Warning to Nigerian Parents By Pius Adesanmi.

There is a certain Nigerian demographic that is being raised by my generation. All of a sudden, the kids of many of my course mates in the University are now undergraduates. My generation is raising Nigerians in the 17 – 25-year-old bracket. Millennials.

I have called them the orphaned generation because they have been left to their own devices at too many levels owing to the complete collapse and atrophy of Nigerian society and nation.

My generation could still peep into the political public sphere and bask in the symbolism of credible and worthy role models. Today’s millennials have no such luck as the Nigerian political public sphere is peopled exclusively by unprincipled brigands and Ishola Oyenusis occupying political office and every space of public symbolism.

If you are working for a political office holder today and making politically correct noise to defend them on social media, chances are that in the safety and privacy of your bedroom and your conscience, you will never be able to brandish your principal to your children as a role model.

My generation also enjoyed superior, ethical, visionary, informed, principled, and purposeful parenting on a very broad basis. I understand that there is a risk of generalization here but it is a risk worth taking in the service of contrast with the sort of parenting we are providing to today’s millennials. I think there are fundamental principles we received from our own parents that we are now failing to pass on to the new demographic we are now parenting in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions.

Of course, I am a funky, in-touch, cosmopolitan pragmatist. I would be the last to recommend an unmodified transfer of the parenting manual of our own parents to the new generation.

I am the first to always advise my own mother, Mama Adesanmi, that she has to modify her relationship with today’s millennials; that she cannot just copy and paste the methodology with which she raised me and my generation at Titcombe College while trying to train and discipline Millennials (her grandchildren’s age) in Isanlu today. I tease her that her parenting methodology is old school lapel and she must receive training in how to relate to today’s kids from me because I have those millennials aplenty on social media and I am more in tune with their psychology than her.

In essence, I am aware of the need to raise today’s kids in today’s circumstances with today’s tools and methodology. However, this should not translate to a wholesale jettisoning of the fundamentals of parenting that we received from our own parents.

Consider the case of work ethic. What exactly should be old school about the work ethic, the conceptualization of hard work, honest labour, toil and grind, and swotting that our parents passed on to us? That is how we were raised. Why is this philosophy of work ethic not being passed on to the generation that we are raising today? Mama Adesanmi’s work ethic should not be old school lapel. We should be able to pass it on to today’s millennials.

If the work ethic of the millennial is appalling, abysmal or even non-existent, the reason is to be found in the sort of parenting that my generation is providing. It is terrible. Consider the case of the education sector. Nigerian tertiary education has moved from rot to total collapse. University, Polytechnic, and College of Education students have been at home for so long some of them will need driving direction to their own campuses whenever they eventually resume. All around, I see millennials who have zero clues what to do with all the free time on their hands and I put that down to disengaged, uninvolved parenting.

As an undergraduate, there was no year I did not spend a minimum of two to three months at home due to ASUU, NASU, and other assorted aluta strikes. The first rule of Baba Adesanmi’s parenting methodology: school closure due to strikes is never an excuse for your education or personal development to stop. For every ASUU strike, I had to come up with a reading and study programme which he supervised meticulously. He was constantly on the lookout for all kinds of conventions, seminars, and other activities of personal and intellectual development that I would attend.

Baba Adesanmi would contact and write letters to Professors he knew in far away Universities – ABU, UI, University of Ife – to ask about opportunities I could productively engage in during the strike: “my dear Professor so and so, your son, Bola, is at home because Unilorin is currently closed as you know. I was wondering if…” Productive engagement of my time during strikes and school closures was crucial to my father’s methodology of parenting. I was never allowed to transform school closure into an alibi for indolence, laziness, or fatalism.

My work ethic, rigour, and incipient sense of pertinent initiative were not to be affected by strikes. Baba Adesanmi would not tolerate that. Engaged parenting ensured that these things remained intact.

Today, knowledge is borderless, democratic, and free because of the dynamics of the global knowledge economy but I look around me and I see a demographic grounded by tertiary education strikes; grounded and lost because they mostly do not know how to rise above the strictures and limitations of their immediate circumstances; they do not know these things because of parental disengagement. Strikes become an alibi and an excuse for far too many of them.

Recently, Bamidele Ademola-Olateju and yours truly launched the Sahara Reporters’ Education Café in Lagos. Our target: University undergraduates. We had space for only thirty students and we stated that very clearly in the advertisement. The ad went out on our Facebook Walls as well as the combined Twitter and Facebook accounts of Sahara Reporters boasting nearly five million followers. Our mission: teach participants how to navigate the resources of the global knowledge economy for your personal development and education for free.

You are a LAUTECH student and His Excellency Constituted Authority has grounded you at home for months in Ibadan. Are you aware of all the free online courses at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, etc, that you can stream and follow for free to grow your knowledge base? Are you aware of the knowledge hubs and cafes that you could join for free in order to rub minds with your peers in Europe, North America, and Asia via streaming? Are you aware of how to navigate these opportunities and maximize them? What to do with them? How to acquire and instrumentalize the skills and resources of the new global knowledge economy?

Bamidele and I went to the venue of the event with very concrete resources we were going to share with participants.Because we are both social media public figures, we easily filled the room to capacity.

However, our audience was made up exclusively of postgraduate students, Lagos-based professionals and social media admirers eager to benefit from resources we had designed exclusively for undergraduates. Only two undergraduates were in the audience. We went ahead and had a fantastic time with our audience but I kept thinking about all those Unilag and LASU undergraduates. I kept thinking of all those Polytechnic and College of Education kids in Lagos.

Most importantly, I kept thinking of all the parents of undergraduate millennials that Bamidele and I have combined on our Walls. Such a well-advertised, unbelievable learning opportunity with resources for free during endless strikes? Bamidele and I had gone to the event expecting not only to meet undergraduates but their parents who had taken the pain to invest the time in coming with them.

In my undergraduate years, Baba Adesanmi would have borrowed money to buy petrol for his car and personally driven me from Isanlu all the way to Lagos to attend such a programme and interact meaningfully with the facilitators.

If you are parenting a millennial in any of our higher institutions, here is a warning and an admonition: his or her work ethic is your responsibility. It is still malleable. And, I’m afraid, you’ve got competition from corrupt politicians and public officials for your child’s time.

You will either shape that work ethic the way your own parents shaped yours or a Governor/Senator/Rep with a very long EFCC rap sheet will move in and shape your child’s work ethic for you via social media.

Source: Pius Adesanmi.

DON'T LET BUHARI AND APC DECEIVE YOU by Amadasu Evans.

1999 is not history for people like me. President Obasanjo did not inherit a great legacy from chains of visionless military governments. There was no oil boom when Obasanjo took over. But once he took over, he looked up and not down. He looked forward and not backward. Not even the mind-blowing looting of Abacha's government, a government President Buhari served could dissuade Obasanjo from looking up to a brighter future. Did we need to recover and repatriate the Abacha loot? Yes, But Obasanjo was more interested in using the budget at the time to meet our challenges. He did not go about branding Nigeria and Nigerians as a rogue nation or thieves. Obasanjo assembled the right people. Charles Soludo made the Banking smooth. Ernest Ndukwe engineered the GSM Resolution. El Rufai fired from BPE. Oby Ezekwesili and Okonjo Iweala were drafted to teach him what he didn't know about international financial and economic community. Nuhu Ribadu and EFCC and ICPC were brought to buy confidence in the world to do business with Nigeria. Debt relief was fought and gains came.

Institutions were built and before you know it there was political and economic stability. Foreign Direct Investments began to rain in. Obasanjo did not meet a super economy. Virtually all the infrastructure we enjoy today came from 1999. The military looted, ruined and destroyed everything including our psyche.

Did Obasanjo dwell in the past? No. Did he continue complaining IBB did this, Abacha did that, Abdusalami did that? No. Even Buhari's Boss's (Abacha) loot are still being repatriated till date. Thus if Obasanjo hinged development on that loot we wouldn't have attained the milestone we achieved so far.

Now listen up. Oil price is not lower than Obasanjo met in 1999 or Yaradua in 2007. It's simply the fault of Buhari and APC. They simply failed to hit the ground running. Out of their malice, they missed million dollar goodwill from people like Okonjo Iwela and Akinwumi Adeshina. Buhari by his rhetoric de-marketed Nigeria. 

He created massive shock in the economy that turned away international monetary agencies and financial institutions. He did not know his rhetoric made foreign investors fear. He created uncertainty rather than assuring all that all investments are safe and that there won't be a radical change of policies. His interference with CBN monetary policies finished the business for would be investors.

If President Buhari had proper guidance from key figures like Pat Utomi or Charles Soludo, yes economy would have slowed down, but the slide wouldn't have been sharp and unpredictable as it is today. Some things would have been salvaged.

Buhari and APC talk as if they campaigned to take over from PDP prosperity, abundant power supply etc. They forget these were the reasons they asked for a chance to rule. Obama took over an economy in recession. Massive job losses. Major financial companies going bankrupt. Deficit Budget. Etc. When he won, he did not go wailing about Bush Bush Bush who spent all the wealth in Defence And Military Budget. He simply brought his head down and work. He Bailedout financial institutions like Morgans Stanley and Leman Bros. He Bailed out Ohio Auto Industries. He nearly lost 2nd term for the slow economy, but he pleaded with American people saying the jobs were coming. And Alas! The jobs came. Even though not optimum level, but he doesn't remind anyone that it was GOP and Bush that created it. 

Buhari and APC stop complaining. Stop passing the buck. You longed for this for nearly 10 years. Leave Goodluck Jonathan and PDP and show us what you got.