By Kayode Ketefe
When
will this myth about incompetence of our youthful generation go away? This was
the question that popped up in the mind of this writer upon reading a statement
recently credited to Head of Association of Chartered Certified Accountants
(ACCA) Nigeria, Mrs. Toyin Ademola.
Speaking
at a recent career fair organised by her professional body in Abuja, The ACCA
boss struck the familiar, albeit unproven chord, by saying the many graduates
from Nigerian tertiary institutions don't get jobs because they are not
employable.
She
was further quoted to have added that there are many vacant positions in
government and private establishments but our graduates don't have the
professional wherewithal to appropriate them.
This
write up is not in opposition to this particular statement of Mrs. Ademola
since the ACCA boss is just toeing a familiar path. Her position
obviously re-echoes the popular presumption about the intellectual incapacity
of our graduates and youth generally. Rather, the attempt here is to
deconstruct the myth itself which is being sustained by nothing but
generational bias!
We
are all used to the self-deprecating rhetoric of branding our educated youth
‘half-baked graduates’ who are irredeemably unfit for any worthwhile
employment.
The
younger Nigerians have over the years being unduly victimized through home-spun
warfare of unsavoury verbal attack culminating in psychological torture and at
times, erosion of self- belief. They have been spared no negative epithets by
the older generations who perceived them as some sort of inferior specie on all
indices that define human personality.
The
youths are morally insolvent, intellectually incompetent, and even spiritually
blind! All the adjectives in thesaurus that have semantic connection with words
despicable, contemptible and miserable have been lavishly exhausted in
description of the Nigerian youth by their own people whose only difference lies
in being older!
Yet
all the socio-economic misdeeds culminating into woes afflicting the younger
generations have been perpetrated by the older Nigerians. Many graduates of
today are unduly adjudged unemployable educated illiterate, hardly capable of any
worthwhile cerebral exploits.
Even
though there are no attestable proofs to justify the postulation, its
proponents miss no opportunity to expound this pernicious philosophy. This
myth, it appears to this writer, has always been perpetrated out of sheer
generational bias. This view, nay mindset, is rooted in vainglorious desire for
contrived self-importance, even at collective level- a base kind of arrogance
that flows from concocted superiority.
In
truth, the assumption is most unscientific, science tells us that by the very
process of evolution, the human species, like other species, are evolving
towards perfection on all fronts, including intellectual, thus the homo sapiens
is evolving towards ‘homo sapiens sapiens’ that is from ‘the wise man’
to the ‘wise wise man’ or in better term, the ‘super man’.
But the advocates of
this generational bias are saying the exact opposite. By common sense, if human
beings are retrogressing in intellect rather than progressing as the theory of
evolution suggests, then the entire landscape of the earth should be brimming
with morons by now,-through gradual descent into intellectual senescence over
the millennia.
Furthermore,
empirical evidence does not support inference of any disability in the
intelligence of a Nigerian youth. Nigerian educational system could have fallen
over the years as a result of underfunding and disregard by the rulers, but
certainly the intellect of the youth has not fallen with it. The youth have
developed numerous compensatory measures to remedy whatever defects that arose
from their deprivations.
To
drive home the point, it is a common knowledge that Nigerian youth take part in
many international professional examinations and acquit themselves well.
Many of them are adept at manipulating computers and other sophisticated
paraphernalia of modern technology which the older generations never heard of
in their own times.
If
anything, I think the present generation of youth should be lauded for
long suffering, perseverance and doggedness. There were times in this country
when employers would invade venues of graduation ceremony and scooped up fresh
graduands for immediate employment.
There
had been times when fresh graduates were enticed with cars to take up
employment; the older generations who enjoyed all these perks are the one quick
to condemn the younger ones who had no such incentives to goad their
intellectual enterprises.
Many of the older generations learnt the
expertise on the job and did not just become gurus upon graduation from
tertiary institution but the youths are expected to be perfect straight away
from school. There are many young Nigerians brandishing local and international
academic/professional certificates, including the vaunted ACCA, and yet have no
jobs. There are simply acute shortage of jobs leading to mass
unemployment and under-employment and the problem is not because the youth are
unemployable.
We
should learn to appreciate our youth and stop denigrating them as if they did
not genetically descend from their progenitors who have chosen to don the toga
of unfathomable superiority. Whatever vices now being exhibited by the youth
was not inculcated in them by some subterranean spirits, the youth acquired
them through indoctrination by the older generations many of whom now deprecate
the same youth with unbridled passion.
No comments:
Post a Comment