Will you add more to the tragedy of Nigerian youth, or stop it?

Editor’s note: Japheth Omojuwa, the Naij.com columnist, explains why the potential of the Nigerian youth is horribly misdirected.

In the art of war, anyone who is able to keep their enemies fighting against one another needs not fight such enemies themselves. The most effectively won wars are those that don’t require you to move or expend your ammunition. Once your adversaries are committed to decimating one another, your job is to ensure they never have a reason to stop fighting. Even if you have never read any books on the art of war, this should connect with you intuitively.

No progress, just stalling

Those who assume that Nigeria is at the threshold of a generational change in political leadership are as far from being right as Ra’s al-Abyad in Tunisia is from Cape Agulhas in South Africa.

Young Nigerians were active players during the 2015 elections. Their participation was well beyond social media despite the general perception that young people were active on social media but scarcely present elsewhere. Young people were active participants at the conventions of the major political parties, they helped to mobilise the general public for the collection of permanent voter cards, and their votes certainly formed the major parts of the votes cast during the elections.

It looked for a while like the time has finally come for Nigeria’s young people to wield their influence, especially because of the amplification of their voices via social media. But the same platforms that had helped to amplify their voices also revealed a polarization that seems deeper than just quests for retweets and mentions.

The absence of unity has been a constant in the political reality of Nigeria, but the relationship amongst Nigeria’s young political class comes with venomous hatred. The past few weeks, for instance, revealed a WhatsApp group where young people who supposedly gathered to discuss issues according to their political leaning had the conversation degenerate into a needless debate on their fellow young people. Death threats were issued.

The pain that comes with losing at the polls is understandable. What remains astounding is the insistence on making enemies of those who were on a different side during the elections. Especially when the wise have since ditched political sides and refocused attention on governance.

What you see on Nigeria’s social media space, for instance, are not debates that border on ways to make the government and its institutions work for the Nigerian people. They are clashes over irrelevant issues that add virtually nothing to the common good. When debates get to happen, they happen within a caucus or two that speak to one another, pretend to argue with one another, and then agree with one another.

The tragedy of youth in Nigeria

A young person was appointed as a special assistant to a minister. Sending his congratulatory tweet, another young person used the opportunity to gloat as a retired special assistant to ministers. There are special assistants with special mandates, there are special assistants being specially rewarded for their politics.

This reality is a reflection of the collective ambition and obsession with making do with whatever goes and assuming just being named the paper carrier to the minister of something makes them part and parcel of the political class. That who was named aide to the minister has since been named special assistant to the president. Essentially, one had gone from one minister to the other in the same position for years without a telling mandate, while the one that had just been mocked started in public service as an aide to a minister and was immediately poached by the president, within a few days, with a telling mandate on each count.

There is a tragedy of youth in Nigeria; a tragedy that is defined by the complex unwholesome realities surrounding young Nigerians across the entire social class. At the foot of the pyramid, you have young people being consequences of Nigeria’s failed system of education, with over 10 million of them out of school. The soldiers of the terrorist group Boko Haram, militants and evolving gang of kidnappers are predominantly young people. Some steps above the foot you find young graduates battling for jobs that are not there, and when they are, those jobs hardly pay enough for the average young person to survive the increasingly expensive realities in the average Nigerian city. At the two levels already mentioned, camaraderie is tough because survival is the only reality that counts.

Then there is the growing population of young people with more than enough power and influence to determine the political conversation in Nigeria. What they are instead focusing on made it so that the political class can take them for granted and not fear a collective reprisal. There are two main divides: the group of young people who made their living off the previous Goodluck Jonathan government and/or the then-ruling PDP government, against the group of young people who formed the movement that swept the Jonathan administration out of power.

It has been 11 months since the elections but the divides have only grown bigger. Those who focus conversations on issues that matter are soon attacked and accused, I’d assume, based on the survival reality of the average young person in the political system.

The resistance

You can be guilty of silence so there is no day off. Your silence is likely to be attacked as “they have paid you to shut up! During Jonathan’s government, you could not shut up for a day!” You can be guilty of supporting a good move made by the government: “Shut up! What will you say before? Is it not your people’s government?” You can be guilty of criticizing the government: “Why are you criticizing them? Oh, they have not paid for this month? Is it not you people that voted for change?”

Wherever you stand according to the logic that requires that you stand based on the issues involved, the ultra-partisan group of young people will have a negative word to share with you. It takes a unique mental strength, a continual focus on the big picture and an extraordinary level of thick skin to ignore such puerile antagonism to focus squarely on what counts: the progress and prosperity of the Nigerian people.

The Goodluck Jonathan administration was a very bad government. Those who supported it thought it more important not to lose face than they thought a bad government needed only to be showed the way out. The Buhari administration is yet to find its feet nine months after its inauguration. Some refuse to understand a mandate has already been given, so criticisms to get the government going will not take away the president’s mandate. These criticisms are not seen as what they really are: attempts to keep the government on its feet, to focus on what counts and what matters.

The road ahead

Either way, there is a challenge. Not many young people have the mental strength to withstand the hatred that gets spilled against them — those who insist on speaking truth to power. So their voices are silent. Safety first. A sizeable chunk of power is lost to the petty group that insists on taking issues from the point of their electoral losses at the 2015 polls. Because once criticism becomes petty, it loses its potency and you cannot define petty without the group that insists on hashtagging their way to irrelevance by dedicating one hashtag a day to embarrassing the government, mostly based on pettiness. The “occasional N10k” will go along way towards a plate of rice or two, but after that?

In the end, you have a seemingly potent force for good, an army ready to make a claim for greatness but an army that insists on imploding before the battle for greatness even gets started. That is the tragedy of youth and politics in Nigeria. Credit to the few who know and do better, but how far can the voice of a few be heard when thrown in the midst of a barbaric reality?

Japheth Omojuwa is a renowned Nigerian social media expert, columnist and Naij.com contributor.

The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of Naij.com.

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