Alex Agbo

While the heading may seem a solution to social vices among the youths, we may have other factor responsible for the escalating consequences of youth idleness and restiveness.

The devil, they say, finds works for idle minds.

The work becomes potent when the idle mind is hungry. As the saying goes, a hungry man is an angry man. Economics rank food as the first basic need of man. Many of our people are hungry. On the streets of Nigeria are hungry out of school children. They become willing tools for vile people across the country to deploy in unleashing violence on citizens. Below is a brief list of other causes of youth restiveness in Nigeria.

Nigeria has a historical culture of violence. From schools to society, the behavior of the average Nigerian is to deploy violence to achieve any objective.

Poverty is another major cause of violence. According to worldpovertyclock.com, Nigeria took over from India as the world’s poverty capital. A desperately poor people packed in squalid conditions would not hesitate to use violence as a means of fighting out of their poverty.

The rise in cultism and urban gangs, as well as other shades of insecurity in Nigeria has destroyed means of livelihood. Everyday people take flight from one community to the other at the break of violence. It is now amazing that these things are becoming normalized in Nigeria.

Cheer opulence versus hard work. The fact that politics has become the quickest route to not only financial stability but opulence of questionable dimensions cause the young hardworking people to wonder if they were doing the right thing. They yield themselves to political machinations in order to quickly ‘arrive’.

Religious institutions are also a part of the problem. With prosperity messages all over as the demonstration of God’s blessings, no one needs to know how you are making money. Just make it and show that you are ‘blessed’.

Solutions
According to Einstein, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness we were in when we created them.
Thus, we need to regenerate our thinking to a solution driven thought pattern.
For want of time, I’d dwell on the economic solutions.

The private sector must dust itself from being an appendage of the government and begin to think of real situations that would cause a paradigm shift.

Emphasis must begin to shift from clerical education to critical thinking.

We must also move away from making employment a function of resume, cover letters and all the show. Let us begin to make the handiwork matter.

The private sector will prove itself as serious when it begins to think of investing on the real sector of the economy.

The government should discontinue its sleepy approach to security employment issues.

Alex Agbo writes from Lagos

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