(VIDEO) WEEKLY SECURITY DASHBOARD FOR THE PERIOD AUGUST 29, 2021, TO SEPTEMBER 3, 2021: SYMBOL OF LOST HOPE
With the inclement weather of thriving economic storms manifest in the continuous spike of food and related commodities prices; aggravated unemployment, and an unabated orgy of violence, Nigeria has come to represent the symbol of lost hope.
No better sentence could suffice to highlight the impact of the consequences of this gloomy scenario than the statement credited to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) when the Benin Zonal Command of the agency secured the conviction of over 33 youth to cyber-crimes within 24 hours. According to the EFCC, “70% of youths may soon become ex-convicts”, these are “agile, strong, and ready-to-work, but jobless-unemployed youths. The employment situation has become so critical that even if the Federal Government provides 200,000-job employment for graduates, it will merely “scratch the surface”. Nigeria is a country of over 200 million people, almost 75% comprise youths, and the current unemployment rate is estimated at 33%. Converting this analysis to concrete figures implies that an estimate of 50,000,000 (50 million) youths are jobless; with the provision of 200,000 jobs, only 0.4% of the number will be impacted. Can this eliminate the consequences of poverty, hunger, and unemployment?
Before apportioning premature blames on those mentioned above, there is a need to illustrate the environment where these thrive.
According to Kola Ologbondiyan, PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, in one of his statements, said that “The unbridled treasury looting and extortion by the cabal in the Buhari Presidency and the All Progressives Congress (APC) are directly responsible for the excruciating poverty and escalated insecurity suffered by Nigerians in the last five years,”
The unbridled effects of poverty have thus culminated in resource and brain drain that many Nigerians in a fit of survival strategy would voluntarily opt to join the slave boat and be exported as slaves to a land of hope, than thriving with perseverance in the corridors of lost hope that holds no future for them. Against the backdrop of this, it is not surprising that the official registration of Nigerians as refugees in different countries has doubled, with a possibility of unregistered Nigerian refugees probably triple the number of those registered.
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As the country continues to tether dangerously on the edge of the abyss, inflicting untold hardship on citizens: 100% increase in cooking gas; proposed increment in fuel prices and skyrocketing prices in the different cost of staple food consumed by the average Nigerians, the catastrophic consequences may be the heightened increase of youths volunteering themselves to be willingly conscripted into banditry and opting for cyber-crime in a bid to survive.
The survival instinct is so critical to every living mortal that the story is told of Maximilian Kolbe and four others, who, when arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at the Pawiak prison on 17 February 1941 by the German authorities and starved to death, had to eat up their faeces and drink their urine to survive.
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The need to rejuvenate the economy, provide employment and save the nation from its brink of collapse by regaining its former lost glory can no longer be overemphasized, for the actions of a hungry man pushed against the brick wall is said to be justified in the absence of any alternative provided.
Will Nigeria remain a Symbol of Lost Hope or become the Land of Hope?
The time to act is now.
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