ABUNDANT Nigeria Renewal Party, ANRP, is aghast, ashamed, and angered at the disappointing, insensitive, distasteful, rather disdainful, and false comments by President Muhammadu Buhari about the youth of Nigeria.
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| President Muhammadu Buhari |
At the Commonwealth Business Forum in London on Wednesday 18 April, he infamously said, ‘More than 60 percent of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free.’
The most irritating part of this response is, it was supposed to be the answer to the simple question, ‘What are the investment opportunities in the Northeast?’
President Buhari’s off-point, false, and meaningless response only proves how disconnected he is with the Nigerian society, as well as his deep-seated disdain for Nigerian youth, otherwise the answer does not relate to the question at all. It was also a missed opportunity to sell Nigeria and her most prized possession, her youthful population.
ANRP checks fail to find the Head of Government of any country in the world that demarkets, disparages, derides and opens their citizens to public ridicule as President Buhari has a penchant for
doing.
Nigerian youth hustle and toil under extreme conditions to make ends meet. They are known to be hardworking, resourceful, enterprising, innovative, with a conquering spirit, resilient, succeeding against the odds. Nigeria youth have excelled and are excelling in every area of human endeavour. All the leading authorities who have investigated this matter, and the world at large recognises this as a fact.
Nigeria has given the present generation of youth nothing but woes and disappointments, not even good role models. Everything the youth have achieved has been by sweat, creating it from scratch with their own hands. Despite this, things keep getting tougher. Never in the history of Nigeria have Nigerian youth had it so terrible as under the maladministration of President Buhari. He had promised to create 3 million jobs for the youth yearly. As at December 2017, 7.9 million citizens lost their jobs in 21 months of his administration, 4.4 million in 2017 alone. No administration has impoverished the youth as President Buhari’s. It is under his watch that Nigeria spiralled down to the country with the largest number, and largest percentage of extremely poor people in the world.
It is under his administration that the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria has peaked at 13.2 million.
This comment coming from one who has benefitted from Nigeria all his life — having joined the Nigerian Army at age 19 and retired as a Major-General and Head of State at 42; and has been living off our oil wealth, with every single thing provided for him free for the rest of his life — to turn around and deride Nigerian youth is extremely provocative.
The youth of Nigeria shall be purging our society of disdainful, entitled politicians who care nothing about them, who are disconnected and cannot understand their pains and struggles, much less empathise with them.
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