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Minister Canvases Inclusive Approach to Youth Issue.

Published

6 years ago

November 8, 2019

Joel Ajayi

The Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Mr. Sunday Dare, has advocated a more inclusive approach for profiling youth for development and empowerment interventions to capture those in the informal sector even as he identified funding as a major challenge to be addressed.

The Minister, who was speaking, when he gave the audience to Junior Achievement Nigeria (JA), a non-governmental organization, in office in Abuja, further noted that the era when Youth Development was just a footnote is over.

He said “We need to be more inclusive to include those without tertiary education in the profiling of the Nigerian youth. The informal sector plays a major role in the economy. I think when empowering the youth we should look not just at the elite population, when we are all-encompassing we will make progress.”

Reacting to Junior Achievement’s presentation on how to empower the next one million youth over the course of the next five years, Mr. Dare noted that “the challenge of youth development has been funding and how to scale up. You need to work with us as a Ministry to also achieve our target of (training and empowering) one million youth.

“As I listened to both of you speak, I was just wondering if someone somewhere compared notes because as I reel out plans, you will find that there are just several plug-ins. To a very large extent, they are similar. What we are doing differently this time is that we are putting youth and sports development on equal care.

The Minister assured the organization that their priorities are also the Ministry’s priorities noting that “What we want to do is to scale up the empowerment of our youth, also to deepen the skills that we offer them and above all, to create opportunities for them. It is about opportunities. What you do is also creating a platform for opportunities.”

He informed the gathering of the Ministry’s vision to empower 500,000 youth in the next two years in partnership with groups like JAI to scale the numbers up, among other programs of the Ministry.

Speaking earlier, the Director Junior Achievement Olaniyi Yusuf, while giving a background on the organisation, said JA has three major areas of focus which includes Financial Literacy; which teaches young people how to spend and invest wisely, Work Readiness; working with students and prepare them for work, Entrepreneurship; working with students and those out of school to make them successful entrepreneurs, with a fourth pillar, Digital Literacy, in recognition of the fact that the world is a global village.

The Executive Director of the Junior Achievement Nigeria, Simisola Nwogugu thanked the Minister for receiving the group and highlighted some of the organization’s achievements. She said, “In our first 20 years in the country, we focused on making an impact on the students that were under our care, we believe that by the end of this year we would have reached 1 million students. We are now at 980,000; we have a few programs to help us reach 1 million by the end of the year. At our 20th anniversary, we decided to look for a way to reach another 1 million without waiting for another year and that is why we are here”

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Featured

ELECTING A POPE: THE BURDEN OF MAKING CHOICES

Published

11 hours ago

May 11, 2025

The Gleamer

By Olubunmi Mayaki

“Habemus papam!” which in the English Language means, “We have a Pope.” was pronounced by Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, a French Catholic prelate, His Eminence, Cardinal Dominique Mamberti from the iconic loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican City on Thursday 8 May 2025 after white smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Those Latin words proclaimed to a tensed global audience the result of the election of a new Supreme Pontiff after the death of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) on 21 April 2025 at the age of 88 years.

The Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Cardinal Robert Prevost (Pope Leo XIV) emerged as primus inter pares (first among equals) from the cardinals after undergoing detailed election rituals, which have been the process of selecting the head of the 2000-year-old Catholic Church for centuries.

A papal conclave, the process by which a new Pope is selected, was held consisting of one hundred and thirty-three (133) College of Cardinals, drawn from different parts of the world converged at St. Peter’s Basilica for a public mass before heading to the Sistine Chapel to cast their votes to elect the 267th Pope. During the mass, part of the choir renditions reminded voters to remember their last day when they would stand before God in judgment to render their stewardship on earth, which is to prevent them from rigging the voting process. At the behest of the senior cardinal deacon, voting formalities were read to the electors, which included- oath-taking- “I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one whom I believe should be elected according to God”. Other processes are banning phones, jamming calls, forbidding speaking or contacting any of the candidates, voting rounds, spiritual pauses etc.

Looking at the voting process, one should be curious about how an election to pick a leader for a religious body could be so systematic and attract such global attention. It is a sharp contrast to elections where political leaders are chosen. Even in the so-called advanced democracies, we have seen electoral flaws and a dearth of political leaders. States are finding it difficult to pick genuine statesmen, giving rise to hegemonic leaders. These political imperia ums are emerging and stoking crises in their domain. Fallouts of elections are no longer favourable due to unpopular candidates forced on citizens.

Africa, as a case study, shows that no matter the rules put in place by the continent’s leaders, our election processes have been fraught with rigging, corruption and waste. In most cases, the leaders who set the rules are the violators of the same process. Governments conspire with electoral bodies to truncate election processes at will. Such political brigandage has destroyed the progress of the continent.

Closing this view, I hope that African leaders will take a cue from the Catholic Church’s election process to reinvigorate and rejig the continent’s faltering political process for the good of its people. Better still; political scholars from the continent can study the Catholic model. The common features of elections in most parts of Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, are riddled with vote rigging, violence, human rights abuse, repression, barbarism, crises, untold hardship, and sometimes, outright war. This is the bane of Africa’s development.

The burden of making good political choices should ordinarily rest on citizens. However, politicians have hijacked this process for selfish reasons. It has given birth to bad leaders. If we fail to get it right, what we see is what we get. That is the story of the world politics!

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