Feature/OPED
Mobilizing Youth for Effective Civic Participation
By Mayowa Olajide Akinleye
Nigeria is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 12 of that document establishes that young people must be heard. They must be listened to and taken seriously. It is their right. This idea presupposes that there is a speaking, an expression that is present but ignorable. Articles 2 and 13 recognize this seeming powerlessness and, in seeking to protect the right to be heard, establish that young people have a right to not be discriminated against and can freely express themselves without fear.
Yet, 95% of its youth population does not feel heard; at least three out of four young people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and that they are powerless to stop it. Nobody, they believe, is listening. This is a breach of a basic human right. Reacting to the Lekki shooting, one protester said “we spoke up thinking our voices would matter, only to cruelly find out that even our lives didn’t.”
Proving that rights, when not empowered by a commitment to duty, are useless. My right to life is worth something because I have a duty to not kill myself, and others have a duty to not kill me. Once the commitment to that duty becomes optional, my right to life is mere window dressing.
In the longest run of our democracy, the best we have had is a tokenistic commitment to listening and accounting for the dreams, needs, and concerns of our youth population—mere window dressing. As a result, there are unequal opportunities for political participation and civic engagement, our educational systems are struggling, high youth unemployment and migration, heightened helplessness, and a lack of voice in making decisions that positively affect their lives and create social change.
Nigeria and Nigerians have a duty to hear its young people and mobilise them to develop into active, responsive, and equal participants in the social, economic, and political fabric of her society. It is the onus of the state and its agents to enforce this duty and ensure an abiding commitment to its veracity.
Why must the state do this, and how can it do it successfully? These are the questions to which this article will offer answers.
The government’s overarching responsibility is to protect. The foundation of a state’s efficacy is steeped in how well it fares in its role as a protector. This burden of ensuring security is the primal justification for the social contract that is the cornerstone of state formation. Simply put, a government that fails to effectively secure its people is a blatant failure.
Listening to and responding to its youth population is critical for any state seeking to secure its citizens. This approach impacts security on three fronts: physical security, economic security, and political security.
Physical security is simply the protection of assets from physical disruption and events that could cause serious loss or damage for the owner. The rise of kidnapping, militancy, and oil bunkering in the south-south; insurgency in the northeast have deep-seated foundations in problems created by the feeling of powerlessness and neglect young people experience.
The fallout from the shooting at the Lekki Tollgate saw massive destruction of property in the city as well as all around the country. 205 critical national security assets, corporate facilities, and private property were attacked, burned, or vandalised. An estimated 71 public warehouses and 248 private stores were looted across 13 states. The multi-billion-naira Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) infrastructure was crippled. Police stations and offices of political parties in Ondo, Okitipupa, and Ibadan were looted and burned. Private homes and businesses of public officials were looted, and a traditional ruler’s palace was desecrated. The Yoruba have a saying: “A child that you refuse to build will eventually sell off or destroy the other things you built instead.”
When the youth population is heard, the result is increased trust in government institutions and systems, leading to better cooperation between them and the government. This increased cooperation can result in more effective law enforcement, crime prevention, and safety awareness; an increased sense of ownership and personal responsibility that enables community policing and reporting; and a lower predilection to violence because of strong mediation and negotiation frameworks.
The International Committee of the Red Cross defines economic security as the ability of individuals, households, or communities to cover their essential needs sustainably and with dignity. Food, shelter, transportation, clothing, healthcare, education, and means of production are examples of such needs. Economically secure countries globally—the UK, Australia, Singapore, Germany, Japan, etc.—typically have institutions and systems that ensure at least any two of political, educational, and economic empowerment for their youth populations.
This is evidenced by the quality of education and skill-building institutions, open government processes, open media, open markets, adherence to the rule of law, and inclusive political mechanisms. Nurtured by the push and pull effects of this reality, more young people become active, productive, and skilled and gain more economic and anthropological power in that society. They become smarter, wealthier, gain influence, start new industries, and contribute excellently to existing ones, ultimately increasing the quantity and quality of production, which in turn expands economic prosperity for everyone.
Political security refers to how resilient, fair, and efficient the governance framework is in upholding the rule of law and representing the interests of its constituency. It usually sets the stage for physical and economic security. The 1994 Human Development Report defined it as the prevention of government repression, systematic violations of human rights, and threats from militarization. These values are enshrined through the sustained development of political systems oriented towards human rights, democracy, and good governance.
Cogent youth engagement will improve the skills of and opportunities for young people to interact with and navigate the political system, encourage informed civic participation that will hold officeholders accountable, and hence deepen our democracy. The ability of a political party to consistently identify, attract, and project credible and promising young talents within its ranks will, in time, strengthen the party’s influence, ensure the identity, values, and ideologies of the party stay relevant within the mainstream of national conversations, and will have trained and empowered new generations to carry the baton. This type of inclusive handover is crucial for political sustainability.
Civic participation among young people is usually more of a response than a duty, as they have more pressing priorities and don’t understand the burden enough to care. Therefore, they must be catalysed. When the government is committed to their growth, they respond with patriotism and pride; when a society is hostile to them, they respond with anger and distrust, as is the case with Nigerian youth.
There are three preconditions that are indicative of this. First, Inspiration: Do young people feel inspired? What are their sources of inspiration? Secondly, motivation: What are the barriers to their participation? How strong are they? Are they willing to cross them? Why? And lastly, empowerment: What are their competencies? Can they afford the financial, physical, and intellectual costs of crossing them? Honest responses to these questions provide a detailed synopsis of the level of civic engagement we can expect from our young people.
Government and stakeholders must begin to prioritise activities that positively contribute to the identified indicators. These activities are grouped into five categories:
Activities that promote legislation, policies, and budget allocations for youth empowerment and engagement: Despite some progress in this regard with the formulation of a national youth policy, the signing of the “Not Too Young to Run” law, the establishment of youth parliaments and councils, and the 75 billion naira Nigeria Youth Investment Fund. Implementation is still a sore spot.
The Ekiti State Youth Parliament, for example, has been unable to access its budget provision for over three years, summarily stunting the efficacy of its operations. More work needs to be done to sidestep bad faith actors and earth legislation, policies, and financing so that they reflect and respond to niggling peculiarities.
Secondly, activities that support, create and sustain structures for young people’s participation and civic engagement. The private sector, civil society, trade unions, advisory councils, student councils and unions, youth parliaments, clubs, political parties, community development or peer group associations, trade unions, and advisory councils are major nests of engagement where young people can get involved and develop the skills and network they need for more extensive involvement in community development, politics, and governance.
The perverse stranglehold that cronyism, cultism, and thuggery have on these spaces limits young people’s interest and participation and is also to blame for the adversarial stance of stakeholders. It is, therefore, necessary to mobilise a network of interventions that strengthen the operation and independence of these structures and weaken the politically empowered grip of the identified ills.
Thirdly, activities that institute and deepen citizenship education across all levels of the curriculum. Young people must learn about the country’s values and history, all of it, in the most comprehensive way possible through history, civic education, and cultural and community exchanges.
The stronger sense of identity that young people develop when they have this knowledge is important for fueling patriotism and pride and, in some ways, incites a responsibility to uphold the values of their heroes or to do better by avoiding or correcting identified misdeeds.
Furthermore, activities that invest in young people’s capacities, networks, and partnerships. Education, industry, political empowerment, fellowships, scholarship, and sports are key pillars that automatically enable this. It is critical to provide funding and governance that will strengthen and continuously expand the capacities of these sectors.
Finally, activities that maximise the value of volunteerism and community service. Setting quality examples of public service and rewarding these values help create heroes. Our leaders must be prime examples of community-driven service and work to instil that consciousness in every Nigerian. We must encourage a community-first approach to development.
This is how to mobilise. For this mobilisation to be effective, the 2013 resolution of the United Nations General Assembly provides a thorough guideline: “… in consultation with youth-led organisations, to explore avenues to promote full, precise, structured, and sustainable participation of young people and youth-led organisations in decision-making processes.”
Four markers must be met. The design and execution of these activities must be full and not merely consultative, as is currently the case; they must be precise and specific to the challenges and context; they must be measurable, time-bound, process-led, and have identified actors and anchors; and finally, they must have the ability to generate support and momentum to continuously replicate.
When these are achieved, young people will gain more influence in society. This influence will give them more space to thrive. More space will strengthen their voice. A stronger voice will deepen their influence, and the cycle keeps reinforcing itself.
Echoing the words of the chairman of the Conference of State Youth Speakers in Nigeria, Toba Fatunla, “If you have not built us, you have no right to blame us.”
The burden of building falls first on the government; every other form of mobilisation can only be effective when built on this foundation. This is particularly important in light of the socio-political shifts happening nationally. If you are the head of a government at any level, a lawmaker, or a public servant, and desire to create a Nigeria we want—one that ensures security for every citizen—prioritising the above activities is a good place to start.
Mayowa Olajide Akinleye is the Impacts and Communications Assistant at PROMAD
This article is an excerpt from the fourth in a six-part series of public conversations on youth civic participation under “Accelerating Youth Civic Participation in the FCT.” A PROMAD Foundation project supported by LEAP Africa and funded by the Ford and MacArthur Foundations.
By Winston Osuchukwu
The average Nigerian borrower is widely considered high-risk – a claim repeated in credit committees, priced into retail loans, and largely treated as settled fact. Every credit market accepts that an individual loan may not be repaid; this is ordinary, priced risk. The high-risk claim, however, is applied to whole segments – the informal trader, the gig economy earner whose income is steady but split across several accounts, the remote worker paid by an overseas client into a fintech FX wallet. What the assessment establishes is not whether they are likely to repay, but how they fit into an arbitrary segment. Having spent years building decisioning systems for this market, my thesis is a specific one: “high-risk” does not mean “no credit” – it simply requires that the lender embrace alternative datasets to price the risk appropriately.
This is not a criticism of the institutions that built their frameworks around collateral and documentation; those were rational responses to the tools available at the time. When data is scarce, prudence means defaulting to the status quo. The limitation is not that this approach is wrong, but that it leaves a blind spot – excluding fundamentally sound borrowers whose economic lives simply are not captured on the bank’s ledger. A market trader who has moved consistent, growing volumes of cash through mobile money for three years is not, in any meaningful sense, unknowable. Their financial behaviour is observable and patterned; it simply occurs outside the traditional banking system, rendering it invisible to conventional underwriting.
This is the gap technology is now positioned to close – not by replacing institutional judgment, but by augmenting it. When AI-driven analysis is applied rigorously to the financial behaviour these borrowers generate, a far more complete picture of their repayment ability emerges – and a meaningful share presents a risk profile that compares favourably with segments the traditional system has long considered safe. The “high-risk” label, applied broadly to an entire category of borrower, was never a risk pricing tool so much as the limit of what the available tools could see.
For banks, this is the opportunity to extend capital with confidence beyond the borrowers who fit their stringent criteria. Nigerian banks are highly liquid; the constraint on credit growth has rarely been capital, but the ability to assess and price the borrowers who sit outside the traditional file. Close that gap, and the whole ecosystem strengthens: banks grow their loan books into segments they have long wanted to serve, and the real economy gets the capital it needs to expand.
This is precisely what we focus on at Mathesis Analytics: building AI-powered credit decisioning that gives lenders a fuller, more defensible picture of the individuals long excluded as high-risk when they were simply misjudged. The Nigerian credit gap has never been a non-lendable population problem, but one of incomplete visibility. By unifying varied data sources and partnering with the institutions that hold the capital and scale to move the market, we translate out-of-ecosystem behaviour into reliable, bank-grade risk scores. Closing this gap is one of the clearest, highest-leverage opportunities in Nigerian financial services today.
Winston Osuchukwu is the founder & CEO of Mathesis Analytics
By Ohore Emmanuel Ufuoma
The Early Years classrooms have effectively become surrogate homes where educators now tie shoelaces, calm separation anxiety, supervise naps, enforce discipline, and provide comfort after minor injuries, which ought to be duties that should be performed by parents.
The extended work hours from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for six days a week, economic realities, and the proliferation of all-day, weekend-inclusive early learning programs have repositioned schools as the primary environment for early childhood development.
For a typical four-year-old, 9.5 hours in school account for about 75% of waking weekday time. With Saturday sessions added, the home is reduced to a space for meals, sleep, and brief routines.
The mandate of Early Years teachers has expanded far beyond academics. Current practice requires them to handle physical care, emotional regulation, and behavioural guidance concurrently.
Daily responsibilities include toileting assistance, feeding, conflict mediation, fatigue monitoring, and maintaining individual routines for 15–20 pupils.
The parent-child dynamic shifts when parents deliberately delegate care of the child, and even punishment, to educators. While parents set apart evenings and weekends for practical tasks, like food, homework, and bathing.
Psychologists term it “contact without connection.” Although parents are physically present, time is divided and focused on tasks.
Children are more obedient and organised in class than they are at home, according to teachers. Parents describe the contrary. The pattern shows an expected result: the parent becomes the outlet for exhaustion, while the educator becomes the authority figure.
The labour market triggered the transfer of responsibilities between parents and educators.
Dual-income households are now the norm in major cities, and flexible work remains limited outside tech and finance.
Child caregiver costs compound the issue. Full-time caregiver care often costs almost half of a salary. Parents opt for schools with extended hours in order to kill two birds with one stone.
For educational centres, extended-day programs create parent-like responsibilities, and staffing, training, and compensation should reflect that. In leading centres, professional development in attachment theory and stress management is becoming standard.
For parents, the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity.
Policymakers are beginning to prioritise employment rules that permit parental presence during early childhood and accessible, flexible daycare. Strong early attachment is associated with higher scholastic success and fewer behavioural problems in later life.
The Early Years teacher and the parents have not replaced each other. Both parties are only responding to a system that demands more hours in the workplace with fewer hours at home.
There has been a paradigm shift in the upbringing of children. The teachers now perform functions once meant for the family unit.
Intentional parenting inside the small windows has been left in the hands of caregivers.
Instead of the classroom remaining a place of learning, it has become the only home children know.
Ohore Emmanuel Ufuoma is an MBA student at Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa University, Turkey
By Quintin Roberts
When banks and financial institutions upgrade their physical security systems, they are making decisions that will affect operations for years. Branch formats are changing, cyber risks are increasing, and security teams are being asked to support more sites, more data, and more business functions. The challenge is keeping pace with change in a way that holds up over time.
A modern physical security strategy needs to go beyond protection. It needs to give teams a clearer view across branches, support consistent governance, and provide the flexibility to adapt as technology and operational needs change. The following considerations focus on foundational choices that help banks build security operations that are resilient and can grow with the business.
Choose open architecture to preserve long-term flexibility
Banks and financial institutions often manage a mix of legacy systems, newer technologies, and location-specific requirements. A proprietary system can limit scalability, options for devices, and which systems can connect across the organisation. Over time, this can increase costs and make it harder to modernise without replacing infrastructure that still has value.
Open architecture gives decision-makers more choice and preserves flexibility. It allows financial institutions to select the cameras, access control devices, sensors, analytics, and other technologies that best fit each location and adapt them as their needs change.
This allows teams to modernise in phases. For example, an institution may standardise video management across many sites while keeping existing cameras in place, then replace hardware over time.
Decide how to deploy your security system
Some banks want to keep core systems on-premises at major sites. Others prefer cloud-managed services for smaller branches, remote locations, or new sites that need faster deployment and less local infrastructure. Many need a mix of both. Deployment flexibility gives them the freedom to choose where systems run, how data is stored, and how services are managed.
This is especially important for institutions with different regulatory requirements, bandwidth limitations, and internal IT policies. A flexible deployment model helps banks modernise at their own pace while maintaining control over performance, cybersecurity, compliance, and cost.
Unify operations to improve visibility across branches
Managing video surveillance, access control, intrusion, and other systems separately slows down response time and makes investigations harder. Operators may need to sign into different applications, search through data in different ways, and manually piece together what happened. Across hundreds of branches, these inefficiencies can add up quickly.
A unified security platform gives teams one operating picture across systems and sites. A local team can respond faster to an incident at a single location, while a central security operations centre can monitor trends, support remote sites, and apply consistent procedures across the network.
A unified system that creates a shared context makes incorporating analytics or AI-driven capabilities more effective, further accelerating searches, identifying patterns, and reducing overall investigation time.
Put cybersecurity and governance at the forefront
Physical security systems are connected to the broader IT environment. Devices all need to be managed as part of the bank’s cyber risk profile. If systems are outdated or inconsistently configured across branches, they can create unnecessary exposure and make long-term management harder. When cybersecurity and governance are a foundational part of the system, encryption, authentication, user permissions, system updates, audit trails, retention policies, and privacy controls are applied consistently across locations.
A centralised approach makes this consistency sustainable. It provides accountability for banks, helping teams keep track of who accessed which systems, who changed permissions, how long video is retained, and how evidence is shared. This is important for meeting regulatory expectations and adapting security operations over time. Further, consistent policies make organisational risk management more effective by standardising how risk is handled across the organisation, adding to future resilience.
Automate workflows for better risk mitigation and investigations
Investigations often involve information from several systems and locations. A suspicious ATM transaction may need to be matched with video, or an access event may need to be reviewed alongside intrusion activity. If that information sits in separate systems, investigations take longer and are harder to document.
Unified systems connect the relevant context across video, access control, license plate recognition, and other systems. This supports faster investigations and helps teams share evidence internally or with law enforcement while maintaining the chain of custody.
Improve business operations using physical security data
Physical security systems collect valuable operational data every day, from occupancy levels to device health. A unified platform can turn this data into useful insights, helping security teams identify recurring issues and improve resource planning. Other departments can use the same information to improve customer experience, branch operations, and facility management.
For example, occupancy and queue data help banks understand when branches are busiest. Device health monitoring enables teams to identify maintenance needs before systems fail. And with centralised reporting, leadership can see patterns across the full branch network rather than relying on isolated site-level reports.
Making the right choices for the long term
As banks modernise their physical security infrastructure, long-term resilience will depend on foundational choices. Strategies based on open architecture, deployment flexibility, unification, cybersecurity, governance, and data all help financial institutions build systems that can adapt well into the future.
Quintin Roberts is the Regional Sales Manager for Genetec Africa
