I am first and foremost a young Cross Riverian.
Then I am a depressed Nigerian youth.
Depression obviously has its several roots: it is the doubtful protection which comes from not recognising failure. It is the psychic burden of exhaustion, and it is also and very often, that discipline of the will or the ego which enables one to continue fighting, continue working, when one’s un-admitted emotion is panic. And panic, it is, I think, which sits as the largest single sentiment in the heart of the collective members of my own generation. Today, I find myself in an overwhelmingly urban society, a distinctly urban creature.
Thus, I am adequately informed of current developments in my own state and country. I am anxious, angry, humorless, suspicious of my own society, apprehensive with relation to the future of my own state. Quixotic, yet optimistic, I am on the prowl for the immediate and remote causes of our predicament. My nostrils fairly quiver for the stench of some injustice I can sally forth to condemn. Devoid of any feeling for the real delineation of function and responsibility, I find all the ills of my dear state, real or fancied, pressing on my conscience. Not lacking in courage, I am prepared, in fact, to charge any number of windmills.
But in doing so, I am often aggressive and unapologetically critical of my own society, critical of what I need to live by, critical sometimes of God’s own choice of creating me a Cross Riverian at this material time. You may wish to call me names. But do not call me a crank or an eccentric. For, on a very rough and ready basis, you may well see an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others alone, like some power drunk governor who has turned governance in the state to a family affair. What makes me this way? Certain of the causes are external, temporary and relatively superficial. Certain are religious, ideological and tribal. I do not intend to mention the devastatingly unsettling effects of this power drunk governor on the politics, the economy and the overall destiny of my state. Yet, underlying the very intensity with which I react to these things, there are obviously far deeper and largely subconscious sources of discomfort to other members of my forlorn generation as well. But there is a sense in which my anxiety is further aggravated by the current conspiracy of silence among the youths and elders of my dear state. And, of course, there is a disconcerting irony involved here. Our silence has developed into a commodity market. I am therefore compelled to ask: can’t we reflect faithfully, but in expanded, oversized dimensions, like shadows on the wall, the bewilderments and weaknesses of parents, teachers, employers, molders of opinion, leaders of government, and captains of industries? I come from a state that is affluent and well endowed with natural wealth yet the people poor and insecure. I sense in our rulers (looters), and they feel in themselves, the material satiety without the balancing influence of any inner security. Imagination, fears, hopes, desires, all these are overstimulated, and hopelessly stimulated by daily events in my dear state. Our state is under siege due largely to the arrogance, pride and inefficiency of one man.
Hence, there are no adequate countervailing sources of strength, confidence and hope for the Cross Riverian youth. There is no strong and coherent religious faith, no firm foundation of instruction in the nature of the individual man, no appreciation for the element of tragedy that unavoidably constitutes a central component of our collective predicament, and no understanding for the resulting limitations on the possibilities for social and political change.
The average Cross Riverian youth is a victim of the appalling shallowness, of the crooked religious, philosophic and political concepts that pervade his state. Social evolution demands that the youths have the biological and sociological right and responsibility to inherit, improve and transmit worth-while characteristics and values that would enhance and sustain social development and security so that generation after generation would aspire to better things. Yet, unfortunately, the present day youth in Cross River state is evidently and sadly over-weighted with short comings and disabilitiesevidences of undesirable heritage under three and a half years of Ayade’s misrule.
There is no thermometer with which to gauge the tempo of Ayade’s lack of compassion and unkindness to the youths of the state than his callous attitude to youth corps members posted to Cross River State on the one year mandatory national service. The usual supplementary monthly state allowance of three thousand naira (N3, 000.00) paid to youth corps members, which was very regular during previous administrations in the state, has hit a dry well under the Ayade administration. Even as he mouthed that he would increase it to N5,000. 00, he has not even paid the N3, 000.00 to the corps members since the past three and a half years whereas Ebonyi state pays N10, 000.00 regularly to each youth Corps member every month. In Enugu State, Gov. Ugwuanyi pays corps members serving in the state N10,000 supplementary allowance. Those in the medical field however receive between N30,000(for youth corps doctors) and N20,000 (for pharmacists, nurses, lab technicians and radiographers).
Cross River State pays nothing.
It is not enough to populate your government with over 6,000 young men and women and place them on a take-home pay which virtually cannot even take them home, and make so much noise about the employment of youths who have no offices in which to report daily and without official cars. It is these same youths you deploy to destroy billboards of your opponents because you are too afraid of opposition.
You have only succeeded in mortgaging their future by stunting their individual talents and potentials in the name of fake employments. If you are sure that you have performed enough since the past three and a half years to justify your re-election for a second term, why are you not comfortable with competition? Why are you pulling down the billboards of your popular opponents? Why are you trying to use zoning rather than competence and performance to launch your second term bid? Why are you so afraid of Sen. John Owan Enoh? Yet, it is those who lack the intellectual and moral high ground to dissect with admirable lucidity and illuminating temper, the insularity and philistinism of our turbulent existence who resort to primordial manipulation and intimidation of their opponents.
How dare you reduce a people known for politics of civility for decades to politics of violence and sheer pedestrian rabble because of your personal ambition? To paraphrase Ayo Baje, a public intellectual and great writer: “Leadership is a spiritual gift. If you are the right choice, your people would enjoy peace and prosperity. But if not, they are doomed”. Cross Riverians have been doomed since the past three and a half years because they made the wrong choice in 2015.
The average youth of today in Cross River State has not witnessed enviable moral discipline which is the foundation of true citizenship whether we operate at the family, village, ward, local government, or state level since the past three and a half years.
Regrettably, we are all witnesses of the fact that we are today living in a dangerously threatened state.
We are viciously confronted with a peculiar but violent and rapacious enemy-a young governor who does not want to grow old-a clueless and nonperforming man who wishes to dominate the present and usurp the future. We are here languishing in a ready-made and almost imported society of falsehood and propaganda, of want, hate, insecurity, conflicts, injustices, frustrations, vaulting and ungodly ambitions, corruption, stupid materialism, political anarchy and jingoism, wars and advanced cannibalism, man-made catastrophe and delusion.
The youth must sincerely reflect on the background and heritage with which we are armed to face the patriotic challenges of the twenty-first century, a role which we do not even understand not to talk of commitment to it. Much of the savagery enveloping our dear state today could be explained in the greed and base conduct inherent in the characters of its leadership. Look at how they are insisting on being glued to power even when they know that they have failed abysmally to meet the yearnings and aspirations of the people since the past three and a half years! The youths of Cross River State should be wary and mindful of politicians who are given to so much boasts, lies and propaganda with nothing to show for their years in office except agonies, pains and tribulations in their trail.
At this giddy moment when our state seems to have set on a batty course of self-destruction, Cross River youths must come together and cut a deal and to react to this umbrage. We must not only reject any attempt by those who are stealing our collective patrimony into their private pockets to use us to destabilize our state; we must condemn them anywhere they are found. We must stop allowing ourselves to be used as agents of destruction by these shameless and sadistic pretenders who have brought us to this state of arrested development. There is a need for the youth to confer hope on this despondent state to demonstrate a common political savvy irrespective of our tongue or political affiliation. Cross River youths who constitute over 60 per cent of the electorate must spare the state the ghoulish stare of insecurity and violence by resisting any attempt by the political class to once more push us into the abyss.
This has nothing to do with which party you belong to. Our state is detained in primitive accommodation.
Real liberation will come when we refuse to be manipulated by ambitious self-seeking politicians. We must be deeply involved in the process of changing the present decadent leadership in our state by voting in a credible, forward-looking, democratic and honest governor who will not reduce our dear state to a family affair. It is indeed, a liberation trumpet. Better days are truly possible in Cross River State this 2019.
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