Nigeria sitting on gun powder, Bishop Onuoha warns
A Methodist Bishop and the President of Vision Africa Radio, Bishop Sunday Onuoha, has warned that “Nigeria is a time bomb waiting to explode” if no concrete steps are taken to address the issue of youth unemployment in the country.
The former President of Evangelism, Methodist Church Nigeria, who gave the warning yesterday in Umuahia, Abia State after a “Walk for Peace” exercise to commemorate his 52nd birthday, decried the insensitivity and lips-service approach of Nigerian leaders towards youth unemployment.
He argued that most criminal activities and insecurity in Nigeria are traceable to youth unemployment, and wondered why the leaders are still showing no commitment in addressing the monster capable of consuming the country.
His words: “Unless we gainfully employ our youths, we will wake up one day to realise we have no country. If we neglect our young people who are crying out that they have no job, we are planting a time bomb because one day, they will revolt.”
The former senatorial aspirant for Abia North district recalled that “there was a time in Nigeria when jobs with cars were waiting for graduates”, but wondered how the country’s economy has gone so bad that “people now graduate from the universities without hope of getting a job”.
The cleric also tasked President Muhammadu Buhari on the security of Nigeria, saying that Buhari “should use everything within his powers to ensure the security of all Nigerians”.
He expressed concern over the escalating wave of protest by Biafra agitators and the insurgency in the Northeast, and advised the Presidency to explore constitutional means of solving the issues fueling the agitaions.
“Every country has its challenges but we cannot continue to see our people being massacred. We cannot continue to see our youths roam without jobs. If we do not engage them, something will engage them.
“The leaders should ensure everybody is treated fairly. There is a constitutional room for people to express their feelings. So, government should explore the provisions in the constitution to address these issues”, he stated.
Describing his experiences of the Nigerian civil war as his greatest pain in life , the cleric who said he was only three years old when the war broke out cautioned against any action capable of plunging the country into another civil unrest .
“I hate remembering the war. I was three years old then and while in the bush it rained on us and we were eating raw food. May we never witness war again! When you see people beating the drum of war it is either they never had the experience of war or they don’t know what it means”, he said.
