YOUTHS, whither Our Future?
The next General Elections will soon be here: are we still ONLY going to be preaching “Get your PVCs! –
Get your PVCs
Amb. Idah Onyilokwu Kingsley David
ceo@iq-ihrap.org, idahdavid@gmail.com
The future of any people cannot be separated from their youths. Whenever the pre-occupation of youth anywhere neglects issues centring on their future, the destiny of such a people is certainly questionable and under severe threats.
Now, I want to talk both my activism to get youths to take their future more seriously by initiating and managing joint group activities that see their aims and objectives through; the reactions and objections I have received and how all these have shaped my determination.
First let me briefly explain a few of the main terms involved:
Who is youth?
The youth is everyone within the active population segment. This is NOT a biology class: we are focused on how to get things done. As Africans I find out that we are deliberately under some kind of spell in attempting to see all things through a small narrow primary lens: elsewhere across the world, every working operational sector see things only in the ways that benefit their work!
We in the development and governance improvement sector know that for as long as you are still productive and active in your community, you are youthful or young at heart. Simple.
Next is the issue of the future. One question NEVER asked by most Africans remains ‘what am I even stressing for?’ Most Africans have this set-back engraved at the back of their minds walking the streets daily while seemingly pursuing their interests knowing full-well they expect nothing to improve!
This engravement indeed already has a majority of our nominal population of youth in their ‘graves’! – so to speak. We mostly look forward to a rather short life nowadays – shorter than did our parents! Some say we are not to blame and that this is caused by our increasingly hopeless existence: we just have life, merely exist and have absolutely NO dreams, no joy and NO HOPE. Quite sadly so (please think about the mindset that African youths have which remains undeterred from almost certain death in the Mediterranean or other high seas or deserts or human organ harvesting camps, etc. when they still set out and embark on those death trips notwithstanding!).
Indeed, we are surrounded by such debilitating accounts of continually decreasing hope at every turn but still: it is only the dead that do not anticipate change and hence do nothing to achieve change. In our case, we still MUST work towards change and yes, I will focus on what such CHANGE ought to be and perhaps the reasons why we are largely unable to more clearly define it until perhaps, now.
Now then still on the topic, our future as it pertains to youth and who the youth ought to be, I want to assure everyone that this is US: these things concern and touch all of US: if anyone tells me I am no longer youth,
I will point such a person to my very young children or relatives and other dependents. If the old amongst us cared so little about the future, why do they keep investing in educating the young? Then again, my favourite; when non-deep thinkers begin to worry near me about my concerns for young people and how I might NOT be good enough to engineer their lives as much as they could by theirselves, and that this should be enough reasons to leave this work for the youths,
I ask them only one short simple question. I asked them: have you ever watched a cartoon strip on television before ever in your life? The answer is usually, Yes, of-course! – who hasn’t? Then I ask them again: Do you see how very little children are unable to resist cartoons, do you imagine ever in your life that cartoons are composed written and produced by toddlers or very young children? Similarly, when you see toys and the very many articles or things that youths find irresistible, do you imagine that kids or youths own the factories that design and produce such things?
Now the point I am trying to make here is simply that we as Africans NEED to understand that in everything in life, SPECIALISATION cannot be overlooked! As simplistic as for instance, raring chickens can be, a difference emerges whenever someone with basic training undertakes it.
Every job type ought to be accorded certain reasonable levels of respect whether drivers, truck-pushers, gardeners, … not to mention teachers, etc. etc. the lot of these are the much easily targeted workers whose salaries are so mercilessly embezzled by public officials all across Africa! This is a topic for another opportunity.
Now, but to the future and our youth …
As things stand today, all governments across Africa need nothing but support and I want to quickly qualify what I mean by this term, support, before anyone tears me up out of frustration: the sort of support I mean here is the one that comes from the coming together of populations to make sure the things that concern them make sense and come out as precisely required as possible. This can be achieved in the following consequential manner:
First; we need to accept that it is sheer madness to keep on expecting African governments to deliver our development goals and objectives as the only possible institution to do so. We do not need any further education to understand this fact other than the usual notion ALL of us have heard repeated many many times over: the people are the government. Trust me: the last government was made up of people who were amongst us, this government is the same and the next government too will not be different.
If those amongst us go into government and do not go with adequate knowledge and experience of what our problems are and our expectations of them, how can we keep expecting them to be better than the last government?
Why are we continually unable to determine and define what our problems are which our leaders must face squarely? If such a system exists amongst us and we soon have leaders amongst us who are gradually becoming great at solving such problems – what would prevent us from electing them into public offices where they can have access to our taxes to improve our situations further with power of state and the fullest possible authority? Without such a local community level arrangement or organisation and leadership system pre-politics, we may be doomed forever!
Second; we need a new paradigm whereby everybody SHOULD belong to or STAND for something within our immediate communities and such things or issues of focus ought to be issues or focuses that pertain to governance and development: our local security, safety education, health and perhaps, power supply! Now, while this remains an initial natural default in this consideration, I have a different. – and I believe, better suggestion: let us belong to groups within our communities on the basis of our livelihoods or occupations first while we pay attention to the other here-above listed focuses, first! See? If the future we are concerned about in truth, the best and strongest vehicle going into that future are our occupations or livelihoods!
Aren’t these the very reasons why parents invest so much in educating their children and why governments invest in schools so much so that this is basically a global development and governance culture? JOBS…
Third; assuming that all the above two items and arguments are agreeable and reasonable, most people are however wont to think how impossible or impracticable such community level setting up of job-related or job-relevant groups would be.
I wish to however assure you that if at all, anyone thinks these thoughts and embraces the impossibility of community job-relevant groups, such a person is being haunted by the spirit of poverty-creation and/or poverty re-enforcement! Such a spirit operates rather intelligently by selling us the first notion that if we are not a government or set up by government, we cannot do anything to help ourselves. While we are in democracies all across Africa, we have still not appreciated that NOTHING works better on the side of voters and the rest of the people in a democracy like their coming together to act with ONE VOICE for their own good.
The politicians who are increasingly improving their craft to keep on winning and not rendering service always encourage voters to come individually … one by one .. politicians may buy votes, may deceive and may cheat when we are itemised by them individually rather than as groups. Now, I know that indeed they are various groups especially youths that form groups during elections. The politicians identify and deal with them as such groups.
But, in my experience, NONE of such groups are community based and neither are they job-relevant! I want to assure every thinker that it is on the basis of this that the global outcry against unemployment and joblessness of youth in Africa will persist because youth demonstrate a near total lack of deep thinking on how they may contribute to solving this problem especially as a lot of them do NOT that joblessness and unemployment of youth is beneficial to politicians: it is the poverty of the people that makes the people easily “buyable’’: if the people are not hungry they will be more reasonable and protect their votes the more!
If the people – although being poor become capable of organising theirselves into groups on the basis of what puts food on their table then the people become harder to ‘buy’! Bob Marley sang: “You can fool some people sometimes but you cannot fool ALL the people ALL the time” Our days of being deceived are numbered – now especially as we will soon become ALL the people – as ONE!
Votes
Yes Votes… now we are back to the very topic of this piece as it concerns youth more pertinently: even when we still talk about the protection of VOTES – we will still be foolish and helpless to assume that in the next three years in Nigeria particularly, all we can work around in the hopes of improving our lives would still be our mere VOTES!
Now let us get something very clear: I do not mean in any way to suggest that youth should neglect or ignore or tamper with the set-down legal and authorised electoral laws or system entirely in any way: ALL I am proposing remains that youths achieve the higher intelligence to make “lemonade” out of the “lemon” that the system has foisted on them. Our survival and eventual victory require no stress, no force – only intelligent solutions. This is the only way to demonstrate that youths are indeed an improvement of their parents or the older generation! This is why those benefiting from our backwardness target our educational system, institutions and general learning prospects to ruin them and hinder us from becoming thinkers and achievers! I cannot continue to imagine that our older generation politicians, – a majority of whom never saw a computer even during their secondary school and the same majority of whom do not today know their way sufficiently around a computer and the very many complicated and highly intelligent functionalities of today’s info-tech era, continually hold the greater number of our youth or younger populations, who are so computer literate and are info-tech nerds and addicts in their respective rights, to ransom depriving us of livelihoods and our entire future!
No, this is absurd and ought to make no sense to every right-thinking, progressive-minded youth.
So then, now, how do we better insist on our PVCs like we did the last time in Nigeria especially, but in ways that our outcome would be as we envisage. In other words, how can the Nigerian youth today PREVENT what happened last year 2023 from happening in 2027?
How can the youths take over?
How can the youths be different?
How can life change for the better for the African, in the seeable future?
Is anyone thinking these thoughts right now or are we just sitting and waiting for a miracle?
Are we hoping that at the right time, we will gather and announce special prayers and fasting programmes?
The answers to all these questions above are IN the very questions themselves! YES – you heard right: the answers are contained in the very situations or challenges provoking these questions.
As stated earlier, all our challenges faced today hinge on one special and central aspect of our lives connecting to our aspired destiny: our Jobs and/or livelihoods. Not only do our interests in and our activism for livelihoods at our various community levels pertinent and central to our immediate survival by presenting us best as actors within our local and extended democracies, it is strategic in ensuring that tomorrow’s youth leaders provide better more competent solution-orientated leadership because they will emerge from a school of career or job problem-solving where they had cut their teeth and have in that process become popular amongst their constituents as leaders of high worth: – dependable, trustworthy, predictable and all. This feat would be the much desired departure from our present-day predicament whereby we are forced to elect people who are totally and nearly totally UNKNOWN to us as trustworthy or dependable leaders: we have nothing to help us decide apart from what comes out of their mouths as mere promises or boasts! Now most of our people just elect whoever pays them money no matter how little since something is better than nothing – NOT caring that the same people there are electing deliberately made it so – so that it would be easier for the politicians to keep being in control to keep – keeping the people poor and helpless so that buying the people out will keep becoming easier and easier with every passing moment and need to do so! This is the worst vicious cycle in history: the wall-less imprisonment of Africans by their ruling class!
The above is the summary of what the Integral Quintessence-International Human Rights Africa Programme, IQ-IHRAP is all about; ensuring that Africa’s youths stand up for themselves to be counted based on their sheer brain-power. We encourage African youths to first decide what their natural inborn life skill, giftedness, talent or capabilities are.
Thereafter, to identify or FORM a local worker group in the name of the kind of job or livelihood chosen: we have the guidelines and methods of doing this at our official website: http://www.iq-ihrap.org or better still email: info@iq-ihrap.org or ceo@iq-ihrap.org The guidelines we provide ensure uniformity and synergy amongst so many other benefits. We provide guidance and counselling to Africans who are down-spirited already and need to be re-awakened: the suicide rate is climbing by the day everywhere across Africa: too many suicides go unreported as bereaved families feel too ashamed to file reports.
Most mainstream media organisations also do not report known cases for obvious reasons: they do not want things to be seen as worse as they already are – no matter the excuse they have!
We gratefully welcome contributions and donations from well-meaning charitably minded persons and institutions for the continuation and deepening of our work. Our sole aims remain in summary to ensure that democracy in Africa BECOMES true, natural and transparent to, first, WE the people of Africa.
This will be impossible no matter what anyone does if, first, WE, the people have no ORGANISATION and we argue further, that the first and only pertinent basis of such organisation remains our JOBS, LIVELIHOODS or occupations. Nothing else ties in with our aspirations for a brighter, better, eternally peaceful and progressive future than our JOBS or LIVELIHOODS and all the ways by which we may more capably generate or create JOB, protect JOBS, IMPORVE JOBS and TRANSFORM our JOB culture all across Africa.
But the first step remains undeniably: formation of JOB-relevant Groups at all our local levels. I do know that so many local primitive and unnatural problems exist to stymie this proposition: the truth remains that, when this is undertaken across the entire land and some form of peer review, cultural measures or instruments are introduced based on which monitoring and evaluation of leadership performance is undertaken, these problems soon peter out into insignificance and irrelevance! Moreover, this is the computer=age and we are computer children: we refuse to be tied to our problems in primitivity and ignorance: we are a jet-age, pacesetting and ambitious generation. We are smarter than our smartphones and we will use our intelligence, knowledge and opportunities to overcome and overtake the older generation no matter what their strategies of perpetrating their stranglehold on us and our children’s future are!
In the coming election seasons all across Africa, YOUTHS will not only be shouting “Get your PVCs, Get your PVCs!!!” only. No. We would have gone up a few notches in this game of chess and ahead of politicians and their installed governments that work on their side against us: no hard feelings – we are not instigating disobedience or civil disorder here. NO way. We are talking BRAINWORK – bringing intelligent solutions to the table to re-organise youths and make them an ‘uncheatable’ and “unriggable” population of VOTERS the world and history may ever know: we will go to the polling stations after having already known our strengths and whom the various youth leaders and government of tomorrow ARE! Yes – we can and we indeed, will.
People = let’s get ORGANISED now!
Thank you.
Amb. IDAH, Onyilokwu K. David
Director, Special Representative and Envoy
Founder/CEO, Integral Quintessence –
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION International Human Rights Africa Pageant,
Africa Region Headquarter, Nairobi – Kenya IQ-IHRAPTM – Africa’s scientific Job and Leadership Programme, Lagos Nigeria & Nairobi – Kenya. 0817133360
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