By Sunny Awhefeada
A looming disaster with the capacity to wreck the social structure of Nigeria is hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles.
The crisis is pervasive and therefore ubiquitous. It is the crisis of an emergent grossly errant generation. All around us are signs of derailment, turpitude and crass subversion of all that is good, but we seem not to be able to arrest the slide.
We complain and talk and point, but we are caving in to the overwhelming pressure of the challenge which has become the crisis of parenting in our clime and time. One has come to understand that every generation has its own challenges which it must of necessity, and for the purpose of survival, address and surmount.
Growing up, I heard my grandmother complain that children born after the Nigerian Civil War were particularly stubborn to the extent that they were deaf to instruction and advice.
Looking back now, the children of my generation, now parents and grandparents, whom my grandma so described were clones of angels in their childhood.
The turn of the present century came with daunting challenges that were never envisaged. Ironically, we celebrated its approach and its dawn as the emergence of a magical era where everything good was possible.
Even when futurologists in their arcane engagements with their crystal balls hinted at the many stranger than fiction events of today, we didn’t pay heed to them. We were anxious and happy to enter the new millennium and I fondly remember the concept of Y2K, the year 2000. And the new century moved so fast to the extent that we now see it as an old century. Now the magic is gone and in fact there was never a moment of magic. What we had were moments of hope and anxiety and then disillusionment crept in.
Here we are confounded and disturbed with a youth population that is going down the wrong lane. Yet, the nation’s demography depicts young people as constituting an overwhelming majority accounting for 151 million of the country’s 217 million people which is 70% of which those under the age of 15 amount to a staggering 40%!
We have all been buffeted by the failure of political leadership and its attendant economic and social discomfiture that we simply forget the most vital aspect of human angle on which our future and today depend, our children, our youths.
The sad and shocking reality of how badly the society has neglected the children and youths has come to haunt the nation with the recent death of the singer, Mohbad. Besides the generation of young people not many adults knew the name Mohbad. Now, it took his avoidable death for the nation to care, but it is coming too late.
The stories woven around the life and times of Mohbad reflect the new crisis of growing up in Nigeria. Things are changing and very fast too. It is this jet speed change that has become the albatross of parenting and by far the most significant enabler of this change with all its destructive character is technology.
Again, the phenomenon of technology represents an ambiguous irony since it was intended to make life better, but now like a double edged sword it is also making life the opposite of better.
The thinking among us is not to speak ill of the dead. But truth be told, Mohbad was a victim of the association he kept. Was he to blame? The answer is no! He was a victim of the crisis of parenting. So much is out there about the upbringing of Mohbad, the superstar. And we all know that such an experience is not unique to Mohbad. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Mohbads out there.
There are many young people from broken cum dysfunctional homes who daily work hard albeit wrongly to prove themselves as survivals and stars. Young people in this conundrum often lack the stable home factor in the making of their person and they fall victim just like Mohbad. The first index of their subversive attitude is their lifestyle which is not only negative, but reprehensible.
The many causes of the social rupture assailing parenting today include poverty, ever encroaching western values, urbanization, population explosion arising from uncontrolled birthrate, decline in educational standard, religious perversion, broken homes manifesting in single parenting and quite notoriously the unyielding negative influence of ICT on our lives and consciousness. Deriving from some of the aforementioned is the drastic alteration of the domestic structure from what it was in the days of yore when mothers stayed at home to nurture the children to today’s compelling needs for mothers to work to economically stabilize the home. In years gone by, mothers remained at home and groomed the children into responsible young adults, not anymore.
So, in our present reality, father and mother run off to work or business every day and nobody is left at home to nurture the children. They are simply left to their own devices.
The consequences of the foregoing are confronting us today in loss of values, drug abuse, cultism, criminality, child pregnancy, sexual abuse, terrorism and other ills Nigeria now battles with.
There are now many deviant attitudes our youths now gladly identify with unlike in time past when such were abhorred. The yahoo culture involving internet fraud aided by a bloody ritual dimension is no longer news. Our young people kill to make money and the law enforcement agents merely extort them and let them go.
Once a national television talked about Yahoo boys’ mothers association who came out to champion the cause of their sons’ involved in cybercrime. The practice thrives because Nigeria has become a bastion of lawlessness.
Our young people have created vanguards of subversion.
The group known as Marlians that has grown around Naira Marley has many errant followers. Disregard for law and order, drug abuse, rudeness, foul language, adopting frightening names, violence, indecent dressing, in fact every act that subverts anything good is for them a virtue and something to embrace.
Mohbad was a follower of Naira Marley until they fell apart. It is now alleged that the latter, his erstwhile boon companion, was the source of his ordeal and eventual death. Many protests have taken place to decry his death and seek justice for him. Many online platforms have blacklisted Naira Marley.
Mohbad’s mother has been inconsolable and has cursed and cursed. The Police known for its legendary ineptitude say they are working. A prophet has also boasted that he would bring Mohbad back from the dead if he was allowed to. But none of this will bring back Mohbad.
We are in dire straits on the matter of youth culture and every home is threatened. Parents must now begin to think of the way out of the present crisis.
Homes make up the society which in turn morphs into the idea of the nation. If our homes are threatened, then the nation is in trouble. The time has come for all to make concerted effort to intervene. Parents must now device means of coping with contemporary realities while raising their children. One of such strategies would be how to manage the menace of ICT and its manifold manifestations in the social media which has foisted a crisis on us.
Parents should intentionally be part of the lives of their children.
In doing this, they must know what the children do at school, what they are taught, know the kind of company they keep and also hold regular conversations with them. Parents must become home police if they must confront and overcome the crisis. There is also the issue of discipline which many parents have jettisoned. Discipline must be part of the upbringing of children.
The school, religious places and even the neighbourhood or community must begin to show interest in what our youths do. The families must create family time in doing things together and parents should observe the behavior of their children at such times. What is upon us is no child’s play and it is disruptive in more ways than one. We must act now and save our future. A stitch in time saves nine.
