Kidnapping: Approved By Default?

What are these, so withered, and so wild in their attire. That look not like inhabitants of the earth. And yet on it? – Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth often times, the society rests its evils on the mantelpiece and cartel of the youth, and even sterotypes the youth in the manner of a wastrel.

Like Banquo who paints youth in the above pretty grim picture and confuses youth with something else, clothing it even in tattered grapbs, the older generation of our society today, while trying to exonerate itself always rambles round the wild excitement of the youth and lays all the bad deeds in the society on the totem pole of the youth.

The youth has been so turned into a mantra of fear, such that whenever armed robbers menance a neighbourhood, it is the youth; when a pipeline bursts in the Niger Delta, the youth is fingered; whenver NEPA equipment get missing, it is the youth that steals them.

Nobody bothers to think about the innocence of youth, or make excuse for this special specie of mankind, which Dan Agbese describes as the dew on the blade of its grass; the mankind at its pristine, unspoilt best; the torch that guides mankind in its journey through the tunnel of life from one generation to another; the link between today and tomorrow, the age without care and responsibilities; the time approved by nature itself for everyone to sow bushels of wild oats.

The only time perhaps that the society remembers that youth for the good is during a football match when Nigeria manages a victory over poor Gabon or has a draw with Brazil. No more, no less.

Last weekend for instance, I was at a friend’s birthday party when an old man in his early sixties began to pour verbal venoms on the youths over the on-going criminal acts of kidnapping in the Niger Delta, Given the fact that kidnapping is a crime against humanity with the youths as the major culprits, most of us could not but share in his disappointment. But his attempts to paint his own generation in pretty terms, as well as absolving it of odious and retroactive complicity in the on-going maladies called kidnapping drew reactions from some of us, who believe the new generation of youths is what the old approved by default.

The truth is that while the gales of kidnapping and the currents of terror that weep through the Niger Dellta in recent times are, by all standard, condemnable, it is hardly fair and self-deceptive for the older generation to excuse itself from the debaunchery of  the youth that now constitutes a morbid speck on our society. To do so would amount to scretching the issue on the surface.

There is more to the myth surround this criminal act than what the older generation wants us to believe. I want to believe that the bushels of wild oats called kidnapping being sown by the youths would have been easier to uproot if they were not being nurtured by the older generation.

It is a known fact today that only a handful of our political leaders are not members of one secret cult or the other, or better still mentors of gangsters groups. In other words, the youths that carry out this dastardly act of kidnapping, hardly operate all alone without the support and backing of the older generation, who often times manipulates the youth to act out a Hollywood Movie or American Ninja to protect their own selfish interest.

The society uses the youth for as many things as the number of atrocities in the society. Politicians use them for electoral manipulations and rigging, political thuggery and even murder of political opponents. Lecturers and school authorities exploit the youths’ skills, muscle and sinew to settle scores on campus, land owners and warring communities use them for land internecine. Even common landlords use the youth to eject their tenants.

Hardly do we know that this habit of using the youth for nothing other than violence represents natural and logical progression down that precipice. The older generation has pushed the Humpty-Dumpty down the wall, all hope that he could be put together has always ended in vain.

How convenient now to wonder why the youths the supposedly mankind’s morning, have invented their own world, the world of violence, kidnapping and secret cult? Pity.

Boye Salau