We must find a solution to youth unemployment. Without this, we must expect increasing defiance and violence – Obi Nwakanma

“It would be futile to just leave the fate of a great people in the hands of just a few ‘politicians’, many without the requisite intellectual training or rigour for political life.”

By Obi Nwakanma

I just got back from Nigeria last night, in what might be called “a flying visit.” The killing of Gabe Ofoma, and the reported kidnap of Justice Pemu of the Appeals Court in Owerri, and other reported incidents are unfortunate, but they feed into the hysteria that exaggerates the reality of life in Nigeria. It is a tough place, certainly. But the calm of daily life is equally real.

I felt no sense of threat. People are occupied with the challenge of quotidian life. I could feel the hardness of spirit and deep cynicism as I never knew it before among Nigerians, but there were still moments of sensitive kindness and warm, open generosity. We need to step down on this hysteria which serves only to undercut and de-market Nigeria, particularly the East of Nigeria, and which gives already cynical folk the excuse to de-invest and turn away from their moral and historical obligations to their natal society.

My observation of the East is quite simple: there is a huge army of highly skilled and unemployed young men and women who live like crabs in a bucket. They have no jobs, and many at 40 years still live at home with their parents, unmarried, with little prospects and they are social prisoners in a world with little social benefits accruing to citizenship. This is dangerous.  A man with an Engineering skill brought together with one with training in biology, chemistry, physics, and with experience in Lab Technology can either make a bomb or build a gas station. The choice is for all actors in the system to decide precisely what you want of them. Right now, these young men and women feel like flotsam, abandoned to the elements, and the natural progression of things suggests that they may seek alternative outlets for survival. They will rebel against the society that has not offered them much choice. They will operate outside its laws. They will bring down the roof on everybody. They will make the night walk with knives. To lament will be futile.

I always liked the old Pyrates credo: “do not yap, Act!” – the seventh of its rudder blades. Our obligation is to find solutions to this increasingly “Haiti situation” not lament. A slow burn out of society is possible when the capacity for systematic thought is left in the hands of incompetent state actors. We need to bring in our sociologists, our political scientists, our communicators, our clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, our demographers, urban planners and our social workers, and begin to design a solution. We cannot leave the business of growth and survival in the hands of fly by night politicians, many of whom are no worse than crime lords, and who are the beneficiaries of the growing chaos.

My observation of the East, just driving through is of the large growth of unliveable cities without planning boards or commissions. They destroy the natural environment and build concrete jungles, with little architectural, aesthetic and spatial considerations. Spatiality is vital to mass behaviour, particularly in a highly urbanizing society. I have suggested the possibility, given the chaos in our urban life, of untreated mass psychosis as a result of the ruptured spaces and the pollution, and the tensions of our new urban society where there is little recreational outlet. Then of course: jobs, jobs, jobs! We must find a solution to youth unemployment. Without this, we must expect increasing defiance and violence. We also need to invest authority on institutions rather than on individuals. The idea of the high and mighty creates ennui and discontent in an increasingly complex and tense society. We must make authority earn its just desserts, not just feed it.

A well-established policing system with capacity to assert legitimate and visible deterrence in a modern society should replace the current primitive policing in our society with its constabulary character. Both in terms of its recruitment and training model and in its orientation, the current NPF is incapable of containing the current generation of criminals with their high exposures. We need to be real: crime is the fallout of social failure. It is not a reflection on the general moral condition of a society. Above all, we must decommission the bitter politics of power and create the politics of service. In sum, I think this is the greatest time in Nigeria for anyone who wants to build wealth and establish value to actually accomplish it.

A city like Aba, for instance, is a massive diamond in the rough waiting to be taken. We can either leave it for the Chinese or we must take our chances. That jewel in the armpit of the Atlantic can absorb the massive but underused skills of the young, particularly of the East, as it expands southwards to Ikot Ekpene, and Northwards to Owerrinta, with Umuahia and Port Harcourt left and right of its flanks. We must clean up our cities, and preserve the great bucolic quality of our country sides, and instigate an environmentally sustainable growth in both our rural and urban economies. That is something we all can bring our heads together to do. It would be futile to just leave the fate of a great people in the hands of just a few “politicians”, many without the requisite intellectual training or rigour for political life.

What is happening in Nigeria, nonetheless, is not worse than what is happening in Mexico where the drug cartels slowly took over the social and political life of that society and where the kidnapping and assassinations of judges, journalists, and key business rivals is in fact, common. Let’s push so that the Nigerian society does not get there, not by lament, or “yapping” but by common action.

Obi Nwakanma ’78