THE NIGERIAN YOUTHS AND DESTINY

Literally, a youth is a young person vibrant and full of energy, endowed with the overflow of strength in physical structure and mind. As young as youths are, they have tremendous ability to change the course and the fate of a nation. That’s why it is dangerous to have a community of youths without intellect and common sense. Youths in general are not just the future of a nation, they’re the strength of a nation; it is very important for the youths to have the consciousness of their identity and act as such.

The African Youth Charter categorizes youths as people between 18 – 35; Nigeria as a nation comprises of about 33.6 million youths according to statistics. This great number can be a blessing or a burden to the nation but imagine if the youths of this number have at least one important value to offer. 
No doubt, Nigeria is such a great nation endowed with so much natural resources (of cause, I’ve been hearing of this even when I was still in my mother’s womb), yet a large number of the youths struggle to survive. This could be because some have a poor background, maybe some of the youths are still blaming the government for their mishaps. But are we going to depend on the government for the rest of our lives? They already have a lot to take care of. Even in the African setting, there comes a time in a man’s life where he would leave his parents and carter for himself. Just like we would always blame the government for depending solely on oil and advise them to diversify, the youths should also stop depending solely on the government and find alternatives when the government disappoints.
However, finding these alternatives, the youths should know they have a destiny to fulfill and avoid various factors that tends to destroy it. These important factors are the reason for this article.

DESTINY
Destiny is a predetermined state; a condition foreordained by the divine or human will; fate; lot and doom.
Even though some don’t believe the myth of divinity, it still did not change the fact that we are all made by God and that He has destined us to make one great impact or the other at the appointed time.

THESE THINGS HAVE THE TENDENCY TO DESTROY ONE’S DESTINY

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE: The humans are the greatest being made by God on earth but it is unfortunate that uncertainty is one of the greatest fears of the human race. This is because so many lack the knowledge of who they are and what they are supposed to do in life.
If we are unaware of our destinies and go in the part we are not supposed to, this could lead to destruction of destinies unless helped by God.

The human mind is blessed with the discernment to know what they can do at ease, If the youths can know their gift early enough, they will get education in the area of their passion which would give them a high percentage to succeed both in their academics and their career.

LACK OF FAITH: Faith is simply the evidence of things we believe. The human mind is so powerful it could analyze and process thoughts of new ideas. The mind has the ability to know the probability of their business to thrive or fail but unfortunately, even when the mind has shown some people a good reason and evidence why they should go for a particular thing, they lack the faith in themselves.
When you don’t believe in your feasible ideas, people will talk you out of it; the dangerous part of it is, a lot of people who are supposed to be blessed by your idea will lose everything because of the lack of faith.
So when you have an idea you’re sure will bless humanity, bring it on; people don’t need to understand it. Most of the great men we know today had faith in what they came up with, they knew they would succeed if they start it up, hence taking the risk to start it up wasn’t a big deal.

Our school system is the most basic place where we can train our children and the youths to learn and make them useful in our nation; unfortunately, the system and most of our teachers have corrupted the minds of our students by putting fear in them of what they stand to face in the labour market if they don’t get the best of results. They teach them how to get good grades but not how to make great impact in the society. Believe it or not, your employer wants you to work so hard to put more money in his pocket while he pays you maybe 5% of what you earned for him, then as an employee, you won’t have the time and the resources required to make this change. 

If you study the pattern with which many of our lecturers teach their students in this country, you will observe they teach these ones to be selfish in nature. How? They teach the students to do all they can so they would be qualified to work for a particular firm; they don’t tell them they could study hard to reduce the unemployment rate in Nigeria because whatever they're learning will be applied in a certain firm. They closed the minds of the Nigerian students to creativity; they make then believe those who are employed in a big firm are those making it. They killed the dreams of these students who would have employed so many Nigerians by convincing them starting up a business or a company is not the right thing to do because they’re so afraid to fail. Of cause, why won’t they be afraid to fail? That’s what they are thought in school, they told them failure is the worst thing that could happen to a student. 

They also condemned those who don't make good results in their course, showing them fake evidences why they would become failures in life which will make the students lose hope; this in turn demoralizes the students who made poor results to go ahead to unleash the conglomerate in them; instead of helping these students, they make them believe they're finished! Only those of such students who believe in themselves go ahead to make even greater achievements than the said smart students. It's a pity. 

The Nigerian youths should wake up; they should acquire the right knowledge and also embrace common sense; they should stop being selfish and lazy and think of the little contribution they can make to improve our nation; they should take away fear and start up something reasonable that can help so many; they should kill the mindset of scamming people for a business rather than helping them. If my Nigerian youths know the tremendous power in them to think and make great positive change in our nation and still get commendations, they won’t engage in some dirty businesses they put their hands into today.

Nigeria is our nation, let’s work hard to make it worth living. Await the second part of this article and kindly share this with the nation to sensitize our youths.

Thanks for your kind attention.

Mofunanya Emmanuel N.
For Mofustunez.