Read this great write up online today and I want Nigerian Youth to see this..

Not all who are poor are frustrated. The greatest beneficiaries of social media and Nigeria’s music industry are the poor youths stagnating in the slums of our cities. What the poor need urgently is a sort of momentary relief to make them forget their crippling circumstances and sorrows. Social media gossips have made suffering enjoyable for Nigerian youths whose future is almost irredeemable.

If it is not about Linda’s pregnancy, Regina’s marriage, Bobrisky’s or Tontoh’s gimmick, Wizkid vs Davido’s palaver, it will be about Buhari’s health, Atiku’s ambition, Obasanjo’s letter … there is always something to occupy and make the suffering poor feel happy. It is a sort of media palliative programs for the drowning poor. Media experts know exactly how to create such sensational contents through manipulation of facts. That is what they get paid for through advert placements.

For the abjectly poor who cannot afford the luxury of social media, they are too engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter. The poor on the borderline of starvation are the happiest people on earth because they live purpose-driven lives. The purpose of living is concrete and immediate – to survive each day as it comes. So, every meal is a fulfillment, and to go to bed on a full stomach, is a major achievement for the day. To make this happen, they toil from sunrise to sunset for survival. People in this class nurse no grievances and dream no dreams.

Frustrations and hopelessness only come when ambitious youths feel dissatisfied with the quality of life they are living, and their efforts are not yielding the expected results. When young people are suffering and smiling, it means they either have given up on the possibility of their dreams or they don’t have dreams at all. They become cynical, always looking out for ways to mock the rich and famous by creating fictional stories of failed marriages, sex scandal, business failures – just any story that makes the poor feel: ‘the rich too should taste our pains and see how it feels’.

And if such story happens to be real, oh my goodness, it is like a feast day for the poor who would literally set the social media on fire with their mockery and jeering. It is such stories that make their day fun. They look forward to them, and if they don’t show up, they quickly create one to engage their idle minds in order generate happiness and cure boredom in the absence of a lucrative decent career. To be poor and bored is a double jeopardy. It’s suicidal! Thank God for social-media-based associations.

Let’s face reality: how far have you gone with your dream?

One pertinent question I need to ask you in this moment in history is whether you are living or suffering. If you die now, will it be said of you that you had a good life? Or will it be said of you that you died a good death because you have suffered enough?

Currently, Nigeria is divided into three major tribes: the elite class who exploit the middle class in building their business empires and who also dehumanized the poor masses in their unbridled quest for political power.

The middle class has been so weakened that they merely exist. Their only concern is how to augment their incomes at all cost. As far as social order is concerned, they are passive and highly individualistic.

At the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, the poor masses have been so suppressed and dehumanized that they no longer see themselves as part of the society, if not less human. They have accepted suffering as their fate. Their supreme purpose of existence is survival and reproduction. They toil from sunrise to sunset with the hope that a messiah will arise one day. Until then, they see themselves as powerless, hopeless and stuck in their pain and misery.

As it stands today, Nigeria is the most horrible place to live as a young person if you have a global vision. So terrible that human life does not hold any form of respect anymore. Children are kidnapped for going to school and farmers are butchered for protecting their farms. We live in a country where life has assumed the proportion of bare naked existence. It is the most terrible country to raise a child in the 21st century if you look at what is happening in other forward-thinking countries.

The tragedy of Nigeria is not caused by natural disaster but by leadership disaster. The worst type of rape is the one done at a gun point. To rape an innocent girl is bad and severe enough but to stop the victim from crying because of the excruciating pain you are inflicting on her is both callous and unpardonable.

Is it not what is happening today in Nigeria? You are robbing our young people of their future and when they cry, you threaten them with armed forces. Here, soldiers are no longer for protection against external threats but vigilant watchdogs in the hands of political merchants to silence concerned youths who dare express their frustrations publicly. God is on our side to shield us from all forms of wickedness.

I refuse to be a coward anymore. After all, can what we have now also be called meaningful living? Well, most youths don’t even know what it means to have a decent life. They had never tasted one in all their lives.

Little wonder, Nigeria has bagged the notorious title of ‘World’s Poverty Capital’. Ours is a country without a direction and leaders without shame.

A nation misruled cannot long endure.

It’s a matter of time.

Author : Tochi Okafor
source : [https://powersystemandrevolution.com/the-happiest-suffering-youths-ever/][/url]