Mfonobong Inyang: How Should Young People Speak to Power?

From my assessment of some conversations on national issues, I realised more weight is put on the reaction of young people to those issues than perhaps the issues themselves. I must first say that I’m not here to hold brief for everything young people have either said or done, nor am I endorsing bad behaviour. My goal here is to capture a necessary nuance that must be factored into the actions and reactions of this demography. I will pick on some of these tropes systematically.

The first imperative that I consider a personal non-negotiable is that we cannot afford for this generation of young people to be conditioned into silence like their parents were. Does this mean that young people can open their mouths and say anything they want without any constraints? Of course not. Both extremes are wrong. There are certain things young people can’t afford to keep quiet about because they alone know what it means to walk in those shoes. Young people not only constitute the largest demographic, but most of them have never experienced good governance or led a decent and dignified life. How do you tell a young person to be silent when they are at the prime of their lives, and it almost seems as though there is a well-oiled conspiracy to sabotage their dreams?

The second imperative is this propaganda that I am never buying: how young people are intolerant of other people’s opinions, or engaged in cancel culture. There might be a sliver of people who are actively engaged in that, but I can assure you that the large swath of young people aren’t. What they call out is not people’s preferences, especially on politics, but their hypocrisy. When you lead a protest under one government over a bad economy but tell people to pray under a different government with a worse economy, when you claim to have fought for democracy but you act like a tyrant in power, when you hire the best talent for your private enterprises but on public office you say things like, “It doesn’t matter who the leader is”, when those who laid the foundation of toxicity in politics dare to clutch their pearls over others who seek to hold them accountable, when young people are massacred on live television and you mockingly ask, “where are the bodies?” Then, barely five years later, the same people are here shouting “respect the dead” – that right there is called hypocrisy.

The third imperative is the implicit cost of silence. Our people say that an infant’s head wouldn’t be bent when there’s an elder in the market. If you are familiar with our political history, you will agree that the tide has changed. It used to be that young people were indifferent to politics, or at best, they would wait for those who they considered authority figures or cultural influencers to signal a decision, and they would pretty much fall in line, but they know better now–it’s hard to fool everyone all the time. Young people have seen that everybody grows old, that list includes snake oil salesmen, political jobbers and government grifters. Thus, it’s not a smart decision to defer consequential political decisions to people just because of their grey hair. Wisdom, as the saying goes, is known by her children. In other words, the effects and results of wisdom are evident in the actions and character of those who embrace it. Young people have refused to become collateral damage of the games played by those who hardly take responsibility for their untoward actions.

It used to be that when things went south, some elders would stand up and speak truth to power regardless of whose ox was gored. Now, some of those who were once vocal critics of bad governance are maintaining table manners – refusing to speak owing to the food in their mouths. I believe in respect, and everyone should be accorded such, especially those who are advanced in age, but respect should not be the price we pay for regression, especially of the youth demography. For example, a democratically elected governor was illegally suspended from his office – that action was an aberration that isn’t known to the Nigerian Constitution. How can anyone who claimed to have fought for democracy that year overlook such an assault on the rule of law and expect young people to take them seriously? Anyone can package propaganda and call it history. Most young people were not around when these people claimed to have challenged military governments, so when folks choose to keep silent in the face of tyranny, the man dies. Nature indeed abhors a vacuum; that silence has become an epiphany for young people to speak up as they realise that nobody is coming to save them.

The fourth imperative is the damage to demography. When a country with a GDP of about $600 billion shrinks to barely $200 billion in ten years, thanks to the brutal efficiency of economic hitmen, it doesn’t go without consequences. About 70% of Nigeria’s population is under 30, so if there is a much smaller pie to be shared by a larger population, it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that young people mostly bear the brunt of abominable governance. So, before lecturing young people, consider the underpinnings of their anger. Some of them have had to enrol for advanced degrees that they don’t need, only because it was a veritable pathway to leaving the country; japa became ensconced in the Nigerian lexicon during the last decade. Young people have been forced to leave without their friends and families in a way that has cost them social bonding. Others had to leave the country and become fugitives in foreign lands because the country of their birth could not stand their audacity to speak the truth. A lot of young people don’t have the luxury of exploring their formative years because they effectively become breadwinners in their families. We forget that a widespread scarcity mentality leads to the worship of wealth; poverty isn’t just an attack on money – it’s also an attack on the mind.

It’s not just expensive to leave the country, it’s also expensive to live in the country. How do you expect anyone who spends about 90% of their income on rent, food and transportation alone to be happy? House ownership has become a far-fetched dream for many. We will be hiding behind one finger if we claim we cannot establish a nexus between a terrible economy and the uptick in social vices. This doesn’t excuse immoral behaviour or illegal activities, but there is a reason why the Social Sciences exists because human beings have been studied, and the correlation between social behaviour and economic realities is well-documented. As an economy loses value, such a country will also experience an erosion of values – the decimation of the numbers will eventually show up in society. Survival instinct is not a Nigerian phenomenon; it’s a human trait. Today, it’s not unusual to see people sing songs to celebrate criminality, for next to nothing, young girls are flashing body parts online, and kickbacks have almost been institutionalised across the board. When we say elections have consequences, it’s not just about undesirable policies but the effect of an unwanted change in the social psyche of people.

The fifth imperative is the culture of victim-blaming that is deeply rooted in Nigeria. In this country, if an organisation that is known for swindling its customers is called out by a young Nigerian, the youth who called them out for their fraudulent activities is more likely to land in police custody instead of the executives of that organisation. In this country, the political class uses professors who should embody academic excellence and character to rig elections, the judiciary that ordinarily should be the last hope of the common man will dismiss petitions not on the lack of merit but on dubious technicalities, then religious figures would be used to sanitize it by asserting that such electoral theft is the will of God, the intellectual class would then deploy its signature euphemizing of evil and image laundering, law enforcement would be used to harass those who insist on speaking the truth by describing them as threats to democracy or trying to overturn the government. There is a high tolerance for skulduggery in our society, but where we seem to draw the line is when young people, who are largely at the receiving end of such egregious conspiracies, speak up.

The sixth imperative is something that is subtle but has been an effective tool of social engineering by an unscrupulous lot: they raise the bar of expectation and performance for those they don’t like while burying the bar for those they do like. For example, it’s not uncommon to see certain people whose criminal activities and enterprise are well-documented being revered, but those who do things by the book are ridiculed. The public officials who steal the coffers blind and intermittently throw pittance around are hailed as philanthropic, but those who manage resources well are told they “need to carry people along”. Those who deploy threats and thuggery for political gains are celebrated as strategists, but those who appeal to the better angels of voters are told they “don’t understand politics”. My challenge about this is when those who claim they are neutral look away from such, but don’t miss a beat in lecturing young people about how to respond; it’s the selective outrage for me. The hypocrisy stinks to the highest heavens, this behaviour emboldens the degenerate culture of misgovernance because even the culprits know that there is an army of sycophants readily available to defend every one of their terrible actions.

The seventh imperative is irony. How do we explain that a first-class graduate of Physics has to engage in tailoring to survive, but those who are barely literate litter the political landscape of the country? It’s confusing me. How can a political class that hasn’t fixed or built functional refineries, standard healthcare centres or invested enough in education to raise HDI and GDP have the audacity to describe the hardest working demography on God’s green earth as lazy? How is it that public office holders who have plundered the resources they were meant to steward are protected by law enforcement officers, but young people are routinely profiled by the same law enforcement officers, only to spend an unconscionable amount of time in jail awaiting trial for crimes they never committed in the first place? How can thugs openly threaten the lives of fellow Nigerians, and it’s considered a joke, but young people are quickly arrested for supposedly cyberstalking for sharing reasonable opinions online? Riddle me that.

What did I miss? How did we go from having the third-fastest economy a decade ago to being the poverty capital of the world, and some folks are outchea acting like this is normal? We all know what we’re doing; the days of feigning ignorance are long gone. Ten years ago, I instinctively knew that Nigeria was about to make a terrible mistake, and I was warning everyone I could – here we are. I have only three things to say to Nigerian youths: the government and the country are not the same thing. Don’t give up on your country; fight for it. Stop outsourcing your patriotic duty to anyone; do your part as every one of us should. If you want to be part of the problem, own it with your full chest. Let all of us take responsibility for our roles so that we don’t start acting like victims down the road when we were accomplices. Some of us have decided to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may because, at the end of the day, like one of my respected elder brothers would say, “history will vindicate the just.”