THE YOUTH OF NIGERIA MUST RISE

• A FAILED NATION

A government is put in place to serve the people of a nation. The government is expected to maintain law and order in a State. But unfortunately, the power cartel in Nigeria, since the introduction of popular democracy served in the opposite direction. What is in place as government is rather used to undermine the nation and its people.

Cases of non-availability of infrastructure, such as roads, water, and electricity, are the norm in most states of the nation. Infrastructural failure serves as a constant reminder that a government, as desired by the people, only live in the recesses of their psyche.

Everywhere are the cases of failed institutions such as electoral commissions, water boards, electrical authorities, school systems, health facilities, banking systems, communication commissions, etc.

The failure of these facilities is onset in the inability of both the federal government and state governments to sustain a functional educational system, where public schools can provide adequate, sound, and competitive training to their ever-bourgeoning school seekers. Rather, what is on the ground is a system that makes it impossible for low-income earners to be able to send their wards to school on account of a lack of school fees, plus bribes to pay their way through the compromised registration system of the school authorities. On the other hand, those who manage to find their way into any of the schools are given half-baked education consequent of not enough classrooms and fewer than enough number of ill-equipped teachers, this sorry state is the same from the pre-primary to the tertiary institutions of learning.

The same sorry story as illustrated for the education system is apparent in the health institution as other major infrastructure of the state.

• A FAILED ELECTORAL SYSTEM

One of the most dangerous aspects of this institutional failure is the peculiar cases of non-functional electoral systems. This ought to be the base upon which the people decide the caliber of people that are to be elected to serve the needs of the nation and its people. What is rather in place are electoral commissions that are not accountable to the people who are to make decisions in the elections. The apparent lack of accountability of the electoral process is because the electoral bodies are in the hands of the ruling political party or the highest bidder.

• THE LACK OF FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Lack of financial accountability is a big setback in the development of democratic governance in the nation. The people are aware that the nation is endowed with abundant resources, but the dividends of it are forever as a mirage on a far-off road to them. Everywhere, telescoped in the vast land of our nation, are a few among many easily able to corner the resources of the state to the detriment of the nation. And this tendency makes corruption one of the biggest problems of the advancement of representative government in the nation. As the states are sapped by a handful of its citizens, who have no other source of income than the state resources, which are supposed to be used to smoothly run the engines of the state.

In its fifth decade of independence, there are lots of Nigerians from its government because the system perpetrated by the powers that be has not been able to evolve a representative government that is accountable to its people, both in terms of elections of the leaders and the recall of erring elected officials.

• THE YOUTH MUST AGITATE AND DICTATE THE STATE OF AFFAIRS

The salvation of the nation of Nigeria lies squarely on the shoulders of its youth, who, to good fortune, are in the majority. They represent the group that should agitate and dictate the state of affairs across its length and breadth. The political bandits, who are at the moment enjoying the common wealth, cannot be relied upon to release the nation from the shackles of underdevelopment. It’s indeed an unfounded expectation to expect the beneficiary of a manipulated system to wake up and put in place a policy that will unseat it from the very corridor of power it cherishes so much. Plenty of dirty deals, they do to get to power, so to expect the syndicates in power across Nigeria to willingly make statecraft accountable to the people will be like expecting a constant bright sunny day at midnight.

Changes urgently needed, most start with insisting on the overhaul of the electoral process. The youth of Nigeria must rise to the occasion to change the system of governance that favors the selection, hand-picking, of office holders in the name of elections by a privileged few through a compromised electoral process.