 Let me say how very pleased I am to have been invited to make a few remarks at this very important conference. And this conference is important indeed because it is a gathering of the demographic majority of our young people in our party. So this is a conference of those who by natural order, the natural order of things, will be in this party long after people like me and many of my colleagues seated are long gone. So we have the present and we have the future of our party rolled into one here today and they have modestly described themselves as progressive youths. Permit me therefore to take advantage of the strategic importance of this gathering to share a few thoughts with you and most of the issues that I will raise cannot be resolved in these few remarks and I don't intend to resolve them in these few remarks. All I hope I can achieve is to agitate and encourage further reflection on some of the issues. Let me begin with the issue of political participation or as some will describe it, political citizenship. It's evident just from voter turnout alone that the vast majority of young people either do not register to vote or do not vote at all. Those who even participate at all would rather engage within the very constrained space of social media platforms or join pressure groups. Many of this is necessarily bad, but while media engagements and pressure groups are important for drawing attention to the issues, they cannot transform the lives of millions for good or for ill, but political parties can. It is political parties and political actors that can transform the lives of millions of people. No amount of social media engagement, no amount of pressure group activities, no number of NGOs can do what political parties in office can do because they come into power and its governments that can most profoundly affect the lives and fortunes of people. So if you are keen on how the future will turn out, you must be involved in politics. Coming up, I was in a number of pressure groups concerned with corruption, with human rights, with democracy, et cetera. As a young lecturer, I wrote papers, I argued at conferences, but it was only in 1999 when the AD won elections in Lagos that I was able to serve as Attorney General and working with several colleagues, we carried out a major reform in the justice sector in Lagos State. We had to participate politically, otherwise all our great ideas would never have, would have ended up nowhere, it would have all been zero. With all the best ideas, if you don't participate politically, very little can be achieved. So sitting here today, we have the Senate President, the distinguished Ahmed Lawan, we have former governors, we have Boss Mustafa, the SGF, who started their political journeys when they were under 40. All of them were under 40. In fact, I know that Boss Mustafa was probably even under 30 when he started his own political journey. They all had to function within political organizations, within political parties, and you must say, and when you look at all of them, it took a while to get here. So while you must all be commended for joining and remaining a part of this great political party, the major numerical force in our society, which you represent, is not engaged yet. In other words, the vast majority of young people who you represent here are not engaged. You have a duty to persuade, to evangelize, and to recruit them. No matter how bright their ideas are, they can only be implemented by politicians in public office, but also, but also you must note that being involved cannot mean public office immediately. It could take a while, and that's what you see here today. Everyone who occupies political office today started very, very many years ago, and they're still here. And we must be engaged enough, long enough, to see our dreams come true. We cannot expect that it will just be overnight, and there are young people who you may have to speak to, who will say that politics and politicians are so dirty that one is best as far away from them as possible. Well, I agree that the political party really does have all sorts of characters. We have priests, we have outlaws, we have scientists, we have idealists, we have demagogues, we have good people and bad people, and every shade in between. But that is the reality of our world. The political party is only a small part, a microcosm of society, with all its features, food and flawed, just as you cannot reasonably opt out of society because some of your neighbors are flawed or because you don't like the profiles of some of your neighbors. In the same way, you cannot abandon the business of shaping your present and indeed your future, because you don't like the profiles or some of the characters that you have to deal with. All of us have to work together. So being involved and getting others involved is crucial. The task then is to aggregate the majority of the party around your own preferred point of view. This has to be done by standing firm on sound principles, but at the same time ready to give and take, especially on methodology for achieving these shared objectives and common causes, being ready to listen carefully to the views of others and accommodate dissension, even unreasonable dissension, has to be accommodated. Now a closely related issue is that of your representation within the party. And I agree with Akiyo Ibode who presented a short while ago that some affirmative action for young people and women may be necessary. But I think our youth can do better than affirmative action. I think that you can do a lot better. Saying give us a place at the table by quota, the only reason why the majority and you are the majority will plead for a place at the table is because the majority has not yet found the capacity to organize itself so as to benefit from its numbers and or has failed to take its place by seizing the intellectual or ideation on high ground. Let me clarify. You are in your prime at your most creative and your most prolific state. You also have the largest numbers clearly. You underestimate your roles and abilities if you do not see your role as taking over the ideological and intellectual direction of the party. The big ideas, the great solutions, the creative plans must come from you. And this is your moment. Human beings are led by ideas, good or bad ideas. Human beings are led by ideas. In a democracy, in a democracy we present ideas. Even if all you present is a bad idea, better ideas must then be presented and communicated as alternatives. Frequently, I hear people saying politics in Nigeria is not about issues. That's not correct. It's about issues. It just may not be the right issues. It may not be the issues that you think are important, but politics is always about issues. Some of those issues may not advance the views of the majority or the good of the majority, but it is people, human beings, not spirits who present these issues and stare the conversations in a direction that will lead to socially beneficial conclusions. We have a duty, and when I say we, I refer to all of you, progressive youths, have a duty to raise the bar of political discourse and focus the minds of the public on the issues that matter most to the majority of our people. And please don't just say it is time for the youth. Don't just say it's time for the youth. And older people must just give away. It's unlikely that that will happen. It is the strength of your ideas and the depth of your organization that will retire those ahead of you, not your age. And I'm also, frankly, not very impressed with the notion that the role and power of young people is somehow postponed until elders have gone or that there is some kind of generational cue to which we all must subscribe, even if that was true at some point, even if it was true at some point, that we must all be on some kind of cue. Today that notion stands on very weak legs indeed. In the era of disruption and disruptive innovation, we have seen disruption in business, in commerce, in entertainment. Why not in politics? This is about service to the people, but at the heart of that is also about ideas and of course numbers. Movements of every kind are activated around ideas and numbers. The larger the number of those persuaded by an idea, the stronger the movement. The fifth issue, which I want to mention briefly, what are these issues that should engage our minds today? What are the issues that must engage our minds? What are the big issues today and what are the big ideas to resolve them? How can a country of 200 million people growing at about 3.2 percent a year or 26,685 children born daily provide enough jobs and opportunities for decent livelihoods for its people? How can we bring millions out of poverty? The President has promised that we will in 10 years bring 100 million people out of poverty. A perfectly achievable target. But how are we going to go about it? What are the great ideas that we need? How about human capital development? Importantly also, how do you unite diverse tribes and faiths to build a great and indivisible nation? How about security, law enforcement and the rule of law? What are the best models? How about ideology? Where do we stand as a party? What does our orientation imply? Can we widen our ideological scope? These are the big questions today and the ideas that will rule our world in the next few decades and these questions that have a reason must be answered by the ideas that will prevail in the coming years. These are the issues that should engage your thoughts and deliberations regularly. On the last issue, the question of party ideology, although it is true that our party's dominant tendency appears to be left of center, this is sometimes described as progressive or the progressive orientation. The people and their welfare are the center of the progressive persuasion and just as the Honourable Minister Tunde Fashallah has said, the human condition is the concern of progressive politics, improving the human condition, bettering the human condition. And I agree also with Mohammed who presented earlier that pragmatism rather than left or right is the way to go. This means that we must reject any purely laissez-faire economic model. Yes, the market and the private sector are critical, but also an active state capable of intervening robustly to reverse poverty and its implications, which is why the huge social investment programme was written into our manifesto and has been in every budget since our party came into office in 2015. So how going forward, how do we fund and sustain a much larger social investment programme? These are the questions that we must answer. There are, and here, you know, still on the implications of poverty, look at the huge challenges we have with human capital development. Stakes have the primary responsibility for education and healthcare. So the conversations which we must promote in our stakes, our state excursions as well as legislatures, must be how do we fund education and how do we develop curricula that will prepare our young people for 21st century jobs? And these are questions that must be answered, especially at the state level. It's very easy to assume that these are federal questions, but everyone of us who knows how our federation is structured must know that the states have primary responsibility for education and healthcare. And these questions have to be agitated in these places. How do we deploy technology to educate millions of out-of-school children? We have STEM, now STEAM education, which is clearly the way to go. And there are many tech-driven initiatives on deploying teaching of STEM and teaching of all these other curricula that we know will improve the quality of the children that are coming out of our schools. How do we take this forward? How do we provide healthcare and nutrition for our people? What is the best approach from here on for universal healthcare coverage? What is the best way of raising money for healthcare? Our current security challenges have created a perfect storm, but these challenges are not insurmountable. That is why we have men and women of ideas. In any event, they create the opportunity for the intervention always of the best ideas. Many countries of the world have had to deal with these issues in varying degrees at various times. That is what governments are for. America, possibly the world's most technologically advanced nation, has since January this year recorded 248 mass shootings. These are situations where a person walks into a place and shoots people down 248 times from January to now, and nobody has yet said, well, they should pack up and go. In what President Biden, President Biden describes mass shootings in America as an epidemic. These problems are the business of governments. This is what governments do. Governments resolve them, which is why we say as a government, and President Buhari has said repeatedly, that we are the best people, we are the best team to solve those problems and we will solve those problems and we will indeed. Now, when you look at a lot of what we are seeing, when you look at a lot of what we are seeing today, in resolving these issues, I think that the party and its think tanks have huge roles to play. We must contribute to the pool of ideas for resolving some of these issues and some of these problems. We must continue to push those ideas, and these opportunities that we have, including think tanks that will come forth from here, are the opportunities to resolve many of these issues. We don't throw up arms in the air. We don't sound as if we are the only ones who have a problem. All over the world, governments and countries have issues. An issue of existential importance to our nation is how to deal with the parochial tensions and divisive tendencies which are rising every day. You may rightly or wrongly blame generations before you for creating or deepening the notion that we should identify ourselves first as tribal or religious entities before our national identity, and how this has incrementally deprived us of the great benefits of the sum total of our diversity. Whatever your views may be, it has become the responsibility of your generation as well to fully advance the truth that indeed we are created equal, that our aspirations as people, whether you are Muslim or Christian, whether you are Igbo, Hausa, Ijo, Yoruba or whatever, wherever you may be from, our aspirations are broadly the same, and that we are all entitled to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that we all have a stake in this business called Nigeria. And it's the duty, and it's the duty of the state, it's the duty of the state to ensure that we are treated fairly, justly and inclusively. But how must the state carry out this task? The federal character and non-discrimination provisions in our constitution are important in ensuring fairness, and it is possible to implement them and still prioritize merit. More rigorous enforcement of these provisions and insistence on accountability by the federal character commission will be helpful. We must hold our agencies and government units more accountable for inclusion and fair representation. This leads me to the agitations for constitutional reform and structural reform and restructuring that have been so frequently made, especially in the past few months. In sum, the agitations generally seem to seek stronger states or deeper fiscal federalism. Yes, we have the Euro-5 Committee Report, which is our party's own contribution to the debate, and at least that should form the basis for further debate. And as Mr. President has said, we must also take advantage of the ongoing constitutional reform process to get our position across. He also said in his June 12 speech that government is willing to play a critical role in the constitutional amendment process, without usurping, of course, the powers of the National Assembly. So this opens up opportunities for further engagement on these issues. We can debate these issues, we can talk about these issues. And I think that these issues must engage the attention of those of you in the youth in our party. The principle that we are stronger together than in little parts is a sound principle. And it's my respectful view that those who advocate the breaking up of the country are terribly wrong. Our size is crucial for geopolitical and economic relevance. Our people will be better served by a large populace and diverse country. As with all big and diverse countries, our business is to make this union work. It is to give everyone a sense of belonging. It's to continue to balance the inequities and provide a socio-economic framework that guarantees everyone a fair chance. This country can take all of us, every one of us, regardless of tribe, religion, gender or even age. And I want to urge you to continually seek ways of making this union fairer and more just for the benefit of all. It is the responsibility, and I believe the very pertinent responsibility of those of you who are here today, to ensure that we frame the debate in a way that ensures that we divert our energies to how to make this nation stronger, how to make this diverse nation stronger. Those are the arguments we should be having today. All of those waiting on the sidelines hoping that this big country called Nigeria will break up into bits so that they can pick up the pieces will be very slowly disappointed. And I'm very sure that those of you who are sitting here today will prevent that from happening. Thank you very much.