by Jude Feranmi

There has been so much ado about how to fix the mess that is Nigeria. As things stand at almost half the year, we don’t have a budget. We have also been told not to worry about the health status of the president except that we now have to take things slowly as a country because our president has to take things slowly.
The economists claim we are now out of recession but nothing has changed on the street. Hunger is still prevalent in town and parents can no longer afford the school fees of their wards.

While all this is happening, our current masters have told us to look to the statement of our former colonial masters who say we will be among the top three world economies by 2050 as consolation.
When we need to begin to have the conversation about whether we will even have a country by 2050 to call Nigeria, we are busy politicking.

By all indications from the capital, all governance has been put on hold, not only because of Mr President’s working from home, 2019’s permutations have already begun. The Nigerian people can wait for another two years.

Now, we can rant and lament and engage in analysis paralysis just to make sense of the whole situation and convince ourselves that we are participating in the process or just provide ‘feed’ for the thousands of followers waiting to retweet and like posts on social media or we can decide to ACT and DO something about it. But like the popular slander that is now the remaining singular barrier to actually waging a strong force to tackle this mess we’re in as youths, Nigerian Youths Are Not United.
At every point in time where the most influential young Nigerians have come together for one cause or the other and failed, we have all come to the conclusion that the absence of unity amidst Nigerian youths is responsible. We are not like the people who we are trying to get out of power – the older generation who are united even in their ‘dirt’.

I could choose to respond to this by saying it’s probably a deliberate step from those who don’t want to see a generation rise out of the captivity that has been entrenched since 1966, but I won’t. I would instead provide a counter-argument on its merit.

The concept of the unity of an entire generation is bogus at best and at worst, ridiculous. It is the most ridiculous expectation of any generation that the most influential players in any epoch will take the same sides on all issues. It has never happen and will never happen. ‘The men who built America’ never agreed on every issue. The men who organised the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 didn’t agree on every issue.

The anti-apartheid Congress of the People organised in South Africa in 1955 consisted of the ANC, the SAIC, SAPCO and COD – four organisations that agreed on the anti-apartheid struggle but disagreed on details as important as the definition of an Afrikaan and an African and who qualifies to be one or the other. But these movements are movements we refer to today when we seek inspiration.

That congress of the people birthed a Freedom Charter that provided the to two questions. If you could make laws for south Africa, what laws would you make? And how would you go about making South Africa a happy place for all who live in it.

So, I am here asking the question, why exactly are we feshitising this idea of unity amidst Nigerian youths, especially the ones everyone else looks up to?
When Richard Quest said “Nigeria’s youth are the country’s secret weapon” on Twitter, some folks responded with the pessimism of how it’s the old people who use the ‘weapon’ for their own benefit and then dump the weapons when the fight is over. There were also responses along the line of how we are our own problems because we are not united.

This idea of unity has to stop. It has stopped us from achieving many feats that will not only benefit us as a nation but also benefit us as a demography. We do not have to agree with everyone we have to work with, even in our workplaces. Why do we then have to agree on every issue before we can even sit together under the same roof to have a discussion about what the future is for our generation?

Where do we start from? We have to start to understand that we can work together on the issues we agree with and refuse to even as much as have a discussion on the issues we disagree on. This is the only way we can have a movement that every Nigerian Youth buys into irrespective of political party affiliation or loyalty to a paymaster or even tribal prejudice.

Unity on every issue, as a criterion before we can work together on the issues we agree on is not just a luxury we cannot afford as a demography, it is also by all means utopian. We have to come together and we have to do this immediately.

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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
Jude ‘Feranmi is the National Youth Caucus Leader of KOWA PARTY and can be reached via [email protected] or on Twitter @JudeFeranmi