No one develops ideas in a vacuum.
My contention on Einstein and Newton is that they dont belong to the understanding that youth necessarily need the direct guidance of older people.
Such guidance is at times best projected through the availability of knowledge which others can select and adapt as necessary, such selection and adaptation being the core of the creative maturity that makes direct guidance unnecessary in some situations and in some cases, even a hindrance.
Different people thrive through different learning styles, such styles possibly undergoing change at different points of their lives.
Looking back, I am convinced I had outgrown the 'teacher-directing-the-student' model of learning by the time I deeply engaged with my family's rich library after leaving secondary school at 16.
Through its range of expositions of religious and secular ideas, that library stimulated me into developing cognitive habits integrating the intellectual and the contemplative in ranging across the breadth of human knowledge, eventually enabling the
I am developing an educational model arising from navigating this experience. Its first summation is an essay "Adapting Yoruba Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice" written for the Yoruba Studies Review under the inspirational urging of Adeshina Afolayan, who, with Toyin Falola, was also instrumental to my contributing an essay on philosophical perspectives on African artistic creativity to the Palgrave
These essays are also conjunctive with the the correlationn of autobiographical and larger cognitive orientations represented by my "Roots, Routes and Roofs : Images of Dynamic Unity at the Convergence of Personal and Cosmic History: Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader".
My primary epistemic strategy across all my cognitive endeavours and as depicted in the Yoruba philosophy essay is a correlation betweenWestern magical theorist Dion Fortune's theory of perception and Yoruba and Igbo Afa theories of perception
My
My
My primary reference for Fortune's thought is her perspective on nature centred perception in The Training and Work of an Initiate, and secondarily her account of levels of perception in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, her theory of symbol aided perception in
These texts are correlative, in
No one develops ideas in a vacuum.
My contention on Einstein and Newton is that they dont belong to the understanding that youth necessarily need the direct guidance of older people.
Such guidance is at times best projected through the availability of knowledge which others can select and adapt as necessary, such selection and adaptation
being the core of the creative maturity that makes direct guidance unnecessary in some situations and in some cases, even a hindrance.
Different people thrive through different learning styles, such styles possibly undergoing change at different points of their lives.
Looking back, I am convinced I had outgrown the 'teacher-directing-the-
student' model of learning by the time I deeply engaged with my family's rich library after leaving secondary school at 16. Through its range of expositions of religious and secular ideas, that library stimulated me into developing cognitive habits integrating the intellectual and the contemplative in ranging across the breadth of human knowledge, eventually enabling the integration what I gain from the publicly available educational system and from my wholly self directed education.
I am developing an educational model arising from
navigatingthis experience. Its first summation is an essay "Adapting Yoruba Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice" written for the Yoruba Studies Review under the inspirational urging of Adeshina Afolayan, who, with Toyin Falola, was also instrumental to my contributing an essay on philosophical perspectiveson African artistic creativity to the Palgrave handbook of African Philosophy, aspects which essay I take further in the piece on Yoruba philosophy and education.These essays are also conjunctive with the the correlation of autobiographical and larger cognitive orientationsRoots, Routes and Roofs : Images of Dynamic Unity at the Convergence of Personal and Cosmic History: Engaging the Toyin Falolarepresented by my " Reader".My primary epistemic strategy across all my cognitive endeavors and as depicted in the Yoruba philosophy essay isa correlation betweenWestern magical theorist Dion Fortune's theory of perception andYoruba and Igbo Afa theoriesof perception in terms of applied to thecultivation of the full range of human cognitive capacity, from conventional to unconventional forms of knowing, in the quest for the essences of phenomenaatthe speculative intersectionof time and eternity.
My primary sources for Yoruba epistemology areBabatunde Lawal's"Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art" and Rowland Abiodun's" The State of African Arts Studies: An African Perspective", later integrated into his Yoruba Art and Language :Seeking the African in African Art.My primary source for Igbo Afa epistemology is John Annenechukwu Umeh's After God is Dibia : Igbo Divination, Cosmology and Sacred Science in Nigeria.My primary reference for Fortune's thought is her perspective on nature centred perception in The Training and Work of an Initiate, and secondarily her account of levels of perception in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, her theory of symbol aided perception in The Mystical Qabalah and her description of materially grounded as different from abstract mystical perception in Applied Magic.These texts are correlative, in between them, subsuming the complete range of cognitive possibilitiesdeveloped in various civilizations, from the conventional to the unconventional, from the mainstream to the fringe or marginalized, from sensory perception to extra-sensory perception and mystical insight, with the Yoruba/Igbo theoretical continuum summing up these ideas of cognitive possibility, all of which I have explored and experienced, even if, as with mystical perception, in terms of an inconclusive initial expansion of consciousness.
...On 29 April 2018 at 23:47, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:The way you and Toy in are viewing the larger picture is far from the way anti imperialist forces view it. What caused the Cold War? The balance of terror of two global imperialists. One of them unravelled leading to a a seeming unipolar world order which elements in the unravelled system led by Putin want to checkmated.
The Islamic states and their systems are pawns in this chess game. The question is not whether change is not desirable but atvwhat pace and at whosevecpense. The pace of change even in thevWest betwern UK and the US is not identical and the substance of change isn't always identical. How much more radically different societies. This was why I brought in Norbert Okoye and the youths with rose tinted glasses. The Iron Curtain fell ultimately because that Soviet youths fell press of American television propaganda. Their elders could not hold them in check because they could not feature anything closer because the value system censored the rosebtintts which American propaganda deliberately promoted to catch the unwary both internally (American Youths) and global youths.
I once watched a documentary on a Russian town where citizens lamentedvthat one generation after the fall of the Curtain their conditionschad worsened and had they known this would be their lot they would have left the status quo in tact.
American propaganda would not be showing the lot of Blacks in Katrina to black and Arab nations but Hollywood scenes as if thisbrepresented the lot of the average Americans don't hear hapless foreign youths want the American experience in their countries overnight. Many Arab refugees who have never set foot for a day in America go aboutthecstreets of London nauaeatingly speaking with adopted American accents!
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>Date: 29/04/2018 15:32 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
The west doesn't control the world. There is autonomy and agency, and sometimes young people embody it. The arab spring was one of the most daring and brave moments of our times, and in the long run, the people in arab lands will overcome dictatorships. Youth lead revolutionary change. And we should celebrate their courage. I agree with your take on this toyin; revolutions aren't perfect, but in the long run dictatorships are unstable and courageous people get tired of it and stand up.
Sometimes, too, the price is too high. There is no outcome in Syria now that is worth the destruction that has been caused by the unbelievably vicious assad, his Russian supporters, the isis opponents, and any of the allies who bombed innocent people.
My own support would go to those who peacefully for a year stood up to assad, while he turned to weapons to put them down. They represented an ideal to me.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/peo
ple/faculty/kenneth-harrow/ From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com > on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Sunday 29 April 2018 at 06:48
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
Was it the West who orchestrated the demands for democratic reform in the various Arab nations?
mubarak would have remained through massacre but his own army refused to obey his directives agst protesters.
Gadafi thought the other Arab leaders who had stepped down in the face of demands for democratic change were fools, so he chose what his son declared in a news interview at the beginning of the conflict that 'they would live and die in Libya' as if Libya is their family's property.
Gaddafi was on his way to committing a massacre in the last remaining rebel stronghold, so the US, which had held aloof throughout, moved in.
i learnt of Gaddaffi from my father, when Gadaffi and Arafat were still fresh faces in the mideast, yet he wanted to stay there forever.
same with the character in Damascus who prefers his country made into a wasteland to conducting honest elections.
toyin
On 28 April 2018 at 22:02, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
I made the destabilization inference from your citation of Arab Spring which could have been quelled by the sitting govt had the West not seized the opportunity to invade. That is why Russia pre-empted such stratagem by the West by supporting Assad against the rebels
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 28/04/2018 21:58 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
We disagree fully.
I never suggested or stated the West uses youth to destabilize govts.
The claim that ' some cultures unlike Nigeria people were alert to tap into youthful potentials and guide them to maturity and commercial success' is not the same as declaring that 'We know most youths the world over would instinctively rather loaf about rather than engage in serious work' and 'their Nigerian counterparts who resort to kidnappings robberies etc to fill their idle time'.
A good no of the people selling wares in traffic in Nigeria are Nigerian youth.
thanks
toyin
On 28 April 2018 at 19:59, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Let me add to what I said earlier when I read just the two first paragraphs of your rejoinder:
We do not disagree much if you again note my emphasis on instinctively. All I found in your long piece include the factoif the West using youth unrest to destabilize govts and your confirmation of the fact that in some cultures unlike Nigeria people were alert to tap into youthful potentials and guide them to maturity and commercial success.
Of all the attacks on Buhari who made the claim you are reacting against which I also critiqued no attack is more deadly to him than the fact that he chose to make the claim in an international arena thus inadvertently shooting himself in the foot by admitting that his govt has failed in the search for ideas to galvanise the youths to economically productive activities to benefit the state.
.I have a few ideas of my own if I were part of government but I'm not interested in govt jobs.
O. Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 27/04/2018 20:24 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroup
s.com >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (toyin.adepoju@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
In my summation on Nigerian youth I praised Charles Ogbu. My views still hold but as of today I see him as becoming pro-establishment, sadly.
toyin
On 27 April 2018 at 15:06, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
CORRECTION
1st paragraph
'I have lived with young people in Nigeria and England, taught young people at secondary and university levels in Nigeria and taught pre-university young people in England
and associated with undergraduate and postgraduate youth in England.
'
toyin
On 27 April 2018 at 14:59, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
I have lived with young people in Nigeria and England, taught young people at secondary and university levels in Nigeria and taught pre-university young people in England
and associated undergraduate and postgraduate youth in England.
I have associated with friends and relatives who raise young people in Africa, Europe and North America,
I have raised young people in Nigeria and England,
as well as recall my own youth and that of my colleagues in Nigeria, in comparison with that of youth across the world in different periods of world history, and therefore conclude that statement by Olayinka Agbetuyi that "We know most youths the world over would instinctively rather loaf about rather than engage in serious work" has no fact in it.
In what ways have youth, people between childhood and 30, with 30-40 being an elastic definition of maturity that is neither youthful nor middle aged, in Nigeria and across the world, defined the environments they live in?
The Creative Force of Nigerian Youth
The vigorous social media debates in the run up to the 2015 Nigerian elections were largely defined by youth, with the opposition APC's quicker grasp of the value of media, generally, and social media, in particular, in creating awareness well before and during elections, being central to the mobilizing of votes in the South, the critical battleground. The social media political landscape was defined by individuals and groups represented by youth and those perhaps slightly older.
Representative of Facebook groups which galvanized support against the incumbent government by mobilising youth was Ibezim Ohaeri's Spaces for Change, describing itself as created to galvanize youth participation in Nigerian politics, a group whose moderators employed the demand for creative change particularly appealing to youth, in cultivating discontent with then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan's PDP, laying fertile ideological ground which the APC built upon, ironically, by using Muhammadu Buhari, an octogenarian, who, on becoming President, turned out to be the very antithesis of the desire for creative change.
The betrayal of the trust and aspirations of those millions of youth and other Nigerians who were misled by APC propaganda to believe that Buhari and the APC generally were little more than soldiers of fortune is demonstrative of the strategic failure of the elders represented by the Nigerian political class. They have little to offer anyone, since their existence is largely defined by the ethos of "make we chop", Nigerian pidgin for "let us eat ( feeding greedily upon the national patrimony).
Such youth or near youth as Uzor Kalu and Ena Ofugara on Facebook did a far better job of promoting and highlighting the politics and economics of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and his government than GEJ's cabinet members charged with that responsibility, and even more than Femi Fani Kayode, the fearlessly combative political veteran, solid as FFK's contributions are, he being better, however, perhaps as a political polemicist and debater than as an information disseminator, organiser and projector as Kalu, Ofugara and others like them on social media were superb at, along with being good debaters.
As of today, one of the most trenchant critics of the Nigerian government, a superb and fearless writer, is Charles Ogbu on Facebook, who began his political writing career before he entered into the university where he is now either in his first or second year, the quality of his verbal constructions, the force of his ideations, the consistency of his presentations at a high level of analytical, expressive and information quality, and the large volume of readers he has galvanized thereby, leading to his being invited to write a column for the Guardian in Nigeria, long a leading and once the premier Nigerian news organ, a stage of professional development which Reuben Abati, another key figure in Nigerian political and general journalism reached only years after a PhD and an academic job at Ogun State University, from where he sent what I believe were unsolicited articles to the Guardian as a member of a group that called itself the OSU Collective, leading eventually to his appointment by the Guardian. In addition to his job as a Guardian columnist, Charles Ogbu has also become an invited contributor to BBC Nigeria on Nigerian politics and society.
You need to frequent Facebook and other news and social media to observe the creative force of Nigerian youth.
As Buhari and his Hausa-Fulani supremacists lead a terrorist warfare across the nation, most of the so called elders have maintained silence, until the relatively recent outcries of Wole Soyinka and Olusegun Obasanjo, two of the elders who led us into this mess in the first place.
The Islamic leadership, in its automatic alignment with policies perceived as benefitting Nigerian Muslims, such as the terrorist warfare being orchestrated against Nigeria by right-wing Hausa-Fulani Muslim elite principally exemplified by the Miyetti Allah pressure group led by elite Fulani, the most prominent of whom are the Emir of Kano and the Sultan of Sokoto, is either predictably silent, or the Sultan of Sokoto ocassionally makes unconvincing self-serving statements or the Emir of Kano makes declarations suggesting the right wing Fulani terrorists are pursuing a just ethnic war. The church has been largely silent, until the recent cries of Bishop Oyedepo, the heat for raising the outcry against the terrorist menace being borne by a much younger pastor, Apostle Suleiman, even as most church leaders keep their mouths shut.
What have the older generation generally bequeathed Nigerian youth? Is the culture of corruption, of poor resource management, of unpatriotism, of self serving ethnicism, of cowardice before power, of self-serving attitudes to the national polity, these being qualities defining what is negative about Nigeria, are they not the creation of Nigerian elders? People who cannot invest in the technologies one reads again and again as created by Nigerian youth while the moneyed elders prefer mundane, low risk investments that have no transformative impact on the Nigeria economy and Nigeria generally, investments centred in survival rather than transformation?
The Catalytic Power of Youth in the Arab World, China and the West
Who initiated and led the Arab Spring using social media technologies which older people have been slow to adopt? The Arab youth. Coming shortly after a major US news organ ran a comprehensive article describing the Arab youth as caught in the stranglehold of gerontocratic traditions, the action of one Tunisian youth, Muhammed Buazzizi, sparked a conflagration across the Arab world, inspiring demands for democratic reform and leading to regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and still playing out in the conflagration in Syria, the Libyan and the Syrian chaos due to old seated despots insisting on holding on to power when their people demanded democratic reforms, with Saudi Arabia sustaining its monarchical system by bribing its citizenry with large sums of money when people there aspired to demonstrations inspired by the Arab Spring, thereby forestalling demands for change of the traditional systems run by the old guard in Saudi Arabia.
Who led the historic Tienanmen square demonstration for democratic reforms in a country stepped in many decades of authoritarian control that have gained a stranglehold on the minds of many, a demonstration eventually brutally crushed by the Chinese government? Chinese youth.
The US dominance of the global economy and its command of the human imagination worldwide is led by its youth. The leading companies in today's world are created by US youth, those companies which define how business is done, creating transformative effects in how people live globally, the companies that created the Information Age, the latest stage in human productivity after the Industrial Age, a new orientation to existence so pervasive it has penetrated metaphysics as represented by the currency of the idea that information rather than matter or energy is the underlying unit of reality, as demonstrated by Paul Davies edited Information and the Nature of Reality.
These companies reshaping the world include Bill Gates' Microsoft, the global dominance of whose Windows operating system is central to how information is managed across the world; the world leader in the search of the Information Superhighway, the largest conglomeration of information in the world, the Internet, the heart of the digital universe representing a new configuration of reality, a company that is now also a multifarious investment conglomerate, expanding even into space exploration, Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Google; the best known pioneer in such online search engines, now a broad ranging information provider, Jerry Yang and David Filo's Yahoo; the largest gathering of people outside physical space and the greatest demonstration of international connectivity across social boundaries in any form of space, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook; the first and perhaps still the only private company to send a payload into space, the company created and launching the most powerful rocket ever sent into space and the first and likely still the only private company to send payload into space, a co,pany that is also a pioneer in electric cars, Elon Musk's Space X, are all creations of youth, of people who began these companies either in their early 20s in the 2nd year of their time at university, like Gates and Zuckerberg at Harvard, and Musk at Stanford, or slightly older, like Page, Brin, Yang and Filo in their PhDs at Stanford, from which they dropped out to build their companies.
Silicon Valley, the most successful industrial hub in the world, was created close to Stanford with the active facilitation of the then Stanford President in order to create a catalytic environment for the young people that would congregate at the university and the effects of that proximity are reshaping the world.
We could go on into examining the age at which Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the leading online merchant, the ages at which their founders created the pioneering online sales and payment systems, Ebay, Paypal, among others, and come to the same conclusion-youth is a prime time for creativity and daring and those who take advantage of that period of their lives often set the agenda for humanity's future.
This fact is also demonstrated in the sciences by such figures as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, two of the greatest thinkers in history, both of whom reached their foundational discoveries either in their 20s, as with Einstein's epochal 1905 papers in his 20s, after his PhD, that established the revolutionary understanding of the equivalence of matter and energy and of time and space demonstrated by his Theory of Relativity and Newton's development of a new field of mathematics, calculus, and his foundational work leading to his later development of the theory of gravity while an undergraduate at Cambridge, along with such founders of modern mathematics as Evariste Galois who did their defining work in their 20s. The site "10 Notable Mathematicians Who Died Young" gives examples of great mathematics being done, as with Niels Abel, even in the teenage years of these mathematicians,
In fact, claiming that most mathematicians do their best work before 40, the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics, is awarded only to mathematicians below 40. A particular scholarship at University College London once requested that referees for PhD candidates above 30 should state "why the candidate is coming so late to research". I understand the average age of a PhD graduate in the US, perhaps the most globally prominent centre of higher education, is in the 20s age range.
Some of the most powerful international conferences I attended in Cambridge, a global centre of higher education, were organised by young postgraduate students such as the Memory and Amnesia conference which I discuss at that link.
Most great achievers demonstrate their achievements in their youth or begin the journey to achievement in youth, necessarily so, on account of both the dynamism of youth and the gestation periods of human creativity. Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Abiola Irele, among other great Nigerian writers and scholars, demonstrated their defining achievements in their youth as well as laying foundations for other achievements beyond youth, as with Soyinka. The Zaria Rebels, the creators of modern Nigerian art, were undergraduates at the University of Zaria, not established artists, with Bruce Onabrapkeya, one of those artists, building into his 80s as of present, the synthesis of African cultures and broader variety of technical forms that this school established.
In recognition of the strategic value of youth, one of the founders of the online payment system PayPal, serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel has created the Thiel Fellowship, a financial award and network system meant to encourage youth to either leave school or put it on hold , while they explore new initiatives, rather than feeding on old ideas often represented by schooling. The fellowship website puts its mission provocatively:
"The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.
A Different Path for Everyone
College can be good for learning about what's been done before, but it can also discourage you from doing something new. Each of our fellows charts a unique course; together they have proven that young people can succeed by thinking for themselves instead of competing on old career tracks.
Freedom to Get Stuff Done
Pursue ideas that matter instead of mandatory tests [ tests that often define schooling] . Take on big risks instead of big debt [debts incurred to put oneself through school as is often done in the US] . How you spend your two years in the Fellowship is up to you — we're here to help, but we won't get in the way.
Our Network is Yours
The hardest thing about being a young entrepreneur is that you haven't met everyone you'll need to know to make your venture succeed. We can help connect you — to investors, partners, prospective customers — in Silicon Valley and beyond".
Coming closer home is the example of my nephew Daniel Pogoson, who at 9 years of age made a video expounding the preface of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, one of the most influential and challenging books in Western thought, and at the same period made another conjuncting the philosopher's life and the books' preface with his own interpretation of that preface, also going on in the same period to make other videos examining relationships between Heidegerrean thought and other disciplines, such as science fiction along with exploring other philosophical concepts, such as the nature of time, in other videos in his YouTube channel.
The notion that youth is essentially reckless and elders' relationship to youth should primarily be as guides rather than possibly as a generation older people can learn from and be guided by just as youth can learn from and be guided by older people is as an echo of unrealistic gerontocratic attitudes dominant in traditional, pre-modern societies, such as in classical Africa, where such expressions as "what an adult sees lying down a child cannot see from the top of a tree" and "A child may have as many clothes as their parent but not as many rags", were often used bolster uncritical reliance on the past rather than a creative engagement with it, contributing, as Basil Davidson argues in one of his books, in slow growth that facilitated the colonization of Africa.
thanks
toyin
On 24 April 2018 at 10:24, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
The key word here is 'instictively' If you have lived with young people anywhere in the world, taught young people anywhere in the world. Associated with friends and relatives who raise young people anywhere in the world then you will agree that this statement cannot but be true.
The challenge for guardians of the young is to transform this attitude to positive values and get the constructive engagement visible all around us
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 24/04/2018 09:58 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroup
s.com >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
The following is not true-
'We know most youths the world over would instinctively rather loaf about rather than engage in serious work'
How did you come to this kind of conclusion about Nigeria or anywhere in the world?
So, this majority of lazy youth magically metamorphose into serious adults once they cross a particular age?
Are these not the same Nigeria youth struggling through the rugged difficulties of Nigeria, its challenged educational system and low quality living conditions?
God have mercy.
toyin
On 23 April 2018 at 23:45, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
We know Buhari got it wrong. We know most youths the world over would instinctively rather loaf about rather than engage in serious work. We know it is the business of the older adults to fashion sustainable programmes to bridge the gap between youthful consciousness and adulthood.
That was why the current educational prototype was developed in ancient India and circulated globally via successive colonialists.
President Buhari ought to be asking his political handlers how to galvanised Nigerian youths potentials through appropriate programmes rather than tacitly admitting failure of governance in this regard. It is not too late. Government can make such programme part of the cornerstone of its bid for re-election if it is serious of being judged on accountability.
Rather than portray his govt as being in office but not in power to effect lasting changes PMB can take the re election bid of his party more seriously whether or not he will be the front man through judicious use of words by himself and his lieutenants
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Gbemi Tijani <tijanigbemi@gmail.com>
Date: 23/04/2018 23:25 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
Chief Obafemi AWOLOWO still remained the most serious-minded statesmanship Nigeria has ever produced.Poems for him when he passed on in 1987. I wrote threnody as well as a dirge variegated enough & published by Nigerian Herald,Nigerian Tribune & Daily Sketch tabloids,Almost all his political programmes of his party were visionary rather rather grandiose ambition.
gbemi tijani
On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 1:22 PM, Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
A more independent analyst would realize that a pathetic attempt to rationalize Buhari's patently stupid description of Nigeria's youth as lazy moochers would fall flat and expose the pedestrian sophistry with which they engage in pro-regime propaganda.
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 23, 2018, at 2:57 PM, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:This is the very kind of provocative exchanges we don't need!
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com>
Date: 23/04/2018 20:44 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
A more broad-minded reader would appraise the article in its totality.
Anthony Akinola
On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 6:03 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
A very lame attempt to defend an indefensibly dumb statement by President Buhari in response to a totally unrelated question about investment opportunities in Nigeria's Northeast. The truth is, Buhari is in the habit of speaking ill of his own country and his compatriots whenever he's in the company of white people in foreign lands. He once affirmed in London the negative stereotype of Nigerians being scammers by saying that Nigerians' penchant for scams had made them unwelcome in Western countries and that Western prisons were teeming with Nigerian fraudsters, two claims of debatable empirical veracity, not to mention of profoundly negative consequence for a country he was elected to promote and develop.
On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 11:31 AM, Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com> wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 4:55 PM
Subject: YOUTHS OF ANY NATION COULD BE LAZY
To: Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com>
OF COURSE,YOUTHS COULD BE LAZY
By Anthony Akinola
Even in sophisticated discussions, it is not unusual to hear the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo being described as a statesman rather than a politician. In the context of such discussions, the statesman is that individual who is genuinely concerned about the present and future of society while the politician could be that individual who employs manipulative and devious tactics in the pursuit of selfish goals. Winning an election becomes an end, rather than a means to a purposeful end, for the manipulative politician.
Awolowo was once welcomed into the city of Owerri in the South-Eastern region by supporters who trooped out in large numbers, drumming and dancing. Most politicians would easily have joined the crowd in dancing, not Awolowo!. He would appear to have seeing the whole atmosphere as disturbing him from delivering the important message he had brought to them. In the video recording of the campaign trip to this important city, one could hear an uncomfortable Awolowo asking drummers to calm down and listen to what he had to say.
In the First Republic when all the political parties were regional, southern politicians eyeing the prime ministerial position had to campaign vigorously in the north to have a realistic chance. The major party in that region, the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), was in an advantageous position because the north was allocated 50 percent of electoral seats.. Chief Obafemi Awolowo campaigned vigorously in the region,albeit unsuccessfully, confronting those who cared to listen to him with the realities of the educational and social imbalance between their region and the south. His opponents would only manipulate his messages of change, portraying him as being disrespectful to northerners and their values. Awolowo never realised his overall political objective of transforming the Nigerian nation, not least because he was deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented by his rivals and detractors..
The honesty which Awolowo had shown in his appraisal of the north was what guided his transformation of the South- Western region to a comparatively advanced entity. His party's policy of free education ensured no one was left behind because of the poverty of one's parents Most people realised they could not all be absorbed in the Civil Service and other sophisticated employments, quite a number were happy to be able to cater for themselves and their families in the agricultural sector. There were quite a number of farm institutes and farm settlements established under the leadership of Awolowo such that unemployment and availability of food were not serious issues. .
The emphasis on Obafemi Awolowo in this essay is to suggest to our contemporary leaders that well-thought out policies are what we require to bail out the youths of our society from the laziness that could easily be their tag. The spectre of young men and women roaming the streets, begging for food and money,sadly portrays a picture of laziness on the part of our youths. If one must be brutally honest, this ugly spectre is more visible in the north where President Muhammadu Buhari hails from and might have influenced his description of some of our youths as lazy individuals who often look for freebies Our.politicians, rather than confront the issues of poverty, would rather take the opportunistic approach that portrays them as philanthropists.
Why sponsor mass marriages when you could have built factories so that young men and women can be engaged in employments and marry themselves in dignity? North and South, one reads about politicians and their so-called empowerment of the youth. All they ever do is give these impressionable youths inferior mobile phones and re-charge cards and their poverty remains with them. Meanwhile, the politicians cart away millions of naira as monthly allowances for their privileged deceits.There is hardly any state of the federation where you can point to what has been done by elected politicians to create jobs for the thousands of young men and women that leave our universities annually with certificates of assorted qualities.
Not unexpectedly, the gaffe by Buhari-talking of the laziness of our youths in a global forum-has become the subject of opportunistic discussions and recriminations by rival politicians. Of course, youths could be lazy; most did not like going to the farm when we were young but we had to go because our parents had farms.There is universality in laziness because in some of the rich nations of the world there are youths who do not want to work because of the benefit system. Our young men and women who have things to do will hardly be bothered that one politician had said youths were lazy. Those youths who reject being regarded as lazy are the ones who must confront those who had not provided them with something to do.Those to be confronted include politicians at local, state, and federal levels of political governance.
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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