Vice chancellor of University of Abuja, Prof Michael Adikwu, has said Nigeria’s present challenges are traceable to indolence and outright laziness among its young people.
He said: “To put it straight, lack of entrepreneurial skills.”
The university don was speaking at a youth sensitization symposium on entrepreneurship organised by Enterpreneurs Focus Ventures.
“These challenges can only be met if we have innovative, well-educated and entrepreneurial citizens who, whatever their walks of life, have the spirit and inquisitiveness to think in new ways, and the courage to meet and adapt to the challenges facing them.”
He added, “The way out is not to wait for oil jobs that may never come or depend on a government that is perpetually broke.”
Adikwu also questioned prioritization of older citizens and subjugation of the values of young people, insisting the country would “wallow in deficit of quality leadership because the newer generation will inherit a mantle of leadership whose thinking is in the past rather than in the future.
He said the place of youth in national development was “vilified and trivialized” and any attention to it was “no more than hypocrisy and lip service.”
He said while politicians saw youth as useful only to execute political scheming and waging electoral violence, capitalists saw youth as labour to be underpaid and majority of Nigerians saw the young as demonstrating capacity to become rich by any means whatsoever.
“Much as these views are prominent among us, they are dangerous venom that must be corrected at all costs before we are consumed by it,” said Adikwu.
