 We're moving into our first major conversation for today and that is youth involvement in politics. The Saturday elections that took place here in Lagos and Ogun state showed a lot with regards to the involvement of young people and involvement of Nigerians generally in the electoral process. How can we get more young Nigerians to get involved in politics? How can we get more Nigerians to be interested in the whole electoral process and the political space? This morning we are speaking with Okwe Ami or Renoir who's joining us via Zoom. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Great to have you here. I'm going to start with of course referring to the Saturday elections in Lagos and Ogun state. You know, one of the things that was noticed is that it was marred with voter apathy. The numbers were embarrassing with regards to local government election. The Lagos state governor even mentioned that voter apathy was one of the things that he noticed. Not very many people showed up. And if you look at Nigeria's young population, there's millions and millions and millions of people who should show up when you hear of elections, when you hear of getting registered, when you even hear of participating in Nigeria's political space. But we don't see that. What would you say might be the major reason why? Right. So from where I'm sitting, I think one of the concerns around youth apathy as well as this last election is concerned is people first realizing how much of a disconnect or how much of a no difference you're making their lives at that level. You know, it shows how much, you know, how the power to the local government has been with you about over time, how the state government has been showed by government has been independent over a long period of time. And it just has to be able to connect to see how there will be any much difference in terms of, you know, now having to look at government elections. Why thank you for a lot of time. The reason why the local government election is even done by those state governors that the case may be, it's like a mobilization too and to, you know, kick back to people supported them at, you know, at the time, they were doing that by entire elections. If you see, I mean, look at what happened in, in, in the open space, even like social space, because we have elections coming up for humanitarian, to the essence of all that local government appoints either KTK or elective as the case may be, quote and unquote. It's just as a way of, you know, moving the base together. So it's been a huge disconnect. Without a doubt, you know, there's been an awakening. You know, young people, if we see what has happened, they're not young to run deal with the entire movement. There is definitely a awakening. But people are not, we really don't want tokenistic change. They want real change. You know, so the, the, the turnout right now for local government elections, people already cannot see how much of a difference it's to make in their life. So it has affected that participation at that level. The reality of it is that if you look at legal space and, and open space, actually young people are the ones, the majority of them are actually young people. You know, the very much establishing people who are not much, you know, there's not like, it's not an issue-based, it's not something they're spending for an agenda or there's a new manifesto they're presenting to the table to totally transform Nigeria. It's not the consolidation or evalidation of the executive to say, oh, yes, Governor Spongulou or Governor Dacoab, they're doing his job. So we just want to endorse it. There's nobody articulating a trade course to rally people around. So that, that's perhaps what I believe is responsible for the way we play. Well, there's also, you know, the perspective that a lot of young Nigerians don't really feel the effect of governance. And so they may not be able to see the relevance of going to, you know, participate or to vote. Do you agree with that? Because it's one of the things that I mentioned to the PDP spokesperson here in Lagos in an interview on Saturday, that one of the reasons, you know, why a lot of people may not be bothered about local government elections because they don't even see what the local government does for them. So, is that disconnect also one of the problems? Absolutely. So I try to add this to that. There is a general broad disconnect around governance. Well, I think it is better over time. I think one of the things we struggle with and within the youth development youth advocate, youth participation or inclusion in inclusion space is the ability to see how every decision of government affects your day-to-day living. You know, so the more you see how, okay, if you have a good government in place to directly affect your access to hospitals, the access to jobs and the apartment for a very long time. So that is disconnect. But that has changed over time. We've spent events right now that have played up to see how, for example, the end-class movement will declare case of eventually bringing the government to a point of negotation. We've seen potential powers of that. What level of local government? It's obvious. Now, people can differentiate that, okay, what exactly is going on? The selection process itself is all of the news that came out around somebody emerging as a candidate and afterwards the party will sit down and say, no, it's not your time yet. I give tickets to another person. So people just see it as a, you know, as a charade of the incubate power to just, you know, constantly need power and not watch delivering on any new change. Is anybody going to come up and say, I'm going to do something different from what the state government is doing? Is anybody going to come up and say that? So it's not, and you look at what has happened again in terms of the results. They will not take fall. You see, especially nobody willing parties, the one that, you know, takes all the, it shows the level of conversation and the variety of the context. It's not the context as it is maybe. So people have just given up to take away. It's time to realize that perhaps at the junction of, you know, gubernatorial presidential, and it's unfortunate, it also speaks to how much local governments have been killed. You know, the state government, there's a good conversation at the federal level even around people who are advocating for restructuring, around recognizing local government as a full-time government. In fact, the proponents of that right now are really recognizing two-time governments, which is the federal state, and that they see local governments as not as independent as they should be. So these are ongoing conversations, and I'm not surprised that it has cascaded down because the federal government election is protracted. We still don't have privacy on what exactly we expect. Are they independent and government? That's not being the case. Okay, so where do you think the change should come from? Because like you mentioned, there's a lot of young faces that you see now contesting, but, you know, there's still a level of, you know, distrust with these people because, you know, like you mentioned, it is possible that they're only just being thrown in there to fill in, you know, spaces where the federal state has young people in governance, not necessarily because they, you know, believed in the process or believed in, you know, in governance and they're going there to effect any change. So where do you think, you know, the change should come from? Should there be more interest? Should we see more university graduates, bankers, you know, doctors, you know, everybody believe, you know, that they have something that they can know in some way that they can effect change Absolutely, absolutely. So, personally, as a rule of thumb, I believe that we need more professionals in politics, not more professional politicians, right? We believe that we must both have we must have created values some way that you want to bring into politics on like what we have, I mean, rampant right now nowadays. So in terms of also young people, we're not saying young people should get into office just for the sake of the fact that they are young. No, that's not what we're saying. What we're saying right now is this is that we are the generation right now we are the product of the status quo. We understand the challenges better and are better wired to the nuances of today's governance and nobody should pinch us, they are more globally connected and the kind of ideas required to move the situation forward is more representative, not depository, you know, in a younger demographic than in the older ones. And we also want young people right now who understand the nuances of governance, telling it around constitutional, the constitutional will presently run. It has to be based on an agenda, not just on the fact that okay, you are younger and you belong to a certain demographic of 35 and under or 30 as number of the kids may be and that's why you want to run for office. So it's not official context, you know, we just don't want people that look young to be in office. So we just believe that for me, it has to be what is the agenda, what are we putting forward. It has to ultimately be issued if not to render just having a replacement so we have young people going into the police but recruitment coaches that brought them in is the same that was put in place by these same people who are trying to replace. So they are not going to change anything or have new ideas that present it whether they are going in the right direction to reinforce the status quo. It will be difficult to change something when you rule on that same course to get to power. Isn't that a challenge and isn't that one of the things that scares people from getting involved and believes that the system wouldn't accept you if you're not the chosen one, if you're not the one that the godfather or the governor or the traditional ruler has chosen to fill that position then you're not going to get in there. So how can we change that? How can a kundle who has been a doctor for the last couple of years and believes in his local government wants to effect change how can he believe in his political party and understand that he's generating enough popularity among his peers and among the society he will win instead of waiting to be anointed by a godfather? Right. So it's not that easy. The popular saying now it has become very rampant that power is not sub-dollar cards, right? So there's a need right now to get your numbers right. So I said create value. It's anything that we've seen over time politics is a game of numbers, right? You don't have to numbers. You don't have a clear-cut agenda that brings people together. Secondly, we cannot underplay the value that money plays in politics. The idea of how the godfather by just a part is a no-consecret. It is through resources. Some sort of people right now maybe through world, maybe through corruption, they need to amass wealth, spend the political party so that idea has been ignited and it is actually possible for us to do this thing. What we don't need to do is that how do we now make sure that we strategically pull those resources together to advance an agenda? It's a relay. Not an hundred meter rate, you know? And what we need to presently begin to do now is we don't have to pull into the old bad political party. We can decide to do that. At the end of it, we go down to numbers and we're picking up resources in there. We're doing action. We're doing ourselves together across the board. So some of the challenges we've also had over time is this decoupling around North and South and we also see soil play out during the NSAS movement where we in the South seem to be very bosterous, we are more progressive in ideal. Why is it not the big conservation? And it's easier to have I would say, I'm not trying to de-politically correct that it's easier right now to easily put them in line with the same player over time. So how do we ensure that our brothers in the North carry them along and make these things about issues? It's not about where you're from. It's not about being in North or South. It's fundamentally about unemployment and it's also terrible there. Having that avenue for continual dialogue and also seeing amongst ourselves as at the time some of the things some of us who have been criticism for at the time how quickly can we get some of our powers? How quickly right now do we want to have because we need resources. The money has to come. So we need to share we can mobilize our own resources to bring ourselves together if we're not in retreating the existing political structures how are we building our own? We've had about two years now to be 223 some years away. So a lot of work still has to be done and we have to be very realistic about when it's to be done. It's not a true party and it's not going to be sad to us. So that's my take on that really. What would you advise a young male-female Nigerian who wants to get into that office and doesn't have to be a governorship office it could be councilorship, it could be local government chairman it could be the State House of Assembly but wants to get into that position to do what he can to ensure that things are better for his people. He doesn't have any godfathers but he has a plan. What would you advise that person? What steps would you say that he or she should take? So first thing I would say is that I think it's important for us to understand the issues. I believe that whatever wants to move forward to change you cannot stop the problem you don't understand. So a lot of times when I engage young people when we talk it's really about what exactly do you want to do differently? You really have to be good at the challenges that Nigeria has. Secondly, you need to find like-mind you need to invest in networking while the other people are thinking like you say right now that in a room of 10 people you are the smartest. When this comes to show, you are the one who will go outside. So how well do you recruit people to begin to think the way you are thinking? Those are starting points. Secondly, you want to look at the political space. You need to do an audit of the political space. What are the existing, you know, do a sort analysis, do a personal analysis. See how well you realistically fit in and how you want to bring people together. Because at the end of the day it falls down to influence. You cannot influence every difficulty. So what do you do? Since you lost power over there we would... I want to also quickly mention something that I shared over the weekend and that was on a different platform. I was saying that a lot of Nigerians don't seem to care. You know, and the the end science protest, yes, it did show that young Nigerians are energetic and they know what they want here and there. But, you know, when it comes to actually being a part of the process, a lot of them don't care. And if you walk around, you know, your environment now, speak to the next 30 people and ask them who their local government chairman is. Or ask them who their representatives in the National Assembly are. They... I'm sure a good, you know, 20 out of 30 wouldn't know these people. They don't know, they don't bother to know. And it's the same thing that plays out when it comes to registering for your voter's card and getting involved with the elections and voting. So what do you feel must change? What do you think will be big enough to encourage young Nigerians to know these things, to want to be a part of the process? So I feel like sometimes we have a very short memory and, you know, understanding of the theory of change about, you know, how... We kind of represent some actions that need to take place for change to happen. I think that generally has been lost on us. We've not been able, as a collective, to see that input and output process, you know. So, as that happened, everybody went back to status quo. Yes, the struggle of dealing even comes into play and speaks to the apathy. So there's a need right now for some of us, you know. At the end of the day, the majority of people, have been intentional about explaining, mobilizing and informing people to see how, oh, election is in 2023. But the real players, if you look at the voting pattern as a case, maybe the e-profile that was removed by INAG. Look at the numbers of registration. You see some interesting numbers. You look at ocean, you have 163, over 200,000 registered voters. That's the highest. The only reason why that is happening is that I already suspect that some engineering is going on there. This group has got their election disclosed. You know. So you can already see that, see, the politicians right now, or as the case in the status quo, they are one step ahead. They know this game. But that's the only thing they know. So only if we understand how they are playing it, that is the only way right now we can beat them at that game. So we cannot afford right now to play the old streets and not be rooted in the understanding of exactly what is going on, what needs to be done. And I believe it's that information process. We need to continuously educate ourselves not on the theories of politics and on governance, but be rooted in our realities. I mean, my own reality is even that the disconnect amongst all the young people were not the same thing. The level of enlightenment is not the same. So how are we able to carry our folks around, our folks are long? Are we able to break down this communication in simple languages to say, okay, this is exactly what the problem is. This is what we need to do. This is the games we've been playing and all. So those are the issues. And I do not totally believe also that amongst the older generation also there are people right now who are rooted in the issues. So I believe that we also should seek partnership across, I mean intergenerational partnership because at the end of the day it is Nigeria we're trying to play. So this is my third purpose. We need to be strategic about organizing. The organization, we've done a lot of organization over the last couple of years. Now it's time to come together and build networks that will ultimately transform to the kind of change you want to see. I'm going to use the ocean state example that you just put out. You mentioned that there's some catalyst. There's some engineering that happens or that has happened in ocean state that has led to that number of registered voters. Would you say that we also need some catalyst across the country? There has to be some specific persons who are able to engineer more young people to understand the need to get involved in the process and get registered. There's also a trust deficit because I remember from 2014 there's persons who were part of that process that today would not be bold enough to speak in politics or in political spaces among young Nigerians because they've lost some level of trust with the Nigerian populace. So what kind of engineering would you recommend that needs to start to happen? Do you think that there needs to be leaders in different spheres here and there that should be able to pull together and get young people to get involved? Absolutely, absolutely. So interestingly there's a project right now that we're working on at our aim to see how we want to create a network of civil society organizations. Now already we have some of them doing in different pockets. In Abuja here you have some organizations actually taking a little laps of their offices and going to rural communities to actually run a help you register. You know so you get your form and things like that. So using the same similar model we're actually building a curation across the information to even address the disparity. If you look at the north and the south in terms of voter registration they are more involved over there. You know that participation is higher on the north and south. So we want to say how well to also bring the south to the same level of awareness and participation we should do less of the talking and talking about things being bad. Now it's time for actually to even get registered. Do I agree with you? We need influencers we need people right now who take the especially existing CSOs and concerned citizens and the model we're trying to run is to open it out to say you know we saw how people were involved in the NSAC movement and the resources of both small and old and people coming together and chipping in to make this happen. So we want to run a similar model if we're able to do it transparently and people can see directly the value that you're able to put on the table people will connect and through that we want to see how well can we increase can we directly you know increase registration to up to two million. Okay because of this our efforts right now we've had up to two to three million right now people register that would be a major success story and the beginning of that building block to all that change we want to see because they will not just surprisingly output in 2023. We need to begin to build it you know from now. So I agree that that's definitely a way to go to ensure that you know we see that desired outcome. The NIN process got you know millions of Nigerians you know to get registered and of course to connect their and I enter their SIM cards but that was you know see it seemed like it had to be done you know a specific way by the you know federal government to get that done because of course you know the normal Nigerian attitude to some of these things you know they'll leave it to next week or maybe next month and you know probably never get to do it. You know major telecommunication brands you know TV brands whatever you know and the likes also runs certain types of campaigns every now and then to get people to register on their platforms how possible can we you know do that you know with regards registering for voting is there campaigns that can be thought of that should be able to get young Nigerians to get registered the same way they will register on a platform because someone is going to give 10,000 or 5,000 an hour you know on you know social media platform can we do you know engineer something like that to get more Nigerians you said 2 million we should be able to get a you know good 15 million Nigerians registered 20 million Nigerians registered you know on these platforms but we're registered to vote rather. Absolutely. So I said that from the silo of our own organization the OK group of friends let's come together now the ideal or what would be the super story is a situation where such an idea right now catches fire and we have pockets across the country of people doing similar models right now in 1,500,000 that so at the end of the day is also important right now for the movement especially let me call it voter registration movement to not be seen as apolitical it's not to further a particular political agenda of PDP or APC as the case may be to also make it issue based we're not telling to come and register because we want to tell you who to vote for but hopefully what we want to do is build a data base be a channel for which we now enlighten people about what the issues are so I agree with you that it has to be that and it's unfortunate, INEC has demanded to actually sensitize the public but the reality right now this is that INEC as far as that is concerned do not have the required resources to do it in a kind of way in which you know would be significantly impactful so it's important right now for well-meaning citizens you know we just believe that okay this actually is a collective rescue mission we have to collectively give direction to pick up that initiative to say how do we want to support the drive that INEC is doing you know how do we want to break down the communication at the end of the day we're not a homogeneous entity where you know where you can use one English language right now to communicate to everybody you need to find out people you know in their localities pick out the languages that exist across the country and show that all plug into a grid about a new Nigeria which starts with first understanding what the issues are in fact it should be a case of less even if anyone is not talking about the faultiness of the constitution and how our constitution perhaps is the greatest problem that we have we don't even want to listen to it you shouldn't even be on the platform running for precedent so we want to make an issue base move away from all of that sectionality oh the north is down to the north and the south to not focus on the issues you know so what are you standing for exactly what are you going to do what are we going to do with your accountable for the 400 days you know we want to move beyond show off those rhetorics and I believe the media also has a significant role to play still so much the media has to play you know because the media is actually that platform you know where people are educated where people get to know exactly what the issues are so I think that kind of partnership will also go a long way in sensitizing people there's ideas and so many ideas that can work and I appreciate the work that you're also doing we have these money or do I describe them the platforms or you know get you know bring in five people and then you move up the ladder you know and if those five people bring another five people bring so it's something that we can work with regards voters registration you know get every person to register 10 people you know get 10 of your friends to register 10 to ensure that 10 of their friends are registered and if 10 people reach out to 10 people and those 10 people have their own 10 people it increases the numbers you know it's really just the interest and you know having these number of people and wanting to ensure that it is done and that's just an idea I thought about sitting down here now an idea came to mind we're doing a consultation brainstorming session last week and I was involved in the World Bank HIV fund in 2012 to 2014 some of the strategies that we explored you know to increase people going into do the HIV test was you know we started we created fund sensors where they were you could win things right so we put up gift items like a raffle draw you know created music sensors where there was music so people can come and dance just to drag people in and when you drag people in right now if you do this test you get the raffle draw and the opportunity you could win you know we got these items that people donated from clothes to maybe you know small earphones to use clothes to stand out things like that and it's okay if you do your test so absolutely and the other came into my eyes one of our partners brought that up similar model across when we began this voter registration drive so I do agree with you a lot of ideas and I think the more we have these ideas come to the table and people begin to implement them the better for all truly enjoy speaking with you or where me or you know or you're an international development specialist thank you for joining us this morning and I hope that we can put these ideas to work, God bless you thank you, thank you for having me all right stay with us we'll go on a short break when we come back to the state where of course the four more students of the Bethel Baptist School have been set free we'll be having a conversation on what more needs to be done and what is the current situation with regards to those still in captivity stay with us here on the breakfast