 Welcome back to our June 12th Democracy Day special. We're looking at Nigeria 28 years after. You can also watch us live on our new YouTube channel Plus TV Africa Lifestyle. You can be part of the conversation by calling us or sending a WhatsApp message via the numbers that you see on your screen. Now let's get into the conversation. We're talking Nigerian use. The use in the country are yet to become influential in politics 60 years after independence, 28 years after June 12 1993 election and 22 years after the return to civil government. The average age of presidents upon assumption of office since 1999 is 60 years. Many current government appointees, especially ministers are politicians who are above 50 and who have been in the system for long. They're not too young to run ads signed in 2018 could change things, but skeptics say electoral reforms and de-emphasis on many politics are still needed to have more young people in politics and governance. A media executive and politician, Gide Adediron, is here to discuss youth participation in politics in the last 28 years. Now Gide Adediron is also the lead visioner of Lagos for Lagos movement. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Good afternoon. Well, it's a breath of fresh air every time I have to talk to a young person about politics. Even though these days you see more and more young people get involved in politics, but I'm going to start by asking the question that everybody's afraid to ask. Why do young people complain more than they act when it comes to being involved in politics as opposed to complaining about the government or whoever is in leadership? Okay. All right. Thank you. Let's first look at youth in politics. So who are these youth? We'll break it into two. I'll tell you that presently as we have, I negate how 84 million registered voters in Nigeria has 51% between the age of 18 and 35, and between that age of 18 and 50 is about 80%. Okay. Yes, you do have youth participating in politics, but for wrong reason. The youth that participated, that is participating in politics, are tools in the hands of the older politicians. Exactly. If you go to the grassroots, you see a huge number of youth really participating with us tools. So the other part is the one you see on Twitter, sitting there, rant and talk about policies just to have their say. But having our way would be all of us to involve in the process at the grassroots. Then for those that are participating because they truly participating at the grassroots are the ones you see going everywhere, running errands for the older generation who have refused to live that kind of path. So what is the difference? The difference is somebody needs to go down there and speak sense into our heads and say, you know what, enough of being tools in the hands of these people. Because when they are done, what you see them do next is to get their own children to also occupy that space and continue to use us as tools. Now, the real problem is in the huge number of some of us who should know and what we do is to sit on social media every time, all the time, you know, rant about your process. We like to go out there to protest and forgetting that protest, of course, is good, is our right. But we can only have our say with that. We can't have our way in the process. So what we need doing now is to have our way. How do we have our way? We have that huge number is to convert our numerical strength, you know, by populating the political landscape. If it remains the game of numbers, we'll get there, you know, populate that trade and see how we can actually get this power to ourselves. So more on that, especially your own involvement, too. But we are joining us virtually a lawyer, author and executive director of Girls Just Want to Run. And that's Nafisa Atikou, a digital. Good afternoon, Nafisa. Good afternoon. Thank you, Nafisa, for joining us. We will get to you, but while we're still at it, let's come back to you. Let me just quickly throw this over. So looking at what someone said recently, in particular Pastor Tunde Bakari, he said something during the conference. He said the problem that we are facing now was caused by a set of youths talking about the military leadership when they took over governance in their 30s, you know, and that it would take the youth to bring us out of that problem. Now, irrespective of where you stand on his statement, how do we drive that process to see youth bringing us out of, you know, what we can call gerontocracy in terms of the 60 years and above being in governance? How do we change the dynamics? I just said it. What we need to do is to come together. First, we need to take the battle to the stronghold of the status quo, which is the grassroots. Don't let us deceive ourselves. We can't win elections on Twitter. If the current electoral act is anything to go by, you have to be physically at the polling unit to cast your vote, to win. Then again, if you look at the numbers, the politicians know where they get their numbers at the end of the day. If you continue to run to Twitter, they don't even listen to you. But every election period, they know where to go and they get that number and deliver whoever they want to deliver. Look at the answers protest. Lagos was the epicenter, really. Right. So immediately after that protest, there was a bad election and the same lucky axis. Look at what happened. APC shouldn't have nearing winning that election at all. Not only did APC actually win that election, but with wide margin. So what are we saying? So for us to get this right, we first need to take the battle to their stronghold and create the necessary pollution at that level. But when they have this apathy that their votes do not count, that when they try to vote, the thing is being rigged, I'm not putting any party in contest now. So where do we build that trust for them to come in? I mean, you just eat the nail at the right place. Let me take you back to very recent scenarios in Lagos. I mean, Lagos where we have the supposed leader of all Democrats. Under his watch, they had this primary election for local government election. And nothing like primary. At the end of the day, somebody starts somewhere and wrote out the 57 names of local government chairman and they would just turn it out. Not even say, okay, this man that we have picked is called this total number of votes. They went in all the worlds where there's supposed to be having an election. They stopped it with thugs. Yes, they continuously been using that to scare us away from this trade. But look, for us, we've determined that we're not going to give in, we'll confront it. If we have that huge number in a general election where they don't have control over, we can actually rest of this path. What we need to do is to step down from this hour, social media, Twitter, everything, and hit the grassroots. What we call political wars. There are zones. You need to be physically present to know where this is. Some of us don't even know where they vote in their area. But in Lagos, for Lagos government, there's something that we have done. We have created a committee that would assist people on Twitter to say, you know what, the Twitter session is coming on the 28th of June who assists you to get registered. If you need to move your PVC from your previous address to new address, we'll also assist you. There's some of the things that we're doing to bring us to ensure that we take this very seriously enough of protest because we can only ever say with that having our way is to get involved in the process. Alright, let's go to Nafisa. Nafisa, yes, of course you are a young person. Congratulations are in order. Yeah, let me just quickly talk about pick up from where he stops. He's saying that we need to go to the grassroots. Now, I'll paint a scenario. In 2019, there was a young Nigerian from the southeast who wanted to run for presidency. And he came from the UK. And the question I asked him was where is your route? Where is your backing, your structure? Do you have a structure in Nigeria? Do the people in your local government or in your ward know you? How well are you known? How long? When was the last time you came to Nigeria? And these questions were pertinent because he said that you need to start from the local government. But we see a lot of people wake up and want to join politics. We see them run for governorships. We see them run for senators and House of Assemblies. But we do not see young people vying for those smaller offices which should be, you know, the starting point. Can I ask you why? Well, to be honest, I think it was all about the knowledge and understanding of the political landscape in the country. So, you know, this, while I want to say that it's theory has been overflown, I don't necessarily think so. So, usually, young people, when they come into the political landscape, when they come into the political environment and say that they want to get involved in politics, they want to, you know, vote, they want to run for office, it is a thing. We have not necessarily had the kind of tutelage or mentorship that we should have had in this whole new political ecosystem. It's just recently that programs have started, young people have tried to infiltrate the system because, you know what, young people have been used as an instrument to win elections, as touts, as, you know, mobilise us, not exactly as stakeholders in the system. Young people right now are not seen as stakeholders in our democracy. So, there was no avenue of tutelage or mentorship to stay. If you want to get involved, this is how you should get involved. You need to go to the grassroots, you need to understand your local government, you need to understand the stakeholders in your local government. Those things where, how, like, those vital pieces of information were not given to them. So, of course, somebody that doesn't know or understand how the political ecosystem is will literally just come in from America and just start to, you know, go for governorship or go for a house of resposition because they don't really necessarily understand how it works here. How do you really need to, because, to be honest, democracy is about the people and it's mostly about the people at the local government because those are the ones that are mostly connected to the people. So, I think it's more of an issue of, I think it's a knowledge deficit. Well, I'm just sorry. I have to come in there. They haven't exactly been involved in the system. Yeah, yeah. So, I wanted to ask, kind of curiosity, do you necessarily have to be running for office for you to get involved in politics as a young person? Should that be the ultimate goal? Because I see that happening all the time. Every time we say young people in politics, then you hear they're not too young to run and this and that. Because everybody who's a politician does not necessarily have to run for office, right? So, for our young people, how do we change that mindset? Because I'm always curious, must you want to have or hold an office for you to get involved in any political party or be part of one? Well, like I said, two things. I think it's more, once again, it's more of a knowledge deficit. When you think of politics in Nigeria, you instinctively think of running for office or holding an office. Number two, when you think of politics in Nigeria, you want to be placed at a particular position where you can now be relevant and influence policies, you know, ecosystems so that things can be better. Or worse, it depends on the motive of the person. So those are two things, a knowledge deficit. When, sorry, I run an organization called Girls Just Want to Run, and part of one of the things that we did was to show people that look, you don't necessarily need to run. Okay, we have a bit of a connection problem there. But let me continue with GD. I'm looking at some funny statistics here, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. We have the likes of Governor Yaya Belou, who was 40 years when he became a governor. We have a bank colleague who was not only young, the speaker of the House of Representatives, but he was even a single man. And we've had quite a lot of people who were in their 30s when they were in politics. But they were taking the true replicas, the representatives of the kind of youth we are talking about. I will leave you to answer that. Well, you see, you can't judge everybody. Mine is just a question. I'm just saying, if you look at a book of the people who were in politics, you can't judge everybody. We have a book of the people ruling us today. They are in their 60s, above 60s and under. Can we then say that all of them in that category are those that we have there? So I think it would be very unfair if we generalize and say, okay, you want to pick one or two persons that have had the opportunity to govern and say, okay, that is what youth represent. But again, you have to give it to these guys. Whether you like it or not, they have been able to throw their heart in the ring and they have been able to tell us that, yes, we can. If they could, there is nothing wrong in all of us in our early 40s and late 30s to say, okay, we can also do the same. So we can totally say that is what Nigerian youth actually represent. And these guys you mentioned as well, they've had their own positive contributions to the landscape. You have to give it to them. So the same way you can, in its entirety, rubbish them, the people, majority of those that are governing us, we are 60s, 70s. So we should strike some balance. That is what we're saying that we can do things differently. This is 2021. Let's take Ligos for instance. For the past how many years, 22 years now, we'll be running what we call Ligos in the land of 1998 in 2021. Is there anything wrong with that? Of course, a lot has changed between 1998 and now. This is a digital age. Yes, I'm telling you, this is a digital age. We have a government in Ligos who has spent two years in office with no single signature project that you can point out, okay, this is it. Hamburg data would send out last election year. It gave us at least 3% out. Three projects that you can point out in these two years is a JAR flyover. There is a bullet JAR flyover. There is the OSHO, the terminal. In two years, you can point to something. So this is how bad we've had it. And you now see the supposedly leader of the democrat came up recently just for us to discover an integrated deficit in the process of their own primary election, internal election within the members. So if they can treat us like that as members, how do they go through it? Are you a member of APC? Of APC, but you can call us a new entrant. We are in APC to change the old orders. We are in APC to inject new energies, fresh ideas. I don't want us to make it about a political party. Let me push you a bit further. We keep putting new wine in old wine skin and let me explain what I mean by that. We're asking young people to join these political parties that we see as run by the same people that we think have a stereotypical mindset of how Nigeria should continuously be run. And we want these same people to mentor these young people as to the modus operandi of how political parties run. How are we certain that their mindsets will not also be somewhat configured to start thinking and acting like the same people because you said something about the Dino Malayis and all of these people, that they have done some positives but of course they have their problems. What is a guarantee that there's not going to be that same transference of spirits for the want of a better term? Let me tell you the mistake we're making here as Nigerians. We're forgetting that there's nothing in the three-letter world, CPC and PDP. It's all about the people that you have in that circle. So every election is just like what is playing out now. You see the opposition party coming up to accuse the ruling party of not doing enough. Are you now see the same set of people living to the new party and so it's still about the people. What we are saying is that if we as young people use our numerical strength to delete the party because don't let us deceive ourselves. If the current electoral party is still heading to go by CPC, we still need the party to beat. Don't get it twisted. When our colleagues came up with YPP, use political party and they said okay, we're going to register this, we're going to get this done obviously. For some of us who actually understand the nitty-gritty of this trade, just sit back and say okay, what is going to happen in three days, three days after online, they registered new NYPP to foster that process. Nothing more. I'm coming back to that. That's very sensitive. Let me go to Nafisa. Marianne asked you a question and I want to stay on that. If you look at what a lot of young people are looking at to be in governance, a lot of them would prefer to wait for appointments rather than getting elected. The reason is simple. They feel they don't have the deep pocket to run this election. Don't you think the strategy needs to change because if you really want to be in charge of issues like this, you also need to get elected? Yes, definitely. I think that strategies need to change in order to make sure that we have all the elections in India expensive. Very, very expensive. Until we get to the stage where we can see that we can not system structure policies that would be able to curtail how expensive elections are, we need to do what we have to do. I always like quoting this example. I know totally different countries. That's Alexandra. She is not representing her constituency in the American House but my point is not necessarily in the structure and system of their country. She was against I think a particular opponent rather than being in the seat for about two to three times and of course her deep pockets. She was simply a bartender and she was running to represent her constituency. She marshaled the resources, basically the human resources of the people who were helping her to campaign and her constituency. If we do need to get young people elected, like the other speakers said, we need to be united in what we want as a country and we need to help crowdfund push, draw on our collective pockets and human manpower resources to put the people that we know who deliver the kind of dividends of democracy that we need in this country. So elected the right people into office is a collective effort. A collective effort of not just the person dipping their hands into their own pockets to sponsor themselves to run, but for all of us I really know that we want to have a better country. It's one of the things we tell the young women who come and say, oh, how do we get involved in politics? I don't want to run for office. You don't want to run for office. Okay, help someone else to campaign. Donate to their campaign. Donate merchandise money. What else? Donate because honestly this country is for us and if we do not unite to push the people that we need there, then we won't head anywhere. So definitely we need to have a different strategy. Young people need to have a different strategy to be able to push this country forward. Nafisa, I just want to push you a little bit on that and then I will come back to it. When you say that we need to crowdfund but that also boils down to because if I want to push for example, my colleague Caya de Toronto, let's say Kedja local government area, I have to be certain that the people that live on his street trust him. The people in his world have been able to test that he is a man of dignity and he's trustworthy. So again, it takes me back to the question that I asked you earlier. If people do not know you, why would they want to invest in you as a person? So what are young people doing to educate, young people like you doing to educate other young people as to why they need to be back to their grassroots and they need to not just wait to run for office but do more than just sit around and wait for someone to pay their way into office. Oh, pay their way. That's very, very strong term. Very, very strong term. Okay, but yes, what are we doing? What are young people like ourselves trying to tell other young people to do? So yes, going to your grassroots is something like I said, it's becoming more of a mantra for those who want to not enter into the political room. For example, I was at the, I was selected as one of the participants for the gender and women leadership, political leadership training last year. I think it's last year. And one of the things that they kept emphasizing was go back to your grassroots, compete for your as a council of your world, compete for your local government, go there, execute community projects, do what you need to do. You see, one thing, and it's also basically one thing that we keep on telling young women when we tell them go to your grassroots and do projects, do community projects, they start to think oh, I just graduated from university, I don't have a job. Or even if I have a job, it's paying me something that I cannot exactly use to execute the things that I need to do that I would want to do in my community. So how do I handle this? And how we basically open their mind up to opportunities, such as collaboration, you know, you can partner with this person, you can partner with this organization, you can partner with this NGO. Say you want to put how I put it a world, you want to put a community pharmacy, you want to put a community health center. These are things, write a proposal. Because we need to be, like I said, we need to have new strategies. So you need to be innovative when you know that you don't have so much, but there's so much you want to do. Put a proposal together, partner with your friends, partner with organizations, partner with NGOs. These are things that really will happen in real life. And then put this proposal towards them and get your resources to go back to your community and do what you need to do. Because you're right, once your community is able to attest, even before you got elected, that you help them to build up the system. You know, that's what we call structure. When we say police could do it, it's not necessarily the buildings or the facilities that they put there. The structure refers to people who can attest to your diligence, your persistence, and your selfless leadership within that geographical system. Perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we continue with this conversation, for those who are just joining us, this is our Democracy Day special. And you can be part of the conversation. We want you to join the conversation. So you can send us a WhatsApp message. Our numbers are on your phone. You can call if you want to call us 0909-840-8408. And you can send us a WhatsApp message on 0814-0444-42. Please do not call the WhatsApp line. Just send us a WhatsApp message. We're going to go straight to the messages. I just want to read quickly two messages. I know that these messages came in earlier on. Somebody here, Solomon here says our economy, our economic downturn is a reflection of our confused public policy that has promoted control rather than competition. Thank you Solomon for your message. And we have another one here. He was reacting to a dating wrong where he says Nigerian leaders have really truncated a lot of things. How can this crap history from our academic calendar he said I asked someone about June 12 and he couldn't give me anything tangible. Of course there's a lot about us. Let's also look at the issue I asked and that has to do with being strategic, waiting for appointment and you don't have deep pockets. You are already in there. Is it because you have deep pockets or how do you intend to navigate this? I haven't said you have deep pockets. Probably you do. How do you intend to build this structure she talked about? When she talked about structure she was talking about mobilizing people. She was talking about how to get people committed to the course you were talking about. And trust me most times they will ask you what you have for us. I think Nafisa was actually right and I want to say to you that for instance in the last six years when we started this movement we know that first before we get in there you need to do some level of empowerment at the grassroot level before they can see you. But more importantly there is something that we haven't tapped and I said it earlier which is our numerical strength as we use in Lagos for instance we have about 65% of our population which happens to be used that about 30 million people. Imagine if we contribute 1,000 you know the amount of money that can come to. But they've been using that to scale us away from coming into the system. You don't have money you know they will kill you they have fogs and all of this. But it has gotten to a point where we need to confront our fear scale I mean squarely. And it is by so doing you now realize that over 90% of what we fear wouldn't even happen you know. And I will say to you that in the last six years some looked at us like what were they doing? Is it crazy? What does it think it is? But today the story has changed. Now they are now seeing believability. They are seeing that it is possible for us to actually get this done. So consistency is one of the things that we need to really get in there. It's just like any business you want to do just again there. One day is going to pay off. So for six years we've been going everywhere. We've been telling Lagosians that look you don't need to do it until somebody will introduce your governor to you and say I have chosen so-so person and all of you will not be looking at it. Who has seen it before? What does it do? But you can know somebody who wants to be. There is different between being picked and you expressing your kind of ability to say yes I can. You first have to believe in yourself before anybody can even say okay let's look at him twice. But what we've had in the last year is just mayor colonization. Somebody just come and pronounce, I've chosen XYZ. All of us follow. That we change in 2023. But we do know that it's not a trade we are going to venture into in six months, seven months of that election when everybody comes in. That is why we started years back because we know this is not your regular election. It's something want to shift and that's the last shift. But before we do that we need to take the battle down there. Talk to people. Tell them you don't need to wait until you start looking at or trying to know who that person is. For the first time in Lagos, and this is what Lagos for Lagos is all about, we want to elect an independent governor. The one that wouldn't require a second level approval before you can get things done in Lagos. That is what this is all about. Of course we need the governor that you talk to and say yes, I will. Not the one that I would say okay, let me get back to you. That's what we need. We need a governor that have 100 percent control over the finances of Lagos. Today, Lagos is the richest state of it in the entire federation. Let's take the conversation beyond Lagos now. I don't know whether you agree with some of the things he has raised. Looking at federation in Nigerian politics, some have argued, and I think you've seen that in other climes too, that these exist in different parts of the world. But it seems we are not close to coming out of that piece that we found ourselves. Hello. Could you take a question again? I missed the first half of what you said. Basically, talking about federation, how do we come out of it? How do we have leadership that we can ask questions directly and they will give us a response? Leadership that we truly chosen from the palmaries up to being the leader at the general election. Did you get that? All right. Yes, I got you clearly. So, well, that's a tough question because you know the way our entire system is raised. Godfatherism right now, if you need to progress up the political steps, you need a godfather somebody that will literally take you and say that I have crowned you my successor. I have crowned you the person that will take over after me. Now, I think when I started this conversation, I said that right now young people are not seen as stakeholders in democracy, rather they are seen as instruments to win elections. We need and a lot of young people because a lot of young people still have that mentality that oh, this party, this APC, this PDP is yours or God, we are just here. Whatever you tell us to do, we will do. I know because I have heard this thing from a youth leader in this country. And if you continue with that mindset, if a youth leader has that mindset, what do you think the rest of the followers will have? It's the same mindset. We need to move from the part where we say that we are instruments or we are helpless to the part where we basically reclaim our power as stakeholders in our democracy and we will tell them that us young people, we are stakeholders in this democracy. So, when you bring something to the table and we know that it is not favorable for us, we will push back. Like the other speakers also said our numerical strength, but the problem with us is that we are not united as regards and to be honest, the issue of our unity is something that we need to solve. It's a really deep problem and it goes on to the fabric of unity in this country, our history, our background. That's the reason why we are not united. If we don't solve this problem, we will never be united and we will never accomplish anything. So, the issue of Godfatherism is we need to move from actually having leaders that are chosen for us to actually choosing our leaders for ourselves. But we can't do that unless we own the system and before you own the system we have to integrate the system. That means you have to join the political parties. That is one thing that I feel like young people are not necessarily doing on mass. They are not uniting to join political parties where they know they think they can alter the structure, alter the system and achieve the dividend of democracy. Let's be the one with the best competition and this is an idealistic scenario. Let's be with the one that has the best competence, you know, get the ticket. That idealistic and we haven't gotten there, but I feel like this is what we can do. First of all we need to understand that we are going to integrate the system and then we need to own the system. Then we cannot afford to push back with the amount of power and unity and the structure that young people will be able to attain. And finally, in a sentence before we go Mr Dediara, in closing there are lots of young people who are watching and lots of them are responding, lots of them are saying things that they want. But what about what they can do to make those things they want come true? I don't know if you allow me to still restrict myself in Lagos, but it happens. Let's make it general. I think my pattern would be to call on all of us, actually. Just like the officer said, the only problem we have is that we have not been able to see that we should come together unlike our leaders that you see irrespective of their pateliness, still see them fraternizing with each other, marrying their children with each other. But in our own case they've succeeded in dividing us and then we just go with what it's time for us to really come together and see how we can drop whether or not you're a Muslim or a Christian or you're of the instruction and come together by so doing, a numerical strength can really count. But if you don't do that, we'll remain slaves forever. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's the lead vision of Lagos for Lagos movement. You'll find out what that means in the coming days. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I think you just corrected or it's Nafisa Abubaka No, it's actually Nafisa Atiko Thank you so much. Thank you very much for being part of the conversation. Break in 2018 President Mahmoud Buhari declared June 12th as Nigeria's New Democracy Day. It was part of the compensation for the injustice that was done to the winner of the presidential election held on that day in 1993. As part of our June 12th special series Osaroghe Obawan examines the role played by some of the key actors in the struggle who are now late.