WHAT CLASS ARE YOU?

Over the last decade, I have heard people say over and over again that Nigerians do not read. Perhaps it is time to do another demographic survey since Nigerians have seemingly jumped from the agrarian age to the information age. Almost everyone has access to a phone – smart or not, a large population seems to have access to affordable internet services, and quite an armful (maybe harmful) have become activists by a click or touch of their very smart gadgets. With the technological transformation, Nigeria has a better rating on the map of the world, albeit looking at the scale from which it had fallen (giant of Africa) the improvement is inconsequential. 

There is a certain class of Nigerians who are educated and have a high level of ideation. These are the people who want to do something about the issues plaguing Nigeria. These seemingly very minority group always air their views about the problems Nigeria is facing and how incompetent the leaders of this country appear to be. One thing I hardly hear from them however is the ‘way forward’ or when they do proffer solutions they do it with the effortlessness of the commentator/spectator of a football match. It is quite easy to shout at a player from the sideline about the angle from which he should kick a ball. I remember the season of Occupy Nigeria. Some of the youths that participated in this understood the hardship that would face the Nigerian people if subsidy was removed but they also understood why the government wanted to remove the fuel subsidy. Perhaps if they were to run their own governments, they would probably remove the subsidy but of course make sure that there are safety nets to help those who would be most affected. There are not many of these people. Are they useful to the Nigerian Society? Well, they can be if only they channeled their gadget-driven activism to benefit everyone with consideration for the children yet to be born.

There is another class of Nigerians who are also educated yet their thinking is greatly affected by their culture, religion that is only skin deep, values that change with the weather and the degeneration in the society so much so that it would be hard for them to look back for a second to ask why the government wants to remove fuel subsidy.  Their focus is totally on the hardship they would feel as a result of the decision and that is all that matters to them.  They never think outside their world or their box. There are many youths in this category and you would find many of them taking the lead when there are situations. They would most likely hijack a situation and of course act with no strategy or with just one strategy – how to solve their own problem. As bloggers, this category is more likely to write articles that are so skewed yet the information they provide is out there for everyone to read and in many cases accepted as truth. They seem to forget that their desktop is not the only desktop in the world and some people might call them narrow-minded because they have come to realize that there will always be an another side to a story.

There is also a category of Nigerians who are not educated yet have access to information. I call them the foot soldiers or pawns because they do the fighting and destruction. Of course I do not need to buttress the ills of having access to information without education. It was sometime last year when a story went viral about a lady that turned to a snake in a hotel in one of the eastern states of Nigeria; some angry people went to the hotel with the intention of burning it down for whatever reason.  There are many in this category and would always be useful tools for politicians and likes in rigging, intimidation and destruction and as well as Boko Haram tactics.

Then there are the people who do not have access to information with no education. These are the people who genuinely suffer from the actions of all the other categories I mentioned above. They have no platform to make any meaningful contributions to their society and they get all their information from the third category.  

I created these categories to describe in a different way the young population which is more than one third of the entire Nigerian population so that we can imagine a country where the young population is educated and has a high level of ideation with access to information and a global network such that among them they have great thinkers and implementers who are defined by the right culture, values and religion. It is evident that education is very much vital to nation building and the over 56 million youths in Nigeria must be armed with the right tools for their development if not we would have a bigger problem on our hands than the ones we think we have. Like I said at the beginning, it is time for another demographic survey.