Former presidential candidate, Professor Patrick Utomi has decried the poor treatment of youths by governments of Nigeria.
Professor Utomi said governments over the years failed to incorporate youths into their programmes and policies, leading to a lack of trust between government and youths.
In an interview with Channels TV on Thursday, Utomi stated that President Bola Tinubu’s National Youth Conference slated to be held in 2025 may not yield the expected fruit without building trust.
The Founder Center for Value in Leadership advised the federal government to work on getting the trust of Nigerian youths.
According to him, government has failed consistently to fulfill its promises of good governance.
Utomi emphasized the need for government to be sincere with the citizens by apologizing for the decades of abuse of the youths’ desire for a working system.
His words: “There are models of how you build trust. But the first thing begins by you doing the right thing and build up what they call an emotional bank account. Every time you say you’re going to do something and you do exactly what you say you’re going to do, you make a deposit in the emotional bank account.
“Every time you say you’re going to do something and you don’t do it, you make a withdrawal. And ultimately, whether you are believable is a function of the balance in that emotional bank account, governments have been not trustworthy in Nigeria, let’s be very frank. It has treated young people like they were idiots repeatedly, and this is sad because most governments in Nigeria were first run by very young people.
“If you think of the military rule, they were in their 20s and 30s, most of them, but something in the nature of the command hierarchy of the military, compounded by oil coming in, led to a beginning crystallization of a new class system in Nigeria. We have not studied class and how it’s emerging in Nigeria. We have to understand these things. Any government that does not begin with recognizing that it is not trusted is wasting time.
“So the first thing that it needs to do is how do we build trust? And that begins with honest commitment, saying, okay, please, we know we have not been trustworthy. We know we’ve done things wrong. We know we’ve brutalized young people. But because they are the country, they are 70% of this population, we know that we are just stewards and that our full commitment is to their future. And this is how we’re going to do it.
“These are the sacrifices we will make to essentially purge ourselves of who we are. Then people begin to relax. And then they do things that are right and they reinforce those things. Trust circles begin to build up, emotional bank accounts begin to rise, and then you can take outcomes of such conferences seriously.”