Society as a model for youths.
Humans are social animals, and as a result, we tend to live and behave in accordance with the ways of our society. The values a society embraces determine its survival and sustainability. Hence, every society has the responsibility of passing down the right values from one generation to the other. Moreover, children are configured to mirror the behaviours, morals, and ways of their parents and society at large. While values can be taught, mostly they are caught or learned by observing what others do, modeling for them what is acceptable, and what they can replicate.
In a lot of societies today, there is corrosion of these values that have held us together and they are not only threatening our coexistence but destroying the very fabrics that spun the core of our society. The dearth of good role models is a major corrosive in the death of societies. The first role models children should have are their parents and family members. A family is the smallest unit of society, and as the adage goes, “charity begins at home” (Yoruba language best put it as “ile la ti n k’eso r’ode”), if the family fails, then broken kids are introduced to the society, children with bad models.
The unprecedented increase we see in young people engaging in cultism, internet fraud, kidnapping, money rituals, banditry, sexual harassment, and all sorts of atrocious behaviours, is a result of what their families and/or society have modeled for them. Better yet, it reflects what values a society upholds: getting rich quick; being powerful; less work, more money; dishonesty; hard work is for losers, I can get away with rape and sexual harassment. Our songs and movies glorify and model these wrong values too. A song said “kin sha ti l’owo” i.e. “I should just have money whatever the means”. You can’t plant yam and reap mango, if we don’t have good models for our youths, they can’t embrace good values.
Statista has it that about 44 percent of Nigeria’s total population were aged 0 to 14 years as at 2020. As a society, we should invest our effort in modeling the right values for them, educating them, and empowering them. The success of our country lies in their hands. We should take a pause, sit back, and review the playbooks we currently use in equipping our young ones: what purposes do they serve, and are they still relevant in today’s economic climate? We need to invest in apprenticeship, where we groom our young people to be good citizens. We instill in them values such as hard work, honesty, integrity, forthrightness, respect for self and others etc. We should show them the career progressions available to them, and guide them to become responsible citizens who uphold rightness. These values should be a part of who we are as a people.
We need a more responsible reward system in our society. We need to reward hard work, honesty, academic excellence, and all forms of good behaviours. On the flip side, we need to punish and vehemently upbraid bad behaviours. Unfortunately, we have the opposite in our society. If bad behaviours are not rebuked, others are encouraged to do the same. But if good behaviours are celebrated half the amount we do bad behaviours, many people will embrace good values. We live in a society today where upright people are standing alone and are afraid of expressing their good nature. We need better scholarship programmes that will encourage good academic performance; we need better-structured sports programmes that engage and empowers our youths. Rewarding a first-class graduate with a hundred thousand naira cheque, while rewarding Big Brother Nigeria winner with millions, shows exactly where our values are and what we embrace as a society.
Lastly, it takes strategic work and intelligence to build a nation. We should invest in our youths, be good models for them, teach them good values, reward them and upbraid them when required. We should design a working system that will shape them into moral and viable citizens who will transform our society.
