The 2023 Nigerian youth project

By Huzaifa jega

The 2023 national elections will be a sobering reality check for those at the helm of the clamour by Nigerian youth to be included in the national scheme of things.

The popular sentiment on youth leadership has gained great traction probably as a romantic throwback to the heydays of this great nation when the sun began its ill-fated ascent over it. That is the decade leading up to Nigeria’s independence and perhaps another after that while the rising Nigerian power was led by a corps of sharp, visionary and capable young political leaders. Their young age must have become a legendary metaphor for their many successes.

More than half a century after self-rule, the Nigerian nation is still stuck in the first gear shift, the same one kicked in by the founding father. The subsequent generations of leaders have failed miserably in kicking it to the second and what should be next and next.

Amidst this rut came a population explosion, which translated into a disproportionately larger young population. Naturally, therefore, a great deal of pressure is on this cohort to pull its own weight, especially because they supposedly have more energy to spare and also a longer transit on the vehicle of life than the older brackets.

Another force driving this agenda is the subject of sectional politics. A culture of class or sectional victimhood is also in vogue with each section feeling aggrieved and then falling unto itself. As this group interest took shape, it is also being weaponised by the young and given political expression in the looming fight for their interest.

The way I see it, leadership means creating a road where none exists, it means leading the pack beyond the frontiers, it means solving problems. It does not mean becoming governor, president or a distinguished senator. Being a leader means leading one or more people on a constructive adventure, it means adding value to the society in whatever respect.

A leader is anyone who has solved or is on a credible path to solving any problem. As designed given our context, Nigerian public institutions cannot and will not solve our problems. By simple deduction, therefore, a politician can hardly be a leader in today’s Nigeria. Independence took us only halfway, even if it would have been the whole hog for others. This meant that immediately after we got rid of the British, we turned on ourselves and not because our interests diverged, but because the dynamics of competition between us remain largely primal. But that is not a bad thing, this is nature at work.

Yes, we have a very big problem, but human life is meant to be full of problems – and with problems, it is either you fix them, or they fix you. The objective of building a prosperous nation is certainly not an exercise in futility – with just a little bit of creative imagination all our problems could be solved.

In the Nigerian context, the candidates for real change are the civil society, the intelligentsia and industrial entrepreneurs. More change can be achieved through leadership within these three spheres than through professional public service, including holding public office, high or low, representative or administrative.

Nigeria can and will be great, but the missing ingredient is the debilitating lack of imagination, fervour and sincerity of purpose at the individual and community levels. It is sound leadership in this sociological tier that will eventually solve this problem that will close the circuit and breathe back life into the Nigerian project.

Quality and purposeful leadership in private enterprise will inevitably translate into quality public governance, and that will inevitably also give birth to great economic fortune. Because this type of individual leadership was lacking, the only consequential economic ecosystem was that with significant public stake, or under government control.

This eventually became our greatest political entanglement. Nigeria is a mono product economy based on a natural resource that is so crude it literally has the word “crude” in it – crude oil, only because the might and will of the government was just enough to develop this industry.

Nobody manufactures crude oil. It is there in the ground, just like the sand and rocks all our grandfathers met on earth. The only value you add is by extracting it. We are talking about a crude resource here – the point being that we achieved some success on that front only because it was bati, awuff, a nilly-willy bonanza. The parts of the country with no such batis then became destitute economically and so liabilities on those with a cornucopia of this bati. Consequently, those from the lands where our crude mono product is extracted feel cheated since this product comes from the lands of their grandfathers.

It is clear that solutions to our very many social challenges can be better engineered and delivered by industrialists, the civil society and the intellectuals. We are bogged down because we have failed to cultivate individual and community agency or initiative – we seem to have been hardwired to believe that we are liabilities of the state, not assets.

The knowledge-value revolution silently afoot will be our ticket out of the backwaters but not if the extant sociological architecture continues. We have thousands of graduates coming out of our universities but the question is whether they have skills that can be practicalised into something useful and this question must be answered by individual initiative.

The tales of NEPA, NITEL, NNPC, etc are cases in this point too. All those are gone now because it was never the place of the public sector to lead economic activities. It was the people, and because the people failed themselves, the government had to step in and had to learn the hard way that that was a mistake – not that of the government itself but that of the people.

This is a call to direct action, to the young and restless in particular. In 2023, your place is not in the Three Arms Zone in Abuja or any of the 36 government houses in Nigeria. If you want impact do not gun for a job as the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC or the governor of CBN. What we need is not another Tafawa Balewa or Zik of Africa.

Close the circuit first through social leadership and the full circle will come to light – this full circle being or what should be the Nigerian dream. And I hope this becomes the central theme of the Nigerian youth leadership project in 2023.