Youth Council President: Challenges abound for starters, but start small

Ahmed Adamu is the pioneer President of the Commonwealth Youth Council (CYC), a youth arm of the Commonwealth of Nations spanning over six continents with about 1.2 billion members. Speaking with the WEEKEND, London based Ahmed spoke about his period in office while proffering a means to start small but strong for youth entrepreneurs.

What was your experience during your period in office? The journey was tough at the beginning and like I kept saying, being the president is one thing and being the pioneer is another thing. Sometimes, people judge you based on the height of the building you erected, not on the foundation you laid and this has given us a big challenge. However, we are satisfied with the level of achievements recorded within the six months period and so far. There are challenges of managing people, and this is not surprising considering the diversity of the Commonwealth nations and we still facilitate and attend high level meetings almost every month in different countries so as to maintain our status as the key global players in the field of youth empowerment and participation. How would you react to the security challenges in Nigeria? It always breaks my heart to read stories about kidnappings especially young girls and women by insurgents in some parts of the country. Those of us outside suffer a lot from the bad image such actions give our country. If you are abroad, everyone you meet, will stop you and ask, how is Nigeria? Why the killings? Why the abductions? And so on. I think the issue of Boko Haram can be dealt with through dialogue. How do you relate Nigeria’s emergence as the largest economy in Africa and the rising youth unemployment? The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not the best measure for people’s welfare because it counts the money owned by foreigners, and sometime you will see one individual or few firms producing larger proportion of the GDP. Unemployment is mainly caused by over reliance on government jobs or white collar jobs. If you look around the UK, the only organizations run by government are the city councils, police and hospitals. In Nigeria, most of the young graduates have high expectations that government will give them job. Only in few states do you see young people striving hard to be self-employed. How would this unemployment menace be addressed? To address the lingering youth unemployment, young people have to embrace entrepreneurship and engage in small businesses and production in line with market demands. Production is what made Dangote, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs billionaires. So, young people should engage in productivity ranging from agricultural products, gadgets, materials etc. Sometimes, you could see young ones opening a small kiosk or hawking thinking that they are entrepreneurs. No they are not. Entrepreneurship is about starting a business to solve a problem or meet a demand that no existing business solves. But then many youths with business ideas are still grappling with financial constraints, what should they do? It is challenging to begin a new venture, but starting small is the answer. Start with the little you have for high-demand business. Such youths should think of doing a business that is seriously needed even with small capital, and avoid duplication. I believe, there are different government support programmes for young entrepreneurs and they can tap from that. The youth sometimes are not united, could be the cause of their plights? I think youths are united but under different auspices. What we need is one strong and united voice for young people, with all other youth-led organizations coming under that big umbrella. What we see nowadays are formation of many replica youth organizations, duplicating and competing with one another. They should form organizations based on specific area of interest. For example, let there be one powerful youth organization that advocates for employment, another one for security, another one for policy inclusion, another one for health, another for involving young people in politics etc. Similarly, the National Youth Council of Nigeria (NYCN) should be there as the official voice and coordinating body for all youth-led organizations. DAILY TRUST WEEKEND