A few years ago, a young man emerged as the youth leader in his village unit. It is expected that when a brilliant or promising young person appears as a leader of his peers, the top requirements for his leadership should include: his ability to mobilise other young persons like him to engage principally in the communal work of cleaning his unit of the village’s footpaths, cleaning the market and other commercial areas, creating new roads and streets to modernize his community, seeing to the proper running of his village’s schools and public facilities, leading his colleagues in active socio-economic engagements and assisting them to get grants and or scholarship to support their quest for education.
But upon emerging as a leader, our modern youth leaders will impose themselves as part of the governing elite of their community. They employ brute force, extortion, threats and intimidation to announce their ‘arrival’ on the scene of irresponsible leadership without accountability that has become our nightmarish experience in Nigeria.
Employing those tools of modern leadership in Nigeria and using the strategies of leadership advocated by Nicollo Machiavelli, Adolf Hitler and Sanni Abacha combined, this young man contested and became the youth leader of his village. In no time, this young man became the youth leader of his local government area. And like his forerunners or forebears in leadership positions in Nigeria, this young man loves titles. He was no longer known and referred to by his name. He was now known and referred to as ‘capacity leader’, ‘my able leader’, ‘my indefatigable leader’, and ‘my performing leader’ and when he became leader of the LGA, he was now simply addressed as ‘chapter leader’. As time progressed, he became more simply known as ‘Chapter’. When you call ‘chapter’ everybody will know who you are talking about!
One morning, chapter left his village and travelled to the village of the then reigning Paramount Ruler of his LGA who was giving out one of his daughters in marriage. When he was allowed to talk at the event, he simply told the gathering that he had come there to demand for a portion of the goodies for the chapter youth of the bridal items that the would-be husband would bring to the table. The assembled guests were aghast and dumbfounded.
No one had heard before of a chapter youth leader getting a portion of the bridal goodies for his colleagues across the LGA. All they had heard of before is the youth leader of the unit where the bride comes from. The people therefore just told him politely that they had initially forgotten to put this demanded item when a list was submitted to the groom-to-be. Chapter youth leader therefore returned shamefully and broken to his village.
His real mission for that high-profile marriage ceremony that day was to try and carve a niche for chapter youth leadership so that it becomes the ‘tradition’ of his Bekwarra people that whenever anyone high up such as a paramount ruler is giving out a daughter, a gift of great value must be apportioned to their leader. He had gone to baptize himself into the conclave of what I would not forget my friend, the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, for describing as “Eating Chiefs”. Eating chiefs, elders, youth leaders and other “eaters” of various varieties in the villages are people who greatly love money, food and wine. You may add a fourth which I am not ready to include here. And for them, it seems, that is the only meaning of life; which is why they do not seem to bother how they get those things. Whether it is by extortion, bribery or corruption, guile, brute force or emotional blackmail, it does not seem to matter very much to these people.
This narration is only a minute fraction of what a bad force the youth have become in village life. In my days in youthful activism, we were truly concerned with what was of concern to growing young adults, mainly their schooling and their dreamy aspirations as to how their community can become modernized. They did not have a mind to become a part of the ugly leadership that has become a nightmare for our nation. We were not going to demand a share of anyone’s daughter’s bride price or a share of illegal levies and dues imposed by eating chiefs and elders to feed their greed and humongous appetite for evil and more evil.
