It would be unfair to pretend not to understand where Mojisola Alli-Macaulay was coming from in her intervention that went viral last week. It is unlikely that anyone with a remote sense of decency would approve the level of destruction that visited Lagos and other parts of Nigeria penultimate week in the wake of the #EndSARS protests hijacked by some suspected hoodlums.
And when speaking about Lagos, people like Ali-Macaulay have more reasons to be distraught. No one suffered as much personal damage in this carnage as Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the de factor political godfather in the state. With Nigerian politics, it is not enough to identify with your political leaders’ losses, you must also iterate your loyalty even if doing so calls for you to play to the gallery or offend universal sensibility. And that is not necessarily out of any abiding love for the godfather. On the contrary, it is more of a self-preservation gimmick. Those who taste public office in Nigeria hardly want to quit as those offices define their sense of worth and more importantly, insulate them from poverty and lack, which is eating hard at most inhabitants of this country.
Now, this is the ironic thing about those who call themselves leaders in Nigeria: they are bent on staying in office eternally, yet, they do not want to bear, and in some cases, are unable to understand the essence of office. This is the heart-breaking thing about what the member representing Amuwo Odofin Constituency I in the Lagos State House of Assembly said.
To be sure, Mrs Ali-Macaulay is close to the mark on some of the points she made. For instance, Nigeria indeed does have a drug problem. In its publication “Drug use in Nigeria 2018,” the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the prevalence of drug use in Nigeria at 14.4 per cent or 14.3 million people aged between 15 and 64 years. Giving an insight into the demographic distribution of drug use in 2017, the report stated: “…use of most drug types is high among young people within the age brackets of 25 and 39 years. This is true for cannabis as well as for non-medical use of prescription opioids (tramadol, codeine, mor- phine)…However, there is considerable non-medical use of pharmaceutical opioids and cough syrup among older people within the age brackets of 45 and 64 years.” So, even though Nigeria is battling a drug problem with the youth, a significant number of older Nigerians also indulge thereon.
She talked about how even though Nigeria is grappling with youth unemployment, it should be no excuse for the commission of crimes. She wondered why young people insist on paid employment rather than looking “within themselves” to consider vocations like designing (fashion, I guess) and tiling instead of using joblessness as an excuse to get into crime. She exemplified this proposition by telling Nigerians, correctly so, that even countries like the United Kingdom, (where she had the privilege of going to school) and the almighty United States of America grapple with unemployment, yet their unemployed youths “don’t become hoodlums.”
What is however most worrisome is that the legislator did not see herself or her colleagues as part of the problem or its solution. To cut her some slack, this failure may not have been deliberate. It is most likely as a result of the usual tentative, in-exhaustive disposition of most Nigerian public office holders to solving problems. Had Mrs. Ali-Macaulay put a bit of rigour into Nigeria’s social problems and the recent violence, she would have understood that this was only a manifestation of the failure of government and social structure that ordinarily give life to a society.
The value of every individual in a society is to the extent to which they can contribute to social growth. But Nigeria is a society where it is possible for people to be born and live their entire lives without the capacity to contribute meaningfully to society. And this is simply because the country does not give them the wings to fly.
The legislator admonished young people to “look within themselves,” but she skipped that part of the process where society is supposed to deposit something in these youths. Truth is that the youths who went violent and destructive recently actually looked within themselves but found no value therein. What they found was emptiness, a no-sense of worth and anger against a society that has totally abandoned them.
What Mrs Ali-Macaulay and her friends in legislative houses across Nigeria should realise is that the citizen surrenders their prospects to government in a representative democracy like Nigeria’s. Elected people like her and those in the executive were handed over the trust of Nigerians to pilot them into prosperity, provide security and give meaning to their existence. So, when leadership fails, a society, no matter how sophisticated it is hitherto, goes on its knees and wanders in pity. This is why the USA, known as the bastion of democracy, is now showing traits of a third world country in its politics and is possibly the worst hit nation of the currently ravaging coronavirus pandemic. Government supported by other institutions of socialisation like family and religion tailor the minds of the youth towards the future. But in Nigeria, the pursuit of self has corrupted all these institutions, yet you put the blame on youths who got no training on how to be better.
The lawmaker spoke about becoming a designer or tiler. The question to ask this woman of ideas is how these youths get trained? While it is true that these skills are currently deficient in Nigeria to the extent that many of those who ply those trades are from neighbouring countries, does government at any level take the acquisition of these skills seriously, does the educational system even think of it?
At a time in Nigeria, for instance, people choose from three types of secondary education. While some attended regular secondary schools, some chose teacher training colleges, while others chose to acquire technical education at the secondary level. So, where are all the teacher training and technical colleges today?
The 6-3-3-4 system of education that was adopted at some point in Nigeria’s history was meant to encourage universal basic education (for nine years) and then guide those who have technical/vocational inclinations to build careers in those areas. Again, where are we with that?
It is also wrong to blame the Nigerian youth for refusing to tap into their talent. The question is, even for those who gain university degrees, does the education they get in universities where they study computer science without computers prepare them for anything but white-collar jobs? But for some private universities, where entrepreneurial education is given some place, tertiary education in Nigeria still largely has that lack of ambition and restrictive essence. However, even when graduates go out of their way to acquire vocational skills as a lot of them do, they neither have access to funding nor assured patronage from people like this legislator whose tastes are usually too exotic for such lowly creations.
There is no end to the myopia in Mrs Ali-Macaulay’s proposition in fact. She spoke of the UK unemployed youths not being “hoodlums” but fails to release that if every unemployed youth in Nigeria were indeed a hoodlum, this country would have been burnt down. By the records of the National Bureau of Statistics, 13.9 million Nigerian youths were unemployed at the end of the second quarter of 2020! So, what percentage of these are drug addicts and hoodlums?
It was also curious that someone who had an education in the UK would compare the level of unemployment in the welfarist country to what happens in Nigeria, where hunger literarily lives with the people. Unemployment in the UK is currently 4.1 per cent, it is 27.1 per cent in Nigeria where tens of millions of people go to bed hungry. Even then, people have been seen taking advantage of protests in the UK and the US to perpetrate crime. While this is by no mean an attempt to justify arson, looting and brigandage, Nigerian leaders must realise the humanity of everyone and the need for them to live up to their electoral promises.
