Nigeria just like any part of Africa is sitting on a quiet volcano, and its tremors are already cracking the foundations of power from Abuja to Nairobi. The truth is brutally simple. Any nation that fails to carry its youth along is negotiating its own downfall. The signs are everywhere: rising unemployment, weaponized poverty, digital frustration, job racketeering and a generation of leaders that want to leave poverty and pains as inheritance. As Nelson Mandela reminded the world, “The youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow,” yet many African leaders still preside like feudal lords over a demographic they neither understand nor respect. The gap between government and the governed has become a dangerous crater. Nations do not survive that. They collapse into it.
Across the continent, young people are no longer begging for space. They are demanding it. They have seen too much hypocrisy to be deceived by recycled political speeches and empty promises. They watched the EndSARS protests in Nigeria drown in bullets. They saw Sudan’s revolution swallowed by the old order. They witness daily how hunger is used as a leash to quiet dissent. Yet youth remain the engine of everything Africa exports: culture, technology, music, innovation, activism, and spiritual awakening. The paradox is painful. The most powerful generation is the most ignored. Malcolm X warned, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” The tragedy is that many African leaders prepare only for their next election, not for the next generation.
The injustice runs deeper and more dangerous. Nigeria has created a cruel recruitment tradition where the children of the powerful gain automatic entry into the military and paramilitary through influence, connections, and private recommendations, while the children of common citizens are rejected and mocked despite their qualifications. These young Nigerians come with passion and patriotism, yet they are denied the right to serve their country. When merit dies, insecurity rises. A nation that refuses to recruit its most patriotic youth will one day be forced to negotiate with the monsters it produced through neglect. Today, we have kidnappers and bandits. Tomorrow, we may face something far more organized and catastrophic.
This culture of disrespect extends into politics, where young people are not carried along but used as tools of violence. It was this rising darkness that moved Prophet T. B. Joshua to speak with urgency on 14 July 2013. During prophetic ministration, he said, “Carry your youth along. Stop using us as thugs. I saw revolutions and bombs of all kinds.” A decade later, his warning is playing out across the continent. Revolutions, coups, armed movements, and restless youth energies are erupting everywhere. When leaders weaponize the youth, they destroy their own future.
Even worse is the quiet contempt that frames young people as inexperienced, reckless, or too loud. But history proves that nations are not destroyed by the noise of youth. They crumble under the silence of old men. Jerry Rawlings was thirty-one when he shook Ghana alive. Thomas Sankara was thirty-three when he set a moral compass for Africa. Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo said, “The children of the poor you fail to train will never let your children sleep.” That prophecy is no longer theoretical. It is unfolding in real time. A generation kept outside the gates will one day storm the gates, not out of malice, but out of survival.
The spiritual irony is deeper and more frightening. Leadership without the youth is leadership without legacy. It is like trying to build a cathedral on shifting sand. African culture and religion emphasize generational continuity: elders bless, the young execute. Bishop David Oyedepo declared, “You cannot have a future you are not preparing for.” Prophet T. B. Joshua insisted, “The future starts now, not tomorrow.” Yet many leaders, seduced by the intoxication of power, keep circling around the same failed formulas. They forget that legitimacy is not inherited. It is renewed by every generation. Once that renewal fails, the throne rots from the legs upward.
In the final analysis, every leader must confront this truth without excuses or ego. The youth are not the problem. They are the prophecy. They carry Africa’s innovation, her music, her spirituality, her digital strength, her global voice. Any leader who walks without them is walking toward irrelevance. Africa now stands at a fierce crossroads. Nations must either embrace their youth or embrace instability. The future has already arrived, and it has the face of a young man or woman carrying a dream the system is trying to suffocate. As the Igala proverb teaches, “The tree that refuses to shade the young will be cut down for firewood.” Leaders must choose. Carry your youth along, or collapse under the weight of the future you refused to build.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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