The year was 1954 when 25-year old Martin Luther King Jr became a pastor in the Dexter Baptist Church. By 1955, a now 26-year old King organised the Montgomery bus boycott in protest of the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.
As a 32-year-old, he had started the non-violent Albany movement against all forms of racial segregation in Albany Georgia. As a 34-year-old, he had also started the Birmingham campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice where he was jailed, during which he wrote the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
It was at this same age that King organised the epic March on Washington where the now renowned “I Have a Dream” speech was made.
At 35, his agitations had led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended racial segregation and turning 36, he had achieved the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which ended disenfranchisement of black people in the United States and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that improved the living condition for poor people. King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968. He was a mere 39 years, 79 days old.
The difference between the youth at the time and the youth of today is their level of understanding. King was able to achieve so much because he understood the problems facing his community and had the intellect to advocate strategic solutions to them.
The same cannot be said of the current crop of youths in the world (a demography to which I belong). Our intellect has been so much impugned by social media that we neither have time nor interest to lend ourselves to critical thinking. We are oft obsessed with such inanities as our number of followers on social media or the number of likes our posts garnered.
We care not for consecution before the execution of our most flighty of ideas. We don’t think, we just do and that often leaves us lost in the wilderness. Things around us happen so fast, too fast for us to mentally catch up. Before checking the posts of our friends and millions of funny characters with an influence (influencers) across all social media platforms, 24 hours of our day have been exhausted and it’s a constant vicious cycle that shows no sign of abating.
A case in point was the #EndSARS protests (a notorious unit in the Nigeria police, Special Anti-Robbery Squad) in 2020. Yes, police brutality is real, but if we the youth who are mostly on the receiving end of this do not understand the origin of the problems, we will never be able to solve it. The youth gathered across the country for almost three weeks, bringing the economy of the nation to a standstill and we still intended to continue the protests in perpetuity without making any smart demands of the government.
#EndSARS, end bad government, end police brutality, these are not smart demands. They neither identified the cause of the problem, nor advocate a lasting solution to it. Our favourite celebrities joined us in the protests as a rite of passage. Nobody thought to make a proposal to the legislators, the mantra was “no leader.’’ I guess throwing tantrums about a problem transcends solving it.
The youth came out on February 25, 2023 to vote their anger. They blame the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress and the governor of Lagos for #EndSARS and everything that occurred. This was due to the fact that they failed to realise the infiltration of the rightful protests by political actors who saw their valid grouse as an opportunity to exploit.
If the modern-day Nigerian youth were wiser, they would have known that the Sanwo-Olu who could not even get a constable to tell him the number of cops he brought to Magodo, let alone order them to stop tormenting the Magodo residents had no power over the police and cannot “EndSARS.”
They would have partnered with the governor to demand an end to the current police structure and the constitution of a state police which would have led to the people being in control of their police. Alas, they foundered in this respect.
When soldiers were sent to the youth at the Lekki Toll Gate, they would have known that no civilian, be it Jagaban in private life or Sanwo-Olu in public office could give such a command. They would have known what direction to point their accusing fingers. The Nigerian youths, infested by the social media bandwagon, take as truth whatever is being bandied by political grifters on social media.
This is why I advocate the incoming administration to institute the Social Media Reform Act and incorporate critical thinking classes in our educational curriculum, from SS1 to SS3 and the first year of every higher institution. They will help to halt the trend of dumbing down of my generation and help imbue the basic tenets of analytical thinking in the mind of the average Nigerian youth.
- Marindoti Oludare is a US-based Nigerian medical doctor
