by Jude Feranmi

Dear @JajaPhD,

I have chosen to write to you seeing that you just made up your decision to join our party, KOWA PARTY. It also appears that you have not entirely taken the bold decision to register as a bonafide member of our party and are open to conviction by people who share a different perspective to making change happen.

I also realize that many Nigerian Youths are in your shoes and are still at the level where they know what they do not want ( the other political parties filled with ancient patronage and client list practices and doctrines with no cut out ideology ) but are still wondering whether what they want is available ( in which our party, KOWA PARTY features a lot).

This is an attempt to seal your conviction and let you know that even though this decision will be one of the most unpopular decisions you will mostly ever make, it is a step in the right direction.

In any society, there will be spin doctors, people who advance the gospel of cynicism over hope, those who prefer to be pessimists in the face of courage and bravery, those who are conservatives and are inclined to stay where they are despite glaring evidence that a step forward in the face of all the odds is the right step to take.

These people will try to convince you and get you to stay exactly where you are and continue to suffer and smile, leveraging on your ability to cope and adapt in the weirdest of circumstances and leveraging on your fear of the unknown.

I cannot guarantee you that our party, KOWA PARTY is going to be the first PERFECT Political Party that the human species will witness, and along with various other occurrences that are inevitable in any political setting. But I can guarantee you that we will together make a difference.

Politics is truly the best and largest impact making instrument that society has developed and political parties as such are the vehicles with which these instruments get to be deployed.

Our party’s emphasis on the impact and the value that the young Nigerian can therefore bring into shaping and developing the kind of society that s/he wants now and in the future is therefore not a coincidence. It is birthed from a meticulous process of finding out how to impact our society.

Reaching the young Nigerian is therefore one of our core strategies and how better to do that than through 21st century tools that the internet has afforded our generation vis a vis social and new media.

Those who claim that our influence is only on social media are also responsible for hailing the impact that social media has brought to the lives of Nigerians including vulnerable and health-challenged citizens.

You are brilliant, influential, brimming with ideas on how to change and impact your society but don’t get it twisted, you are not exceptional.

There are a thousand and one Nigerian Youths like yourself who control pockets of influence and have ideas and skills and are ready to make impact and change the history of our generation and they are on social media, the only way on our planet we could have reached out to you in far-away London. We are out to reach them and bring all of us under one political umbrella to carve a way out of the doom that our country is currently sleep-walking into.

So to all the Jajas out there, who wants to join our party and contribute their own quota to the development and restructuring of our dear country, to all those who want to birth a different kind of politics different from the god-fatherism controlled and patronage-procedural politics that our fathers and fore-fathers out there have bequeathed unto us, to all those who want a different life for their own kids and want to see our country flourish like the giant of Africa that it really is, our doors are wide open.

Your friends might boo you, Your families might think you are just taking a stroll into politics and the ones that are influential enough on these streets might think we should just take a chill pill and park the bus, what you have to know and keep remembering is that in the times of doom and in the times when society needs people to rise up and take a different path to glory and paradise, there are those who lead the charge and forge ahead despite the unknown and the uncertain, believing that their creed and their passion to see a better day and a light at the end of the tunnel is enough to bring the other resources to get to the promised land and there are those who will be convenient with cynicism, pessimism and take a conservative approach to the status quo.

In the end, everybody is swept by the wind of true change when it finally comes and only those who believe and have contributed will have their names written in history books as having contributed to securing the new life and the better experience that we will then have.

Take that final step and I promise you that in the nearest future, you will be able to beat your chest and hold your shoulders high while telling your children that you were one of those who contributed to the life that they now enjoy.

For the Love of Country,

___________________

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

Jude ‘Feranmi is the National Youth Leader, KOWA PARTY