Gone are the days when statements such as the “the youth are the future” still held sway because out of Nigeria’s 150 million population approximately 100 million are below the age of 30, so it has become ever so clear going by these statistics, that the youth are no longer the “future” but rather they’re the “present”.
The youth are now the dominant force in the nation as they represent the largest age group. 100 million young people who desperately need to know that their government has their best interests at heart occupy the land. Every single year thousands of young Nigerians graduate from university and are added to the ever expanding list of those who are “educated and unemployed”. When you add this figure to the “uneducated and unemployed” segment of the society, then you will realise that as a nation, we are sitting on a time bomb.
Restlessness is synonymous with youth, and if this idle army of young fire brands do not enter some sort of gainful employment or self employment very soon, then we could have a revolution in our hands. The unemployment situation amongst the youth can no longer be used simply as a topic for discussion around the dinner table or as the catalyst to stimulate the intellectual orgasms of a few economists who spend their days perusing financial data and pontificating (on a solely academic level) about the economic realities of our time; it’s time to act and we must act quickly before it is too late.. The proposal which I have outlined in this presentation can solve this problem if acted upon. The last thing we need is yet another unproductive youth conference where people simply attend in order impress each other with their knowledge of the English language and spout out phrases such as “paradigm shifts” and after all that talk, the economic realities of our youth remain unaltered. We finally have a strategy which has the potential to solve the unemployment epidemic besieging our nation and revitalise our young and extremely dynamic population.
The youth have become understandably apathetic with the conduct of our political class and very few of them believe that their government actually cares about them or their well being, but I am convinced however that if the above strategy is implemented nationwide, this prevailing apathy will dissipate and a reconnect between the youth (who now make up the majority of our population) and the Federal and State government officials would occur.
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