Time to Engage by Kingsley Omose

Kingsley Omose

Time to Engage

Years back when I resided in a quiet neighborhood in Surulere, Lagos, I had cause to visit Orile-Iganmu, a densely populated and blighted community in the Coker axis of Surulere, and what I saw and experienced there left me tongued tied for over two weeks.

I could not comprehend how Orile-Iganmu, a community about ten minutes drives from the Lagos Island business district, where financial deals and business transactions were done in the billions of Naira, could be so blighted and poverty ridden.

But what was more distressing for me was that Orile-Iganmu was just about thirty minutes walk from the part of Surulere where I was then residing, and it struck me that if for any reason people in Orile-Iganmu were ever to go on rampage to protest their appalling condition, my family was in deep trouble.

Not having the resources at that time to relocate my family from what I considered then to be a real threat to our future wellbeing, I decided that the best option was to engage with residents of the Orile-Iganmu community, become their friend and do the little I could to improve their living conditions.

My thinking was that if Orile-Iganmu was ever to implode and some members of the community were to invade more affluent parts of Surulere, they would pass by my gate, counting me as one of their friends thus sparing me and my family a worse fate that would befall others in my neighborhood.

In my search for engagement opportunities, I began attending the monthly meetings of the Opeloyeru Community Development Association, which was part of Orile-Iganmu that served as the link between the community and Surulere through Opeloyeru road, the main gateway into Orile-Iganmu

The main challenge facing the community then was that roads in Orile-Igamu became rivers of water during and after the raining season, leaving the community flooded and its roads impassable, its economy in doldrums, its people sick, in despair and despondent.

Babatunde Raji Fashola had just been sworn in as executive governor of Lagos State and with his rallying campaign slogan of “Eko Oni Baje”, we decided in the Opeloyeru CDA to take this issue of getting the government to reconstruct Opeloyeru road.

Through civil advocacy visits and series of letters and electronic mails sent to Governor Babatunde Fashola, we were able to bring the plight of the Orile Iganmu community to the governor’s attention resulting in the setting up of a government committee headed by Dr. Jide Idris to look into the matter.

A government delegation led by Dr. Steven Jagun eventually visited and went on an extensive tour of Orile-Iganmu, and representatives of the various community development associations in the community as well as a large number of residents were on hand to welcome them.

The result of all these initial interactions and engagements with the Lagos State government is that seven years later, Orile-Iganmu has undergone massive infrastructure upgrading that has radically transformed the community and in the process improved the quality of life of its residents.

While it is not yet uhuru for the community, one positive outcome has been the blossoming and flourishing of the local economy of Orile-Iganmu, a natural fall out of the fact that many roads are now motorable, leading to the establishment of more businesses, more employment and better living standards.

The quality of houses in the community have also improved and more people are relocating to Orile-Iganmu, as its attraction has always been the proximity to Lagos Island, and with the new express road and railways passing by the community, things are certainly looking better for the formerly blighted community.

To improve the human capacity development of its residents, especially its youth, we formed the Orile-Iganmu Progressive Association, an NGO which has been running a newspaper and free computer training institute in the last five years and has since added a football academy and now a film institute.

Since we started running the free computer training institute, we have observed that university and polytechnic enrolments have drastically increased among our grandaunts, many of whom were secondary school leavers stuck in the sands of time.

With the help of corporate sponsors and sacrificial giving of time and substance by members of OIPA, we have run workshops and trainings for handiwork, leadership training, book club, camping trips for members of our Youth Vanguards, industrial attachments in manufacturing concerns and much more.

Members of the Youth Vanguard currently run a monthly sanitation exercise in Oril-Iganmu community, have become model youths and citizens , regularly invite upstanding speakers for talks and seminars in the community, and many of them who are now in tertiary institutions attend meetings when on holidays.

We have also gotten the Parents Teachers Association of one of the foremost primary schools in Nigeria based in Ikoyi, Lagos to adopt a disadvantaged primary school in Orile-Iganmu, and in the last three years their efforts have transformed the school that has seen government also improving its infrastructure.

You may be wondering by now what is the rationale for this write up, well it is no other than the recent development that has gripped public attention and drawn the ire of Nigerians, where six million young men and women applied for 4,556 vacancies in the Nigeria Immigration Service.

The resulting death of 20 of these young men and women (unofficially 39 of them are said to have died), in various centers across Nigeria, following a stamped in some of the centers were 520,000 out of these six million young men and women had been invited for a screening exercise, sad as it may seem is not what is troubling me.

I am also not troubled that the Ministry of Interior and the Nigeria Immigration Service may have been motivated by profit motives in opening up the application, to fill 4556 vacancies, to six million young men and women who paid N1000 each, and of which only 520,000 were shorted listed for screening.

What is troubling to me is seeing photographs of tens of thousands of young men and women across the various centers where screening was conducted for the 520,000 Nigerians, and the numbing thought that another 5,480,000 did not even make it to the screening exercise and what will become of them.
What is equally troubling to me is that we do not even know the actual number of young men and women beyond the six million, who applied online for the Nigeria Immigration Service vacancies, that are currently unemployed and for how long they have remained so, and how they are keeping body and soul together.

Suddenly, I am feeling as vulnerable as in the days after I visited Orile-Iganmu, when I realized that my family was residing less than thirty minutes walk from a blighted and poverty ridden community which was likely to implode at any minute due to their appalling conditions, and with implications for my family.

Short of relocating my family from Nigeria, which is not even within my contemplation and an escapist approach to the problem, or retreating behind the walls of a heavily gated community, the fact remains that we are living in the midst of tens of millions of unemployed young men and women.

No one knows the tipping point or what will trigger these young men and women, millions of whom are graduates to take the laws into their hands as we are already witnessing in many parts of the North East of Nigeria where religious fundamentalists have possessed their minds to our chagrin and pain.

This is not the time for playing the blame game or pointing accusing fingers at governments at all levels for the high level of unemployment among young men and women, this is the time for an all hands on deck approach to tackling a problem which has the potential to overwhelm us all, this is the time for engagement.

This is why I related the above account of what we were able to collectively achieve in Orile-Iganmu which fell within my area of influence as opposed to it just being within my area of concern, in which case I would have only condemned and pontificated without doing more, and the community may have been worse off today.

We need to individually and collectively creatively engage the mass of young men and women who are currently unemployed or underemployed to keep many of them occupied, so that with eventual government intervention, our efforts will collectively become the seed that drastically curtails the scourge of unemployment in Nigeria.