Since President Muhammadu Buhari made a
statement at a Commonwealth event in London, about 60 per cent of
Nigerian youths being lazy and entitled people, Nigerians have spilled
gallons of ink trying to either prove he is right or wrong. On the one
side of the aisle are Buhari’s megaphones who tried to turn the
statement on its head. It was laughable reading Buhari’s media aide,
Femi Adesina, spin the gaffe by distinguishing between “a lot of” and
“all.” If he were not merely trying to be disingenuous, he should have
remembered his primary school mathematics lessons’ rules about rounding
off figures. If Buhari thinks more (!) than 60 per cent of the Nigerian
population below 30 are uneducated and only want to, “sit and do
nothing, and get housing, health care, education free,” he is as good as
addressing all of them. Adesina should also know that the outrage
against Buhari’s statement was not just about that singular statement,
it is a build-up of several others. They evince a disdainful attitude
towards Nigerians. Buhari has serially described Nigeria as “crooked,
corrupt, and unworthy”.
This statement about lazy Nigerian
youths is one too many, and that is why it struck a nerve. Notice also,
how Buhari says “a lot of them haven’t been to school…” as if the
responsibility for these youths’ education lies solely in their hands.
There seems to be no reflection on his part about the ill-education that
Nigeria presently offers, and why even those in school come out barely
educated.
There are other Buharists like a former
Congress for Progressive Change chieftain, Tony Momoh, and Director of
Muslim Rights Concern, Ishaq Akintola, who have at least echoed Buhari’s
statement with their conviction that indeed, Nigerian youths suffer
from pathological laziness. Momoh and Akintola are Buhari apologists
who, unlike Adesina who is twisting himself into a rope to defend
Buhari, argue that indeed Nigerians are lazy and Buhari needs not
apologise. Akintola even went to the point of quoting Chief Obafemi
Awolowo making a similar observation about Nigerians in a 1974 speech.
What Akintola could have added is a little more reflection: Are the same
youths that Awolowo condemned 44 years ago not the ones that grew up to
be the Akintolas (and perhaps, the Momohs) of today, and who are now
calling the younger generation lazy too? If Akintola was described as
“lazy” in his younger days, should that not also give him pause before
accusing the present generation of being “lazy” too? Instead of lazily
accusing younger generations as they were accused in their own youth,
why not interrogate the psychology of Nigerian youths and the factors
that predispose them to inter-generational laziness? Why were Nigerian
youths lazy in 1974, and the children they bred still just as lazy and
as entitled in 2018? Any answers?
Of course, Buhari has also been
vehemently criticised from different quarters. Some of his critics are
the youths he accused, and some of them must be wondering if they
deserve such gratuitous insult from the man they worked so hard to
support to be President a mere three years ago. There are countless
others too, particularly opposition politicians who are also countering
Buhari’s putdown of Nigerian youths by showcasing examples of Nigerian
youths as hardworking, resilient, and innovative. While I appreciate the
robust response to the President, the other part that is worth
considering is the meaning of laziness in itself. What does it mean to
be a Nigerian and be lazy? Given the harsh sociological conditions most
people are born into in the Nigerian space, has it ever occurred to all
those who are self-righteously describing Nigerians as lazy – as well as
those contending Buhari’s assertion – that refusing to work and
developing a sense of entitlement is as valid a political response to
the Nigerian condition, as much as striving valiantly? In other words,
while those who work hard to overcome the odds have a point, those who
refuse to work, but chose to sit down and do nothing also have a
legitimate point!
Some years ago, when I first got to
graduate school in the USA, I met a young man who was homeless.
Occasionally, he would ask me for money for food. Eventually, we got
talking. One day, I felt comfortable enough with him to ask him why he
had not taken up a job. He was white, young, and an American, why would
he be poor and homeless? He shrugged at my question and told me that his
parents and grandparents were the most hardworking set of people he
ever knew, but they still died in acute poverty. He told me watching
them toil for promises that would never materialise made him make up his
mind not to work because there was no point running many miles in order
to remain in the same spot! He said he would not get a job because work
was unlikely to change his material conditions. As long as he ate and
had a place to sleep in extreme weather, he was fine. He could
concentrate his energies on activities other than balancing a cheque
book.
That conversation taught me to look
differently at “laziness” in an economy that tasks one’s body so much.
The idea that people who get things free from the government are lazy
and entitled is one of the most contested political and sociological
theses ever. Politicians say so when they want to obscure issues and
blame victims of their policies for not displaying enough self-reliance
and willpower to overcome the circumstances those same politicians have
created. If it were true that people are lazy and entitled, this also
would be true: Those that would rather “sit and do nothing, and get
housing, healthcare, education free,” are not merely lazy, they are in
fact strategically lazy. They have come to believe that no matter how
much work they do, their lived conditions are not likely to change that
much, so why should they invest their energy in “work”? Their defeatist
and fatalist attitude is thus understandable, whether one agrees with
their lines of reasoning or not.
If you look at the same issue within
our local context, Nigerians pay a lot for merely being Nigerians. Our
government has outsourced their duties to the citizens and the ones the
people cannot do for themselves are abandoned. Ours is a country where
people generate their own electricity, water, security, and even public
services. What do government officials really do for us that makes them
deserve the fat emoluments they allocate to themselves? Yet, they call
youths lazy and entitled? The kind of arrangement that subsists as
governance in Nigeria is so taxing that by the time one gets to the age
where one should be a working and productive citizen, one is already
exhausted by just being a Nigerian. At that point, one just wants to sit
back and start collecting one’s pension like Buhari himself has been
doing all his life.
I am a young Nigerian, and yes, I am lazy and entitled. And so bleeping what?
Buhari insults Nigerians for being lazy
but what has Buhari himself contributed to the polity in terms of hard
work, ideas, vision and ideology since he was kicked out of government
in August 1985? What nation-building ideas has anyone ever heard Buhari
himself propose other than taking sanctimonious shots at the lowest
hanging fruits, aka corruption? The main thing Buhari has gifted us, it
bears noting, is his sense of entitlement at the Presidency. He has
lived fat at Nigeria’s expense since 1985 and he is unapologetic about
it! Why then blame Nigerian youths for wanting something for nothing
when that is the way those who ruled Nigeria have made their obnoxious
fortunes too? We were socialised to see government as an elephant
carcass that anyone with a knife can carve out their own portion, and
not as a collective trust or responsibility.
Therefore, if Buhari looks at young
Nigerians and decides that all there is to them is “lazy and entitled,”
then, he is looking through a mirror and seeing a reflection of the
society he helped create.
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