FRUSTRATED NIGERIAN YOUTHS
After a roundtable meeting in Lagos, to mark 2012 International Youth Day, a new movement emerges, the convener AYOKUNLE OLOYE made this declaration:
We today, after several meetings and city discussions have taken it as a duty to declare as youths, a movement for the liberation of future leaders and to set an agenda for nigeria of our dream:, FRUSTRATED NIGERIAN YOUTHS
We are declaring a movement for the liberation of the potentials of a great nation.
In Nigeria, today, it is a common knowledge that the future of our nation is at a blink. The youths, the hope and future of the nation, are living a frustrated life which is evident in our day to day activities.
We have been fooled enough to believe that we are leaders of tomorrow. We have come to know that the tomorrow that we see is today. OUR TOMORROW IS NOW!
The conditions the Nigerian Youths are subjected to in their own country where milk and honey flows unabated to the coffers of their ruling class is degrading, demeaning and appalling!
A story so pathetic. We have the resources but our wasteful leaders and government has continue to plundered our future into irreparable states, playing politics at our detriment, We are rejecting this.
Our education system has completely crumbled and has become a disaster, churning our graduates who realize they do not fit into the scheme of national building, and are a shadow of what the classes attended make of them.
More than 50 million of us remain jobless because our manufacturing industries have closed shop due to bad business environment orchestrated by those whom we regularly entrust our lives and resources to.
Out of frustration our youths have taken to crime in the society; more hopelessly hundreds of our youths are committing suicide on a daily basis, engaging in detrimental ventures in a quest to fill up the gaps created by a system that has refused to attend to their basic needs.
The sad part is that corruption has eaten deep into the very fabric of the society. It is in the homes, the schools, the offices – everywhere. We are thieves in some way best known to each of us. Integrity and honesty are rare commodities in these part of the continent. Several of us already have the predisposition to also enrich ourselves if, by chance, we get into an elective office or some parastatal or agency.
Good roads are not PRIVILEGES, they’re our rights! Good education, good health care delivery systems, decent accommodations, pipe borne water – all these are rights! Government is obligated to provide them!
But we need to start demanding for them. We are too afraid of a death that stares us in the face everyday,. When will we not die? If change must come, WE are the ones that must begin to take decisive actions to demand for accountability and transparency of our elected officials. We must wave goodbye to the days of leaving these thieving politicians to themselves to do as they please.
This is our commonwealth! Nigeria is ours! They are only privileged servants, trustees, who have turned rogues! We should start demanding for our RIGHTS! In Nigeria, You’re your own government.
The road on which my house is situated has been in a state of disrepair for close to fifteen years. We have had Local Government Chairmen and Counselors in that time and not ones has the road received their dishonorable attention, except during election campaigns when they drive past to deafen our ears with their dishonest pleas for votes via blaring speakers – noise pollution.
We scamper for spaces in awful Danfos and Molues while our elected representatives ride in air conditioned Jeeps with tinted glass to their offices. By the time you arrive at work after a traumatic and psychologically depressing trip in a jagged bus with pugnacious co-passengers or conductors + nauseating arguments over ‘change’, you’re instantly expected to deliver optically like a private-jet just dropped you off at work.
Basic amenities are luxuries here in the Nigeria jungle. A politician who manages to drill one bore-hole in a community calls a media party like he has just done the people a huge favour when he has only fulfilled the basest of his responsibilities.
It would be fair enough to say we don’t have a government because, you generate your own electricity, buy your own water, you are your own security, etc.
We scamper to enter buses, our clothes get dirty or torn by those moving coffins we call commercial vehicles, some of which are just contraptions of rusted metal, at best, with an engine for mobility – road-worthiness, zero.
A lot of Nigerian Youths have lost every sense of decency. They have become as barbarians, quite unconscionable and in plain terms, wicked! The national psyche has been battered so hard by decades of rapacious leadership, government and deprivation that we have now turned on ourselves, rather than on our oppressors, and are now devouring ourselves like wild beasts.
There’s no such thing as free freedom. If we do not pay the price for freedom today, we will all leave the task to our children and God forbid that they do not loathe and curse the memory of very existence when they view places like South-Africa where their forebears fought and won freedom from repressive elements for the enjoyment of generations yet unborn.
May fear not be the end of us all and of Nigeria as we now know it! I leave us with my favourite quote, by Charles Caleb Colton, “Liberty does not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be EARNED before it can be enjoyed!”
We are Frustrated, Yes! But today we vow to Frustrate those FRUSTRATING the youths.
We affirm that, No matter what is going on in Nigeria, there is hope! We have raised our hope and we are working to build a Nigeria of our own; a government where the people’s interest will prevail over the interest of our selfish political and economy leaders.
This movement is going to every corners of Nigeria, we have initiated talks with uneducated, educated, political expose and local traders on the need to stand for our right.
Our demand remains:
First of all we call on the Government to brace up and bring a lasting solution to the state of insecurity and an end to Boko Haram insurgency .
War against corruption, should UK continue to jail our criminals for us?
Youth involvement in policy and decision making process of Nigeria
If you doubt this foregoing assertion, look out for the next…
Frustrated Ayokunle Oloye
Convener
08063727788
Paul Mbagwu
National Co-coordinator