The gecko thinks if it quits the roof to live in the forest long enough, it will become an alligator. Will practice make the cat roar like a lion? I have seen all sorts of revolutionary marches and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Nigerian revolutionary is an incurable sissy. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. It’s worse if he’s in his youth – because then he fully immerses into the backwardness into which he has been born, evolving quite brazenly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim, through the trap-door.
The incumbent ruling class will glory in its delusions of power and grandeur, until the Nigerian youth muster sufficient courage to remove it. Perhaps. Until then, we will get the quality of leadership that we deserve.
How can the youth take over? How can government be made to reflect the wishes and soul of the citizenry? The preexisting political structure and party regime is no doubt an albatross to the emergence of a greater Nigeria. This is because the nations’ politics as it is so constituted, is structured to serve the whim and wiles of the predatory ruling class holding the country hostage even as you read.
There is need to evolve a credible opposition party structure particularly as the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) fades out from the political space to resurge as a hydra-headed monster in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). This requires the active participation of the nation’s youth. There is need for the nation’s youth to come together to evolve a credible alternative to the existing political platforms that we have in the country.
But before the youth can embark on such purposeful exploit, this segment of the citizenry needs to come to grasp with certain bitter truths about its incapacities. The conscientious and the just, the honorable, gracious and humane; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but soon it slips from their grasp turning them from leaders of the revolution into victims of the revolt thus their seemingly desperate inclinations to distance themselves from every revolutionary march.
No revolution can be successful if the human elements serving as its force of change are wholly incapacitated to see to the fruitful end, the ideals of the insurrection; which brings me to the quality of youth mooting the revolt.
Revolution is never the rebellion against a pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one. How different could an order anchored by the current crop of Nigerian youth be?
In the daily lives of our youth, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thoughts of possessions they may acquire and that others may take from them. Russell would say “It is not so that life should be lived” but the Nigerian youth could not be bothered even if they knew that much.
Many whose lives ought to be fruitful to them, to their friends, and to the world in entirety are hardly inspired by hope and sustained by joy; they seek in imagination the vanities that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence.
Ultimately they choose the path of decadence. In their private relations they are pre-occupied with the inane lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive; they are engaged in giving affection and respect at a price and the reward often comes by their desperate quests.
In their work they are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and are least concerned with the actual task that has to be done.
In politics, they spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their benefactors, godfathers, class or ethnicity, even as they make their world less happy, less compassionate, less peaceful, more full of greed and compatriots whose growth is perpetually dwarfed and stunted by oppression.
A spectre is haunting the Nigerian youth. Knowingly and unabashedly, they have entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class. They do not constitute formidable opposition to keep the ruling class on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep our leaders on track.
Their approach to politics complicates the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, the ruling class and the working class; the proverbial middle class got lost somewhere at the crossroads where the bourgeoisie swallows up the proletariat.
Though youth does not really have the means to stop the economy, the ruling class dreads the youth, as was discernible when a wave of panic seized the Nigerian government by the jugular in the wake of the defunct Occupy Nigeria protests. What do they fear? It’s without doubt the frequency and the potentials of youth mobilizations. Massive youth mobilizations were taking place across the globe and with often grievous and far-reaching consequences in the affected nations; the Nigerian leadership no doubt dreaded a Nigerian manifestation of the Arab Spring.
The fear of the Nigerian leadership was however hardly far-fetched given the radicalism of the Occupy Nigeria movement.
In a violent society that has no future to offer them, the Nigerian youth have very little to lose thus their lack of hesitancy in confronting the State. The wish to abolish status quo was widespread among the nation’s youth as they romanticized the idea of a revolution as the protests dragged.
In spite of the youth’s passionate struggle against the incumbent leadership’s utter insensitivity and cluelessness, the eventual result was basically, an opportunistic contract between the exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin would call “the original sweetheart agreement.”
This revealed a lot about the Nigerian youth’s revolutionary potential. Eventually, the nation’s youth were written off and their grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. The youth were eventually dismissed as essentially hopeless and misdirected.
Most of the time, youth mobilizations and revolutionary movements attract sympathy from the workers and the population, as if the youth were saying loudly what the majority couldn’t afford to say. Thus, in many instances, youth mobilizations restore to the social camp the confidence in the masses’ ability to resist; and in some cases other working sectors engage in mobilization, following the youth. The Nigerian youth however, presents a contradiction to the benefits of such relationship of trust.
He is accustomed to keep his head down like one eternally doomed to be adept in all the arts of the beggar. He even presumes a little upon the possession of talents which, as he ought to know, can never compete with cringing mediocrity; in the long run he comes to recognize the inferiority of those who are placed over his head, and when they inflict greater hurt upon him, he becomes refractory and shy, turning round to crawl into the wall when he is backed against it. This is hardly the way to get on in the world but very few Nigerian youths are conversant with the words of Voltaire: “We have only two days to live; it is not worth our while to spend them in cringing to contemptible rascals.” But what if “contemptible rascals” also qualifies a greater percentage of the nation’s youth?
NATION
END
Be the first to comment