by Alkasim Abdulkadir

With the increasing unemployment and frustration in the country, young people who make up 70 percent of Nigeria’s population need not only participate actively in politics, but must also be policy drivers….

I was anchoring an event at the Yaradua Centre earlier in the year, the theme of the event bordered on youth empowerment and attendant skills acquisition. While making a remark I quipped that according to the United Nations definition of youth age bracket, a youth should be within the ages of 18-35 years old, however in Nigeria’s political sphere we were saddled with a 60 year old who was the youth leader of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP. The Chief Servant of Niger State and my state governor Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu, replied that his party’s youth leader is young at heart and youth was not only defined by age but by a certain vibrancy. In spite of his reply, the point had already been made about the near foreclosure of young people in politics.

Little wonder then that the state put forward a verifiable young person as a candidate in the just concluded PDP Special Convention; where they elected 30 year old Abdullahi Husseini Maibasira from Niger State was elected as National Youth Leader of the PDP, the youngest ever since the establishment of the party in 1999.

This might appear mundane, the participation of young people in politics, however it became so because the nations psyche got drawn into a grab all vortex, where older people advancing daily in life refused to actively mentor younger ones who will replace them. We were faced with a situation where the successor generation of politicians remained in limbo with only a handful of young people making headway in politics.

Politicians from the Shagari era morphed into politicians of the third republic, further morphing into politicians of the 4^thRepublic. Not even General Ibrahim Babangida’s deliberate intervention of advocating for young people to participate in politics in the early 90s could upset the apple cart of gerontocracy that had set in; however General Babangida’s New Breed politicians went ahead to create a dent on the canvass gerontocracy in the general elections of 1993.

It is good to point out that it wasn’t always like this, the easiest examples to point to are the politicians of the first republic who were mostly in their 20s and 30s. There is the example of General Yakubu Gowon who became president at 32 years old. A president! A whole president, I mean. Around the same time Alfred Diette-Spiff became the first governor of Rivers State at 25. An age today, where young people are at home, sitting idle from ASUU strike; then there is also General Shehu Usman Yaradua who became vice president to General Olusegun Obasanjo at 33. This trend continued up till the 80s with the appointment of the likes of the then Lt. Col David Mark at 36 as the governor of Niger State, currently the President of Nigerian Senate. Babangida’s assumption of power at the age of 44 in 1985 is today a mirage.

With the increasing unemployment and frustration in the country, young people who make up 70 percent of Nigeria’s population need not only participate actively in politics, but must also be policy drivers in order to bequeath a greater understanding to the conversation. However this cannot be achieved with the mindset of remaining foot soldiers and thugs who snatch ballot boxes and cause mayhem during elections. Young people must move away from the chorus of shouting Gbosas to the pervading gerontocracy.

A starting point is for Mr. President to replace the vacancy in the Ministry of Youth with a “real youth Minister”. A young and visionary person  who understands the urgency that urban youths have no business selling Chinese toys in traffic hold-ups, who understands the unlimited and untapped resources in the agro-allied sector, who is scared by the fact that there 10 million children are out of school in Nigeria. Most importantly one who understands that Nigeria’s young people who make up 70 percent of the population must be dividends and not a disaster to Nigeria in the next decade.

Mr. President, your political party has elected a real youth leader; it is now time to appoint a real youth Minister.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.