"Oh! What A Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice To Deceive" - Anonymous.

Truth they say is bitter, that is why we cringe and fill social media with vitriolic attacks on who ever dares tell us the truth to our face. In all the latest vitriolic against President Buhari however, none has dispute any of the salient points he raised.

The president did not generalise his postulation because he is aware of the many brilliant, intelligent, self-made and hardworking youths from every corner of our country impacting the world positively and making us proud. The same manner he knows we have disappointing, murderous and self-serving ones among all regions of our society.

He MAY be wrong to disparage his own people openly but he is very correct in every sense of what he said. A truth every Nigerian must accept and confront.

Go to the streets of Northern Nigeria where the influence of drug and substance abuse have crippled and paralyzed their shared sense of responsiveness and creativity which has further induced social vices, civil upheavals and other forms of criminalities among the youths. Or the south, where kidnapping, 419 or yahoo + are so endemic. The story is the same, or even worse especially with the oil producing regions where the youth in their majority are only interested in community runs, extortion and handouts from Oil companies, local, state and federal governments with a little interest in doing physical and mental work.

While it’s true that our problems stemmed from leadership failure with how they looted all the funds meant for our development to then leave us impoverished, it is also a truth that we are in a period of severe austerity all Nigerian youths must face with pragmatism if we are to stand a chance of seeing a brighter future.

Our negativity, biased criticism and baseless hatred for Buhari will only destroy our ability to reason properly and find solutions to our perennial problems. Our President has only called on all Nigerian youths to take a long, hard look at ourselves and work out the role we must play in liberating ourselves from poverty and deprivation.

We need a total re-orientation in Nigeria. We have to instill the value of hard work, instead of the belief that because we have oil, we should get everything free in life. Moaning impotently, every time someone ask us to take stock of our own failing and address it only mark us as unreasonable individuals who will find it difficult to craft solutions for problems.