The Nigeria Intervention Movement (NIM) Grand Coalition has expressed alarm at the sweeping characterisation of Nigerian youths by President Muhammadu Buhari whom the President described in faraway London as not only lazy but uneducated.

A statement issued on Thursday in Abuja by NIM Grand National Coalition, signed by the Head of Publicity Bureau, Hajia Fatima Bako, said that “the president has now acquired a penchant for taking swipes at Nigeria and Nigerians during his frequent visits abroad.

“If it is not about Nigerians being corrupt, it would be about his infamous postulation of 97% versus 5% regional votes in the 2015 elections and now the rude categorisation of Nigerian youths as lazy and uneducated even when the presentation of the President’s School Certificate remains an issue up till now,” the statement said.

“It is astonishing how a president under whose watch secretive employments of only children of his privileged circle of friends and relatives, to the exclusion of deprived but qualified and hardworking youths continue to take place, can make such sweeping generalisation. Under the ECOSOC rights in Chapter two of Nigeria’s constitution, government is not only enjoined to provide qualitative education but to make possible decent jobs for the citizenry.

“Disturbingly, there are more out of school children now than ever in the country due to government neglect of youth education, to the extent that in 2017 alone, more than 6 million jobs were erased from the economy owing to bad choices in government policy. So where are the jobs for the youths before adjudging them lazy? Every sector of the economy including the textile sub sector with the highest employment potential is comatose,” the statement noted.

“For entrepreneurial inclined youths, the operating environment along with the necessary infrastructure, power et al remains nonexistent 3 years after Buhari’s election! Where then lays the parameters for pronouncing the Nigerian youths as lazy and uneducated when government has failed in its constitutional duties? It may perhaps be hard to blame the president since he hardly plies the roads to discover that Nigerian youths are up daily as early as 4 am on the streets hustling and hassling to eke out a living for both themselves and their indigent parents.

“May be the president is right but the lazy youths are not the everyday Nigerian youths but the privileged ones, including his, who school abroad, ride power bikes that cost excess of 50 million Naira without being known to have done any tangible job in their lives.

“Those are the lazy Nigerian youths who sit around waiting for oil money and not the everyday Nigerian youths who have become orphans to the Nigerian government and therefore struggling on their own without government to provide an enabling environment to empower themselves, yet striving to make waves in the film industry, comedy, music and even in manufacturing, etc,” the statement declared.

NIM further said: “Our president should stop de-marketing and criminalising the Nigerian youths who may want to be part of multinationals or other global organisations, or is it another scheme to have such openings reserved for their privileged but spoilt children. NIM decries this unfortunate outburst of the president in its entirety.”

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