Approved By Default

The young knows how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that’s the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.

– Anne Rice “Tale of the Body Thief”

Often times, the society rests its evils on the mantlepiece of the youth, and even stereotypes the youth in the manner of a wastrel.

Clothing it even in tattered garbs, the society rambles round the exuberance of the youth and lays all the evil deeds on its totem pole.

The youth has been so turned into a mantra of fear, such that whenever armed robbers invade a neighbourhood, accusing fingers are pointed at the youth. When oil pipeline is vandalised or electrical equipment get missing, the youth is the prime suspect.

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 Nigerian society remembers the youth for good is during a football match when Nigeria manages a victory over poor Gabon or secures a draw with Brazil. No more, no less.

For  instance, I was at a friend’s birthday party  sometimes last year, when an old man in his early sixties began to pour venoms on the youth over the criminal acts of kidnapping and rape in the country, and most especially the Boko Haram insurgency. Given the fact that kidnapping, rape and suicide bombing are crimes against humanity with the youth as the prime and major culprit, most of us could not but share the old man’s view and disappointment.

But his attempt to paint his own generation in pretty terms, and absolve it of  odious complicity in the prevalent social anomie in Nigeria, drew reactions from some of us who believe the new generation of youth  is what the old approved by default.

While the gale of rape and kidnapping and the currents of terror that are sweeping through the country are, by all standards, condemnable, it is also unfair, self-deceptive even for the older generation to excuse itself from the debauchery of the youth that now constitutes a morbid speck on our society. To do so, would amount to scratching the issue on the surface.

The truth is that, there is more on the myth that surrounds the bushels of wild oats being sown by the youth. It is true that the youth carry out most of these dastardly acts. But the society cannot deny the fact that the youth hardly operate all alone without the support and backing, even if it is tacit, of the older generation, who often times, manipulates the youth to act out a Hollywood movie or American Ninja to protect its own selfish interest.

The society uses the youth for as many things as the number of atrocities in the world. Politicians use them for electoral manipulation and rigging, political thuggery and even murder of political opponents. Lecturers exploit the youth’s muscle and sinew to settle scores on campus, while land owners and warring communities use the youth for internecine. Even common landlords use the youth to eject tenants at will and without recourse to the law.

The cumulus clouds of insecurity in the country and especially the Boko Haram insurgency that is vastly ravaging the  North with the braggadocio of a vampire, are not without the signatures and imprimatur of the political elite.

Hardly do we know that this habit of using the youth for  less noble things other than violence represents natural and logical progression down this dangerous precipice we find ourselves today.

The older generation has pushed the Humpty-Dumpy down the wall; all hope that it could be put together has always ended in vain. How convenient now to wonder why the youth, the supposedly mankind’s morning, have invented their own world, the world of violence and crime? Pity!

Boye Salau