Youth and Nation Building in Nigeria, 1960-2020

Abstract

The paper examines youth and nation building in Nigeria. The investigation taps strength from the understanding that youth exists, because the nation exists and conversely, the nation exists, because youth exists. This axiomatic underpins the complementary roles and relations between the duos, which are the hallmark of Hobbesian social contract theory. While several literatures on nation building focuses on other elements, the youth element the future of the Nigerian society hangs is deliberately and fundamentally undermined. This vexed problematic is what the paper seek to address by bringing youth of diverse religious backgrounds to the centre stage of national development discourse as crucial partner in progress. In addressing this vexed issue, the paper finds the ruling elites made up of Christian and Muslim and even African Traditional Religion on the one hand, and the Nigerian government conspicuously dominated by the adults on the other hands, to have done their best and exhausted. In other words, the adults ruling elites’ best appears not to be the best for the Nigerian youth population and for the nation. Thus, the inability of the State to have arrived at the right formula to constructively and strategically engage her youth due to repeated history of policy inconsistencies and disarticulation and the gloomy picture of the future this paints, largely accounts for the outbursts of acrimony and tensions threatening the foundation of Nigeria. Instead of shopping for whom to blame; either adult or the youth in the entire episode of the national question, the paper makes bold to say that all hope is not lost giving the prospects awaiting younger generation of Nigerians in the century and beyond. Against this backdrop and of the residual history of mutual relations between the people of Nigeria, the paper advocates for adequate and compulsory teaching of the nation’s basic history at all level of education to create patriotism and sense of belonging to diminishing and dismantling destructive ignorance, deadly prejudice and systemic stereotype. More importantly, since Nigerians are extremely religious, it adds that genuine teachings of Christian Religious Studies and Seerah are done to enable the younger generations imbibe true character of love, tenderness, mercy, justice, honesty, peace and patience lived and showcased by the persons of Jesus Christ and the Prophet, Muhammad S.A.W. The paper concludes that, while the role of the youth is significant to nation building project, all hands must be on deck as the phenomenon and its engineering is not a one-man show, but product of coordinated and cooperative enterprise.

Being text of the pepper presented a Two Days International Seerah Conference on the theme “Training the Young Generation for Societal Change: Guidance from Seerah” organized by Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University Peshawar Pakistan, 23-24 May 2022.