Nigeria Youth: A Political Tool?

                                         
    The greatest strength and asset of any nation is her youth. This is one universal fact government officials in Nigeria have remained indifferent to, having their gaze only on accumulating wealth, forgetting that a neglected youth of today will be an enemy to their well-being tomorrow. That Nigeria has not had a comprehensive, nationally coordinated youth empowerment programme is not an overstatement; especially given the fact that efforts at developing the youth have been superficially represented as part of broader economic development blueprints.
Youth are the most neglected group in this country, benefitting virtually nothing other than being used as thugs or tools for rigging during elections by officials of the same government that has impoverished their parents. Some institutions of higher learning in the country have been shut for months now, students who enrolled for four-year courses are currently into their sixth year on campus, yet top goverment officials and political office holders are not showing concern – or even alarm. The reason is not far-fetched; they have shielded their own children abroad from the political and social uncertainty in the country.
Political ideologies that were once considered fringe beliefs are now becoming mainstream. More than ever before, a large percentage of youth is actively becoming engaged in local campaigns and other political activities. Don’t get  me wrong, I am  not  opposed to youths participating in politics, but their strength being harnessed towards thuggery and perpetration of electoral malpractices. The potentials of the youth are either ill-exploited or under-exploited. It is a pity that political office holders and a preponderance of notable people in the country are more interested in enriching themselves than making positive changes in the lives of the youths they have sworn to serve, and pledged to defend.
Parents spend their hard-earned money to raise and train their children, many who end up roaming the nooks and crannies of the nation in search of jobs. Some households can’t afford even one meal a day. So many kids are roaming the streets instead of being  in school. The slums are expanding. Queues at health centres are getting longer for drugs that are insufficient. What picture does all this paint? A bleak future. There is no magic wand to change the situation for the better. The only tool available to change  this bleak future to a brighter one is our vote. I  therefore urge Nigerian youths not to sell their voting right in exchange for naira notes or any other promised goodies, like the  biblical Esau who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Political thuggery seems to be synonymous with the Nigerian political process. Election here has become synonymous with crisis and violence; geared towards winning power by subverting the democratic electoral process. In the process, regrettably, hundreds of people, mostly youths, lose their precious lives in political wars engineered by political leaders in their bid to protect mandates that are not often genuine. Why, then, do youths need politicians to determine their lives or means of livelihood?
Elections are here again. It is worth noting that politicians who know full well that they would not be able to win elections on a level playing ground, even in their own family meetings, would resort to hiring youths as paid thugs to rig or snatch ballot boxes from polling booths, harass their political opponents or even beat up electoral officers who refuse to dance to their tune. Many of Nigeria’s ‘‘elected’’ leaders got to their their positions through this exploitation of the youth, denying millions of Nigerians any voice in selecting their political leaders. This time we should let winners emerge by the votes of people, cast at booths supervised by the electoral commission; and not in the court, as we have seen in the recent  past.
Nigerian youths are imbued with innovativeness, conscientiousness and creativity pleading to be brought out. Only recently has the role of youths as viable social agents become recognised and appreciated. Corporate bodies, especially in the telecoms industry, have found it most expedient to invest in the youth by organising a variety of shows – though parties and shows are not all that go with being a youth – and designating them as goodwill ambassadors. Some others are sponsoring youth development programmes in diverse disciplines.
An effective way to arrest the negative trend of electoral violence and youth restiveness is to establish a specialised agency at the national, state and local government levels, particularly for the task of empowering the youth. This is imperative because in a situation where the youths are gainfully engaged, they would not be subjected to the manipulations of a parasitic political class.
The youths in South Africa played a dominant role in the dismantling of Apartheid. So great a force were they that their government found it hard to silence and disband them, or infiltrate their ranks. In the United States of America, the youth-dominated Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, of Martin Luther King Jr. played a pivotal role in initiating the civil rights movement. The youth in both countries had a vision, were committed to it, and brought it to fruition.
Nigerian youths are currently at a cross-roads. They need to forge a viable front that would bring about positive change that would secure them a better future. Since the leadership of Nigeria has failed to harness their potential, that choice lies in the hands of the youth.

 Written by Jumoke Awe

Trump's deportation plan:What you should know

                                           
Recently, President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to crack down on undocumented immigrants living in the US.
"What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers ... probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million — we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate," he said during an interview with "60 Minutes."
Trump has framed his deportation scheme as a way to restore to US citizens the jobs usurped by immigrants and as a means to secure the southern border, but demographics and recent history suggest that such a crackdown will only exacerbate the misery and instability that have driven the surge of migrants heading to the US in recent years.
 
Data suggest that the number of unauthorized immigrants who've been convicted of crimes in the US is actually far fewer than the 2 million to 3 million number cited by Trump.
So to hit that number would mean going beyond criminal immigrants or immigrants with criminal records to include those who've only been charged or who've only committed low-level offenses, which Trump transition team members have said they'd do.
Trump has also said he'd roll back Obama's programs offering temporary legal status to immigrants who entered the country illegally as children.


Such immediate mass deportations would in all likelihood violate due process and appeal rights, and to reach that number of people would mean ensnaring immigrants who are not serious criminals or who have no real ties to the country to which they'd be sent.
 
Like previous groups of deportees who've been sent back to Central America and Mexico, with few roots in their new home and little in the way of support, there won't be much to prevent those people from slipping back into the stream of migrants who've headed to the US in recent years.
"Over a decade ago, the US began sharing some information with its Salvadoran counterparts about the people that it was deporting to El Salvador. However, there were very few economic opportunities or programs to address the needs of the deportees," Mike Allison, a political science professor at the University of Scranton, told Business Insider.
 
"There is a bit more emphasis on speaking with deportees today, but there is limited assistance for those deported. There are no jobs," Allison said. "Many of those deported simply want to return to the US where they might have lived for several years or where their family lives. While they might stay in El Salvador to reconnect with friends and family, many of them try to return to the US rather quickly."
 


Such vulnerable people would not only tax the resources of governments in Latin America, particularly in Central America. (Nearly one thirdof immigrants in the US in 2015 were from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala.)
 
These people would also fall prey to criminal groups — transnational gangs like Barrio 18 or MS-13 — that have turned northern Central America and parts of Mexico into war zones.
This wouldn't be the first time such a dynamic had taken shape.
In the 1990s, after the end of the civil wars in Central America — particularly the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — US policy changed to expand the number of immigrants subject to deportation and made it harder for them to get relief from deportation.


The consequence of deporting many immigrants — a number of whom were already criminals — to countries emerging from a period of war with weak law enforcement and little economic development was the growth of groups like Barrio 18 and MS-13, both of which have their origins among immigrants in California who were deported.
 
"Minor street gangs existed during the late 1980s and 1990s in El Salvador. From what I understand, they were just nuisances or kids messing around," Allison said. "However, the deportations of thousands of young men during the 1990s did transform these gangs into more violent, sophisticated groups."
"Honduran and Guatemalan gangs were aided by deportations as well as the spread of gang influence from El Salvador," Allison added, noting that a variety of factors, including weak state institutions, lack of opportunities, and repressive policing strategies, fed a cycle of violence that continues in northern Central America now.
 
"So, in a way, deportations were extremely important to the emergence and expansion of criminal groups like the MS-13 and Barrio 18," Allison told Business Insider

The hardline strategy Trump has proposed, unaccompanied by an effort to address the situation in Central America, would do little to improve and likely only worsen the conditions there.
Nor would such a strategy keep people from fleeing those conditions, Maureen Meyer, senior associate for Mexico and migrant rights at WOLA,told Vice.
"If you have people who are willing to cross the U.S. border and the desert at the risk of dying, the thought of trying to deter people doesn’t really fit with reality," she said.


A mass deportation of millions like Trump says he'll undertake would furnish Latin American criminal groups with more people to recruit, extort, or abuse.
These criminal groups and gangs already have a presence in the US. (Some, like MS-13, are believed to act as retail level distribution on US streets for drug traffickers like Mexico's Sinaloa cartel.) They may use recent deportees, convicted criminals or not, to augment their links to communities in the US.
Trump's intention to send people back to Central America or Mexico would give rise to "a cause-and-effect situation, where it's going to increase violence," Vigil, author of of "Metal Coffins:The Blood Alliance Cartel," told Business Insider.
"And these individuals, coming from the United States, already have a base here," Vigil added. "They already know individuals here that they can use to funnel drugs ... thereby increasing the amount of drugs coming into the United States, the amount of violence coming into the United States."



The deportation scheme Trump has promised to pursue would be logistically difficult to carry out, given the immense number of people to be rounded up.
And given the time it takes for cases to get through US immigration courts — some states have average wait times of over 1,000 days— it's unlikely that these removals would move at the pace Trump seems to suggest.
But given the conditions in the areas many of these people will be returned to, as well as the limited resources they will have to support themselves and that local authorities will have to deal with them, such a scheme promises to only reproduce the problem it claims to address.
"Trump, in essence, will deport 2 or 3 million individuals, and probably we will get 5 or 6 million undocumented immigrants coming into the United States," Vigil said.
"So it's a strategy that has not been well laid out ... and all it's going to do is cause even more issues than we currently have in the United States."

Written by Christopher Woody

Christopher is a historian,writer,reporter and editor