₦airaland Forum

With more than 20million of her youths unemployed, Nigeria can be likened to be a person sitting at the keg of gunpowder, and that sitting position is too dangerous and discomforting for a nation. When the trigger is pulled and the bullets roll out through the barrel, a sitting person has more work to do than a standing person.
To say that the gunpowder has been fired and the explosive mixture spreading all over the country and the noise continuously reverberating in the ears and minds of Nigerians cannot be out of place. We sat with laxity, never gauging our ability to stand or even walk out. Now it appears we will remain in our sitting position and assimilate all the potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulphur which the gunpowder have to deliver and tarry till its effects subside, if at all it will, then learn how to stand later, maybe limply.

To give a human face to any policy a government is promulgating is to basically secure her citizens, then to put cash and food on the pockets and tables of families. In Nigeria, very few citizens are secured, cash and food seem to have developed unknown phobia for the ordinary countrymen.

Whether a policy is prescribed or proscribed, implemented or left untouched on the office table, there are certain groups that practically bears the brunt of the proactiveness or incompetence of government- THE YOUTHS.

Ten years ago, in my teenhood, I thought the vicissitudes of daily life were daunting, annoying and sickening. Those vicissitudes overflowed with a want to be free. But life stared with going to school and constrained to learning subjects I don’t like. It also stared with another bitter fact of waking up early to wash plates, clothes and to clean the house on weekends. And the most emotionally-challenging is to keep up with my peers in that teenhood. To keep up means to be accepted; to do as much as your street peers do; to know as much as they know and to feel necessarily belonged.

Juxtaposing these interesting facts and that longing to break out of the shell of parents and guidance protection, plus the hormonal urge which accompanies adolescence prompted a repine for adulthood.

Now in my twenties, which I can term introduction to adulthood, things have expectedly changed, but not promising anyway. I have noticed that there is a long untarred road between teenhood and adulthood. A glance at that road by an ordinary Nigerian teenager would cause that teen to prefer being stuck on the latter side of the road. Unfortunately, time and age has defiled humanistic wisdom and cannot be stopped, thereby making many Nigerians vulnerable to the bitter experience of that road.

Between our living school and becoming an acclaimed adult in sub Saharan Africa, it requires a long wait which can be termed waithood. Regrettably, the realities of waithood begin to dawn on most Nigerian graduates immediately they graduate from the higher institution. It become moments of sober reflections, annoying moments of waking up daily and not having any meaningful thing to engage with, moments to embrace the fact that millions have left school and are roaming the streets without jobs and there is high probability you might join them in that waithood. It turns out to be taunting moments where one will find it skittish to answer phone calls of younger ones for the fear of them requesting. Victims of waithood could only wish time would rewind itself and drop them at the junction of teenhood; where they can wash plates again, clean the house, study mathematics and be under the grips of parents, never to think of working to provide for themselves.

In the potholed road of waithood, the greatest torment is to know you have to fend for yourself, learning how to fend for yourself and practically fending for yourself.

If adulthood means cutting yourself off the chain of parents support and contributing to the welfare of the younger ones, parents and the community; if it means starting life with a furnished room apartment; if it means nursing plans on how to be a parent and building your own home, then late teenhood should be the time to prepare for the herculean task and waithood would be the transition period.

To a balanced expectation, waithood is supposed to be transient for fresh graduates. A period to learn to settle down, not a time to scramble for a living. A time to begin mulling over humble investments rather than struggling to make ends meet.
Fatefully in Nigeria and sub Saharan Africa, there is a long and tumultuous drive on the road of waithood; inundated with potholes, sharp corners and no u-turn. Often the road seems dark and overwhelmed by haze during daylight. Millions of Nigerians have been stuck on this road even before our democracy and many have been assured by the dwindling economy of the country that they will join the bandwagon.

One of my lecturers in the great University of Benin, Edo state, often remembers with nostalgia during his days in higher institution, how employers will hand over employment letters to graduands and invite some for interview during convocation ceremonies. Jobs were available then and no lost dignity in any job. But now, in Nigeria, an employment letter of a fifty thousand salary can be likened as one of the valued possessions of a job seeker. Employment don’t come easy, sweat and blood have to mix together due to the stress of trekking the whole Lagos in search for a decent job.

Factually, an average Nigeria graduate has a plan for the future which has been stifled by a counter plan. In a nutshell, the future is bleak and uncertain.

Daily, graduates troop into the field of job market and comes back with stories that can be better felt than imagined- the organisation said they cannot absorb me; they need a 5 year experienced person; someone told me to pay some ridiculous amount to be considered for the job.

Affected parents have also been stuck on the whims of waithood. Since the human race for survival revolves from the older generation to the younger, the transition period of taking over responsibility is very crucial for that cycle to remain fulfilling. It becomes obscure and overshadowed with inconsistency when the transition period approaches; it forces Nigerian parents never to experience retirement from the financial burdens of the family, even when graduates litter their homes.

Not that Nigerian youths are indolent as some have argued, but available institutions can rarely absorb half of our teeming youths, and government policies and culture, over the years have impeded the development of the youths by engineering the environment never to favour ingenuity. So since 1999, Nigeria has been churning out graduates with smeared future; graduates that will be thrown into the labour market with reckless abandon; youths that would wish to start small but can neither get any start-up moral boost nor capital from the government; youths that are left to grind their ways through the ever changing and challenging forces of the labour market without any buffer from the government, and they come out bruised, unconcerned and unpatriotic about their fatherland.

Millions of Nigerians have been stuck in waithood for years. Thousands have had theirs overstretched to a decade or so, and it has completely changed how a youth in Nigeria takes responsibility. Many graduates shelter under their parents for years before they could be able to cater for themselves, our cultural beliefs have somehow excused the female folks from the frustration of this unprogressive life; they could easily sit at home and wait for maybe an accomplished man to woo them into marriage. But the male folks are seriously in the business of struggling their way out of this. Marriage is now scary to many young men in Nigeria, and this can be attributed to the complete lack of financial resources to raise a decent home, depriving the larger society that revered smallest unit of its existence.

Since our democracy, waithood has mocked higher education in Nigeria. It has made those that toed the line of learning a trade or business to feel more fulfilled, rather than investing the four years in the higher institution that teaches abstract curriculum and unpractical ventures.

Notwithstanding, waithood has sprouted the best out of many Nigerian youths. That tortuous road has brought out real creativity from the sheer disappointment of many Nigerians. They have learnt to embrace that staggering road, carve out their own path, steadfastly and successfully struggling on their own road and sealing the potholes with values, riches and fame. Accomplished Nigerian youths are teaching their counterparts in many parts of Africa that for their own branch to sprout and their flowers to blossom and their leaves to remain lush green in the continent of hidden plenty, they have to steadily walk, committed to removing the boulders, resilient to stand when the potholes have tripped them off and vehemently dissenting to remain stuck on the road of waithood.

Chiefly, governments all over African need to see their youths as a ticking time bomb which must be attended to, to save the society. Emergency services of practical youth empowerment have to be rendered to all youths in Africa to defuse the effects of this weapon of mass destruction. The effects of youth restiveness can be far-reaching for a society that has stretched her younger generation beyond their elastic limit.