousands more, the continuing crises in the most economically marginalized areas - the Niger Delta, where the oil industry has destroyed the local economy, and the north, where traditional agriculture is failing to sustain the people - mean that Yar’adua is fighting a war on two fronts

Nigerian intelligence sources told Huhuonline website that the recent crisis with Boko Haram might have quietly opened the door to external Muslim fundamentalist groups such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which operates as far south as Northern Mali. To make a bad situation worse, Al Qaeda’s leader and the world’s most wanted man; Osama bin Laden has identified Nigeria as a resource-rich country ripe or insurrection and the foundational outpost for the recreation of the ancient Muslim caliphate of that stretched from the Sarduana of Sokoto to the Ghana-Mali-Songhai empires of West Africa.

Nigerian Intelligence officials are working round the clock looking for evidence linking Al Qaeda to the extremist Boko Haram sect but Islamic proselytizers from Pakistan are said to be at work along the Sahel belt with instructions from bin Laden to infiltrate local militant groups like Boko Haram and MEND with a view to destabilizing Nigeria. Although the fighting with Boko Haram militants has stopped for the time being; for the intelligence services and military, making sure Nigeria does not become an Al Qaeda recruitment post remains an ever more threatening challenge especially as most Boko Haram members have fled to neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger - where Boko Haram’s leader Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf allegedly told the military he bought his weapons - they have vowed revenge after Yusuf died in police custody. Retaliation could follow if Yusuf is claimed as a martyr. Attempts by international Islamist groups to destabilise Nigeria through sponsorship of extremist sects are hard to discern. Nigerian intelligence sources insist that Yusuf’s group and its members are home-grown.

No one has, it seems, yet produced evidence that Boko Haram has links to Al Qaeda, whose affiliates move easily through the porous borders of the Maghreb to the north but the cash washing around Nigeria ’s corrupt oil economy makes it more vulnerable to foreign funding, and national intelligence sources accept that the growing political and economic pressures in the north have created new opportunities for militants to exploit in their campaign to destabilise the government - and the chance for foreign-backed and organized groups to move into the region’s biggest economy and most populous country.