There is a famous picture in the
United States of baby JFK, Jr. crawling under the Resolute Desk of the White House Oval Office while his fathered
worked on it. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, Sr. (the baby’s father) was the 35th
President of the United States of America, one of those to be assassinated. That
crawling lad was born to him few days after he won the US Presidency in
November 1960 and remained in public spotlight until he died in a plane crash
sometime in 1999. The 6th President of the US (1825–1829), John
Quincy Adams, was the son of the 2nd President of that country
(1797–1804). In the same vein, George Walker Bush, the 43rd
President of the US (2001–2009), is the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, the
41st President of that country (1989–1993). Again, standing on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. announced to an
unprecedented crowd of 200, 000 civil rights activists, and indeed the world at
large, his dream of a truly free United States of America. Whether the US is
truly free today is a different story, but we do know that about 46 years after
King’s epoch making I Have a Dream speech,
Barack Hussein Obama became the first black human being to mount the US
Presidency, or should I say, became the most powerful human being on the
planet. From this survey, therefore, there seems to be a certain degree of
sincerity in addressing youths of America and elsewhere as leaders of tomorrow.
I wonder if the same holds true
for our country Nigeria. Few examples will do. When General Olusegun Obasanjo
was Nigeria’s Head of State way back in 1979, he had addressed a group of
youths, wherein he told them he looked forward to seeing them take over the
reins of power in the nearest future. Funnily enough, exactly 20 years from
that year, that is 1999, he vied for the office and became president again,
remained there for 4 more years and wanted to bend the constitution to let him
stay on, and would have asked for more afterwards, I guess. Go through the
annals of Nigeria’s history and find that your great grandfather’s Heads of
State now want to be your president, and are not joking about it. Even now,
there are speculations that our current president wants it again come 2015, and
if possible again and again. Go through the Nigerian Civil Service and find
grand and great grandfathers who should be glorying in their pensions and be
tenants of retirement homes still posing to be 50 years of age with the
assistance of our interesting instruments of corruption – affidavit swearing
and Declaration of Age. And yet we find energetic and promising youth
languishing under the yoke of underemployment and unemployment.
The case here is that of a conspiracy
of the rich and those who thread the corridors of power. They want youths down.
They want them to be and remain incapable of questioning or challenging the
status quo. They want them to accept the status quo for a culture and be too
blind to spot and spoil their greed. And it actually appears they are
succeeding if at all they haven’t. How? Through their educational designs and
obsolete curriculum they make youths unemployable; through their emphasis on
security they dissuade youths from resorting to crime; through their sabotage
of the economy they discourage economic adventure, the type the likes of Gates,
Jobs, Zuckerberg, etc. dabbled into in America to make their way to the
billionaires club. What do we find around us instead? They want youths to get
their eyes off white collar jobs and embrace the various available farming
schemes. They offer enticing loans to NYSC pass outs, and have students compete
in writing and executing business plans. In one word, it is difficult to trust
that the system cares about youths as it appears that only death musters the
courage to kick them out.
The one million dollar question
becomes: “What do we do?” Rising to mutiny, that is killing every single one of
them, is not at all a part of the solution. This is because your children will
hold you responsible for the blood of their grandfather. Ruffling it out with
them is not the solution either as one should be sure of losing out on the game
since they are pretty good as what they do, in addition to which they made more
than enough pluck when our money grew on trees – they own all the oil wells,
bought up most public enterprises in the name of privatization, and equally
have a cabal of Machiavellian capitalists who throw their combined weights
behind them in return for profitability from their mischief. Furthermore, while
they can be said to have the repose of wisdom, which is got from experience,
youths are, more often than not, impulsive in deciding what course of action to
take.
What then is the way forward? The
answer is quite a simple one and is hidden in the understanding that the future is now! You just need to
understand that your future is now, and then start living in it. I can explain. To start with, what is your take on the idea of future? Is it something
faraway, near or now? Do you wake up every morning in joyful anticipation of ‘a
time’ called ‘future’ when all your dreams and noble aspirations will come
through? This is correct only insofar as you are viewing the matter in the
light of conventional wisdom. However, the problematic encountered in seeking a
deeper understanding of the concept of future, the type sought for here, is
that of the concept of time. Suffice
it therefore to say that our understanding of the concept of time is the point
in question here, as the terms past, present and future, or yesterday, today and tomorrow are only nomenclatures that express time.
At this juncture, let’s turn to
St. Augustine to tell us something about time. For him, the concept of time is
elusive, one that is understandable but incommunicable. He confesses, in his Confessions, that while he knows what
time is, his knowledge of it eludes him whenever he attempts to communicate it,
reason being that the components of time (past, present and future) barely
exist: the past is no more, the moment is passing, and the future is not yet.
Therefore, this ‘present passing moment’ is all we have got to grapple with.
And so ‘getting involved’ in this
‘present passing moment’ is the key to doing battle against the Nigerian status
quo. When you get involved, you rather than blame or complain against the
situation take responsibility for whatever has become your lot. It demands that
you do whatever you say you want to do – never caring about your detractors –
because your word is your bond. It calls you to the realization that your
destiny is in your hands, and you never want to trade it for a bowl of
porridge. It emboldens you to go out there and get all you need to become all
you want to be. It instructs that the only limits are yours to decide. It means
that you daily become what you aspire to become by the quality of every single
choice you make and every other decision you take. Yes, it is that simple,
except that you have decided to busy yourself with gossips about a system that
cares little or nothing about you.
For instance, what are you doing
with the many months you have been at home because FG and ASUU want you out of
school? I bet you that many youths spend their time making jokes of it on
social media sites, many others are doing one stupid thing or the other. And if
you continue this way, why complain about being on the dark side of life? I
understand that the status quo has put you in there, but you are having me
believe you enjoy every bit of it. However, my friends and I have set out on a
voyage to the sunny side of life and I doubt that we are not already there.
Care for a ride with us? Get involved!
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