WHO ARE YOU?

We are now youths, way past the periods when we will wait for milk from our mothers and spoon fed by our fathers. We have grown past the stage where we can hide behind ignorance and say I don't know what is happening or say how is an election conducted. We can now see with our own eyes how our elders have dealt with situations and choose if we will deal the same way clearly knowing the outcome. As youths do we say we don't know why we are used for things like rigging, kidnapping and even militancy. No we can't deny the fact, it is glaring that our strength is our greatest asset. But of what use is this strength to an ignoble youth.

We are allowing ourselves to be deceived and spoon fed the same way we were treated as toddlers. We say we are the leaders of tomorrow, true, indeed we are, just the same way our present leaders were youths once. A group of people would arise and say "youths don't let them steal your franchise it is your right". But they forget to include that after this don't become like they that were before you or for them to say try to remember where you are coming from. The average Nigerian youth wants to become wealthy and amass wealth at whatever cost especially if he is able to enter the political race, and once in, instantly forgets he had been disenfranchised once before. We say our leaders are bad and corrupt, they have to go, we can't continue like this. But when they eventually leave and we get there, do we deal the same way we have been meted or do we say despite all I am here with a mandate and I most answer to the people that voted me.

Let us put our actions and words in a safety deposit box, in a part of our brain that would not be eaten by despondence or the termites of corruption. So that when we grow old we would remember all we said and did and through that be different from the generation of decadence.

We have been called on by a generation that has been in power for over 20years and still can't get it right, leaders and elders to heed the clarion call to fuel our desires and hearts because they know that's what we want to hear, while behind us they sneer and giggle like babies because they know they have us fooled. Some of us are enriched and we say yes I have arrived not realising that our arriving is to the demise of our so called beloved nation. Because of the morsel we are given we become dilettante not realising there is a bigger chunk hidden away.

How long would we be youths, have we stopped to think? Very soon we will have to step up and lay claim. But how would we lay this claim, would we lay claim to the national cake as our family birthright or lay claim to credibility and stand for a better NIGERIA shouting the slogan ALUTA CONTINUA, VICTORIA ASCERTA