Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, yesterday, said Nigeria’s increasing population is assuming a worsening trend, which keeps him awake at night.
Speaking at the public presentation of the 2020 Africa Progress Group (APG) report in Lagos themed: ‘‘Making Africa’s Population an Asset,’’ he lamented the challenge of providing basic amenities for the country’s ever-increasing population.
The report, Population As Asset Responsiveness Index (PARI), is anticipated to be a stimulus for African countries to show more responsiveness to making their populations more of an asset than a burden.
The former president stated that the reason for uprising and terrorism in the country is not far from the fact that there are large armies of unemployed youths who are being recruited into violent extremist groups and criminal gangs.
Making reference to the 11-year Boko Haram insurgency, Obasanjo said Mohammed Yusuf, the group’s founder, was noted to be a religious and forthright man who had lots of unemployed graduates around him.
He said: “Mohammed Yusuf who started Boko Haram was said to be a good and responsible man with a lot of idle youths waiting to listen to him. I heard there was a time he called his followers and said to one, ‘you went to university, how many years now since you graduated?’ He said three years and what are you doing now? He said, ‘no job.’ Then he replied, ‘you see the uselessness of your university education.’
0 comments:
Kindly comment here!