In his speech in London last week, President Muhammadu Buhari, ever his frank and honest self, captured the challenges a state like Nigeria faces, with a huge population fixated on the entitlement syndrome which feels that the state must do everything for the citizens. Said the President at a Commonwealth Business Forum on Making Business Easier Between Commonwealth Countries in London; \u201cWe have a very young population. Our population is estimated conservatively to be 180million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil-producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.\u201d<\/p>\n
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There is nothing you can fault from Buhari\u2019s perfect reading of the Nigerian reality, especially where a ravenous newly-minted opposition feels it is its right to hold power, raid the treasury and ride roughshod over all Nigerians, as it did in 16 woeful years. Where the displaced PDP and its cohorts think they have a thick poach of lazy, idle and uneducated \u2018youths\u2019 from its bizarre years in power who lie in wait for the proceeds of stolen resources, there is absolutely nothing new or wrong in the President\u2019s unputdownable reading of the country\u2019s predicaments. President Buhari merely brought to the fore the needs of a nation that had its best years eaten away by locusts, its youths badly short-changed and duped and its future made so uncertain by the prebendal profligacy of the past. So why do the Gentiles rage and the people utter folly?<\/p>\n
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But his honest and faultless statement was latched on by an opposition that wants to desperately hoodwink, cheat and con its ways back to power. Pronto, we had another version of Buhari\u2019s sincere statement of the facts of the Nigerian problem. We heard from the distraught opposition that President Buhari said that Nigerian youths are lazy and there began a round of devious maelstrom that the same opposition hopes will drive it back to power to continue the bizarre sleaze it did in 16 years before the Buhari tsunami swept them off power. That was all the coyotes who have been bleeding badly since they lost power needed to raise a way cry. Oh, yea, he called us lazy and we will teach him a lesson in 2019! Can you believe such bacchanal deceit? Can you imagine such lascivious fraud? Can you believe such bestial intrigue? Can you believe such naked scam?<\/p>\n
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It can rightly be asked if the President\u2019s comment above was the only match stick that kindled the mischievous anger of the dehydrated and frustrated Nigerian opposition. Is this simple statement of truth the only catalyst that set off the bottled rage of the opposition, hurting badly after being defeated and sent off power and bleeding more after the capping of the notorious free-loading enterprise with which they demolished Nigeria in 16 years? Is this statement enough to let off so huge a gall bag the distressed opposition and their cohorts have been exuding since then?\u00a0\u00a0Ordinarily, the President\u2019s comment shouldn\u2019t let off the huge fireball those that want to come back to power by fire, by force have raised. But we are at a point where the consuming desperation of the opposition to return to power is firing the pin of a dangerous social, political and economic mayhem the country has never seen before. We have in our hands today an amoral and corrupt opposition that desperately wants to lie, slander, perjure, forge, bite and claw its way back to power. We have a deadly gang up of bitter but hugely corrupt forces that won\u2019t mind setting the country on fire to achieve their consuming desire to get back power for the purpose of self-aggrandizement and free loading. For such deadly, spitting force, forging, lying and seducing the unaware and the simple minded with such frauds as they now untruths to the President, are all game.<\/p>\n
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In its desperation to nail Buhari, even by false means the bizarre opposition the country has been saddled for the past three years ran into its ever busy laboratory of forgery and fabricated a false version of the president\u2019s comment and came out with the mantra that President Buhari called all Nigerian youths lazy. They didn\u2019t go further. They have gotten all they wanted and they set sail, furiously marketing this lie to their confederates in desperate bid for power. They were not interested in proof of Buhari\u2019s culpability because, like every other dubious marauder, they don\u2019t have proof. They now moved in to seduce the ill-informed youths, their supporters and their fellow collegiate in the queer battle to get back to power and continue their brigands to mount a war cry of how Buhari abused the youths as lazy. They fawned, foamed ceaselessly in the mouth and threatened with corrupt indignation that they will vote out Buhari n 2019 for calling Nigerian youths lazy. Believing Nigerians are unthinking and irrational mobsters they can twiddle in any manner they want so as to get back to power, they lurked at the back, smiled in a glee of mischief and uttered, like Mark Anthony in Shakespearean Julius Caesar; \u2018mischief thou art afoot\u2019. They hope to garner the rewards like any other yahoo yahoo fraudster but they will be disappointed because even as they have consistently taken Nigerians for fools, Nigerians will disappoint them at the fullness of time.<\/p>\n
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So far, no one has shown where such devilish quote of \u2018All Nigerian youths are lazy\u2019 came in President Buhari\u2019s spotless reason for which he drew attention to a stark reality bedeviling Nigeria where its future generation latches onto a strange sense of entitlement to deny themselves the creative opportunities and urge to do well for themselves. No one has so far excerpted the forged quote from Buhari\u2019s effort to offer a conceptual clarity to a problem which surely will hunt all of us one day. No one has offered any\u00a0\u00a0rebuttal to the truism of Buhari\u2019s statement. No one has cared to offer any alternative fact to the one he offered. But to the multitude of lazy, jobbing coyotes that graduated from the PDP school of mischief, Buhari is guilty, even when he never made the quote they are running stark nude in the market square with. To them, Buhari is guilty of every sin in the world because he denied to pander to their sense of entitlement by sharing the national cake amongst a sybaritic cult of idle, lazy and pleasure-loving political hustlers. Most importantly. Buhari by defeating the PDP was directly responsible for their woes. He denied them the favourite feeding bottle through which they have lived their padded lives so he must bear the responsibility for even what he never said or inferred. Can you believe such tragedy?<\/p>\n
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What was contained In President Buhari\u2019s speech that had not been said by various people, even in more acrid forms before? Let us revisit a few;<\/p>\n
In July 1974, precisely at the Ondo Town Hall, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo delivered a speech at the presentation of legendary Chief Gani Fawehinmi\u2019s book, \u2018People\u2019s Rights To Free Education At All Levels\u2019 where he said, \u201cThe trouble with many Nigerian youths is that they sleep too much, play too much in idle chatter and gossip\u201d. Buhari, in his London speech, didn\u2019t come near this fatal indictment but there was no banner raised against Chief Awolowo because he was speaking the truth. Then, there was no desperate caste of looters and their politically-charged lazy youth wing trying every prank to return to power.<\/p>\n
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Reuben Abati, the Spokesman for the immediate past president Goodluck Jonathan, wrote about Nigerian youths in September 2012, \u2018Nigerian youths are idle and idling twittering collective children of anger, the distracted crowd of Facebook addicts, the BBM-pinging soap gossips of Nigeria who seem to be in competition among themselves to pull down President Goodluck Jonathan\u201d. This is the official spokesman of the erstwhile President Jonathan. So why did the political \u2018youths\u2019 mouthing asinine war rallies today on their forged quote not protest this huge assault which grandly dwarfs the presumed slight of President Buhari? Will it surprise you that the same \u2018youths\u2019 that are now devouring their tongues in anger were sing-praising and urging Abati to fire on because this was from the house? Is it because, as at the time Abati made this scathing remarks, the same \u2018youths\u2019 now beating war drums over what Buhari did not say were sitting lazily in the village square, singing, drumming and clapping for Jonathan and drawing handsomely from that but are now weeping out their eye sockets because the illicit source of vain livelihood they were surviving from had been plugged by Buhari? We must be clear on this before we are inadvertently recruited for an obnoxious political battle for the benefit of those that despoiled and laid the country bare just the other day.<\/p>\n
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Truth is that no sane, educated, informed Nigerian youth will feel perturbed with President Buhari\u2019s frankness. No good Nigerian youth will feel indicted by the President\u2019s assertion of the truth that many Nigerian youths are idle because they feel the state will wipe their behind for them because it is an oil-producing nation. No sane Nigerian youth will submit to the devious project to falsify President Buhari\u2019s true reflection of Nigeria with a view to stealing the roaches back to power.\u00a0\u00a0No sane Nigerian would gladly wish the President play the ostrich, pad and hide the truth from the outside world and risk a factual presentation of his country\u2019s problem and open doors for meaningful intervention in a bid not to fluster the nest of lazy, political youths and their corrupt paymasters. The truth is that no sane Nigerian youth will consume the sick and awful forgery of the lazy, corrupt, uneducated political youths who deviously embark on deliberate smear campaigns to achieve the deadly goals of their corrupt paymasters and their consuming desire to come back to power. No informed youth will fall prey to such cheap traps as the one made from forging President Buhari\u2019s frank and honest take on any national issue.<\/p>\n
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But then, what else did the latest hoax about President Buhari allegedly calling all Nigerian youths lazy show but that, more than even the President can capture, Nigeria is firmly trapped with\u00a0\u00a0lazy, uneducated and ill-informed youths who cannot read but wait on the state to feed them, often through stolen resources? It is incredible that some people will go such a long way mischievously manipulating President Buhari\u2019s comment, get raucous applause from those that consume such forgeries and still protest being called lazy, illiterate and unproductive. It is instructive that the strategy these predictable political manipulators want to mischievously employ for selfish political gains have turned out to expose them so badly that, by their actions, they are proving President Buhari\u2019s factual comment much more than the perversion they turn of it. Everything points still to the danger where an erstwhile corrupt political culture made a mess of our youths by destroying everything that will lead them to productive growth while feeding them with poor rations from stolen funds. From whichever angle you look at it, the problem is critical and demands such urgent attention far beyond what the country can muster, as Buhari pointed out in London.<\/p>\n
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Peter Claver Oparah<\/p>\n
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Ikeja, Lagos.<\/p>\n