Nigeria’s bulging youth population is failing to move the needle of social and political change in Africa’s biggest democracy experiment given its scanty representation in government with 60 years as the average age of cabinet members.
Young Nigerians had participated in the 2015 general elections in a variety of ways, including as voters, observers and polling officers, but relatively few youths had taken up leadership positions in the new government.
The National Bureau of Statistics defines a youth as anyone between the ages of 15 and 34. This age bracket constitutes almost 50 percent of Nigerians active in the labour market. For every Nigerian 65 years old and above, there are 16 Nigerians 40 years old and below.
But young Nigerians are failing to influence the emergence of governance structures that will work for a future in which they could, within reason, be better off.
This has been attributed to the structure of Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy, where wealth creation has in the last three decades been largely a function of access to oil and gas mining and production licences and the youths have been shut out of this space with negative effect on the development of democracy in Nigeria.
“Nigeria is a licence-driven economy. Mention any Nigerian billionaires and I will show you the licence behind their wealth. Those in government use these licences to settle their friends, who are usually not young people,” Seth Akutson, former professor of entrepreneurship economics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, said.
Investors and governance experts have pointed to the fact that growing economic inequality is becoming a fundamental risk to democracy and to economies around the world as more people feel government rules “rigged” in favour of the rich leave them with few options.
“Democracy needs freedom to thrive and freedom is only for people who own property. Not many Nigerian youths can afford to own property and this affects their ability to command influence and bring about political change,” said Promise Ejiorfor, a post-graduate student of diplomacy and international relations at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Globally, half of the world’s wealth is now held by just 1 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2015 report by Credit Suisse, a financial services company.
Another reason for the limited youth involvement in defining Nigeria’s political landscape has been the lack of political party structures defined by a clear philosophy. Political parties in this sense lack structures and revolve around wealthy individuals who call the shots and consciously work against building party systems that are robust.
Youth participation here is sporadic and aligns with the bidding of the strongman of the party, who is usually the wealthiest too. The youth serve as political thugs. This puts youth affairs on the backburner.
“Even though the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) says it has reached agreement with the Federal Government, the universities have not resumed academic work. The UTME will soon start and Nigerian universities still lack requisite facilities. We do not count,” said 18-year-old Precious Offor, a Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination candidate.
Since the 1960s, dependency ratio in Africa’s most populous nation has been worsening while peers have continuously reduced this ratio in their population.
Dependency ratio describes how much pressure an economy faces in supporting its non-productive population of zero to 15, then 65 and above. The higher the ratio, the greater burden carried by working-age people.
Nigeria’s dependency ratio in 1960 was 79.96 percent, according to the World Bank. It reached a high of 91.76 percent in 1990 but fell to 87.77 percent in 2017. South Africa has moved from 82.24 percent in 1960 to 52.28 percent in 2017. Kenya leapfrogged from 100.47 percent in 1960 to 75.91 percent in 2017.
Widening dependency ratio for a youthful population such as Nigeria’s means youth unemployment is on the rise. Of Nigeria’s 90 million people in active labour force, 44 million are youths, according the National Bureau of Statistics.
However, only 19.73 million of these, that is, 45 percent, are in full-time employment. Full-time employment means 40 hours of work per week. The other 55 percent of youths in the active labour force struggle to survive and 11.36 million youths, about 26 percent, work anywhere between 20 hours to 39 hours in a week or less than eight hours a day. Another 6 million (14 percent) of youths in the active labour force work less than 20 hours a day, while 7 million youths, representing 16 percent of the active labour force, are sitting at home doing nothing, despite the fact that they are actively searching for job.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
