Youthfulness in Nigeria: a Candle in the Wind.

Youthfulness is loaminess, loaminess is wealthiness but like volcano under the ocean, so is youthfulness in Nigeria. The Youth Policy defines the youth as all young people of the ages 18-35. The youth are strong, active and ambitious- burning like fire -manufacturing or destroying. Jacob Omede posits that 'the youth remain one of the greatest assets that any communities can possess. Most Nigerian youths are highly misguided, recruited and used by some adults to achieve their selfish aims'.

The youth are the major hands employed or motivated by some forces to wreck any nation through vices.

Remi Ayede asserted that 'if Nigeria is to be sustained as a viable entity there must be a very good plan to tap the energy and resourcefulness of the youth population to fast track economic development.' He also stated that over the years, 'significant proportion of Nigeria youth have become demoralised and confused. Thus, we have experienced high levels of youth deviance, manifesting in the form of violence and thuggery, rising levels of financial and economic crimes.' Name any bloody crime, the youth are involved.

Youths are strong hands with strong will. They can break, they can lift. Since age is put before beauty, then the youth have the old to follow and they will replace the old when the latter exit the space. Bad governance is therefore a wind. Many articles on youth connect the youths with mass unemployment, social unrest, vices, and at times with national development.

Majority of the youth in Nigeria are just candles, burning at both ends, in the face of a violent wind. The problem of unemployment, poverty, and frustration have made many youth desperate for any means of survival. While many will personally gang up to commit crimes at their own risks, many are hired to commit crimes with impunity. The political violence in Ekiti and any other state did not involve any old person fighting. The youth are the fighters be they initiators or not. What are they fighting for? Survival or Approval?

As long as there are greedy gods of egoism, there will continue to be demoralised youth who will be hired and armed by those who will never be able to disarm them. So, the moral development of the youth should be strictly institutionalised. The repressive forces that climaxed into desperate struggle for survival should be fought. The youth who fail will become the thorns in the flesh and on the ground to those who endure to stand. Those who compromise are pulling and pushing those standing off balance. There are candles but the wind is strong.

Potentials and skills that make youth indispensable make them candles but rather than being allowed to shine the old often choke them, squeezing the blood in their veins and dumping them potentially pale. The argument is that many of them do not develop their potentials to be marketatable or employable.

Then whatever is distracting them from developing, whatever is making the skills inadequate, and whatever is tapping the little they have, is a wind.

Some of these wind factors making youths windswept are addictions to the social media, movies, music, pornography, sex and sports. These are self-imposed wind. There is a need for discipline.

There are academic institutions and policies that do not favour moral and skillful development of the youth. For example, involvement in fun and fancy in social events- including dancing, is certainly, often rewarding than involvement in academic or vocational exercise. Dancing contest which happens more often than essay contest attracts reward and recognition. Of course, youth must prefer fame, fun and much money to thinking, working without any or much money.

Project (field based, academic or vocational) are rarely sponsored except sometimes by some international organisations. Why will there not be cyber criminals when Graduates if Computer Engineering cannot invent or develop something? Do we even believe in the posiblity that we can create something new? We announce discoveries or people from other countries without charging them 'thank you'. What a world! When the winner of a debate competition gets #100,000 with a laptop, a winner of a fashion parade get a car with professors taking pictures with them, what a world!

Arguably, it is not the institutions that sponsor these social events to make them more desirable than intellectuality. The companies that sponsor them are after crowd and it seems fun and fancy attract many youths' attention than any act of intellectuality.
However, it is noteworthy, that reward is a motivation for reasoning and rising to partake with enthusiasm in anything.
Man, no matter what, needs the hope for some personal gains, to make personal sacrifices. This is not a vote against fun and fancy but a call for balance between fun and focus, fact and fancy, noting that the osmosis pressure lies greatly on the 'fun side'. On the scale, fun is down focus is dangling.

In a country where it is known that poverty is not uncommon (though many youth cloak in unreal richness), an imbalance sponsorship that favours fun and fancy against intellectuality and tangibility, is nothing but a deliberate or myopic promotion of hopelessness. When the fun-addicted youth realised the need for focus and tangibility, the needed will be wanted. So, they become liabilities decorated with frustration. Poverty and its consequences then will still remain popular and celebrated.

Nevertheless, if the wind blows out the fire of the candle, it is better the candle remain as it is and not melt or dissipate without shining. The candle must ely burn off but it would have shone significantly giving light and value to a least a person and place. WHY WASTE WITH WONDERS AND WORTH WITHIN?

If the prey will not come the predator can go hunting. The youth should not wait for sponsors or motivation before they get serious. Afterall, not all will get the benefits of any sponsorship since it is usually selective. The fact, however remains that potentiality only pays in opportunities - to perform, reform and develop.
Catch fun if you must since many issues in the country seem frustrating and one cannot commit suicide to protest change into being actualised, but do not lose focus. Complaining cannot get it done. Break the rock to get the honey within. In a rich soil turned rocky, it is not unknown that it is not easy to break into the deep of the ocean of 'dream come true'.

Putting pleasure before business is a wind. That many prefer foreign products and services to local ones is a wind enough to discourage inventions. That many homemade product are proven fake and services proven dissstisfactory is also a wind. These complex-invention-killing-occurrences are wind to the candles of the youth.

When youthfulness is a candle in the wind
When strenght is misguided into cursed-missions
When dreams are shattered in survival struggles
When potentials are self-buried or force-buried
When past failures portray inabilities and impossibilities
What will be the future of the nation?
Light or darkness?
It's time we began to call for an all-embracing effort to still the storm.
Till then, many candles prefer to fly and burn off on cool spaces over seas.

from the Wordsmith Forge
SAMUEL O. KUYE
KSOOANG HOPEACE (TFW)
ENGLISH/ARTS
UNILAG.
7F6CD61F