By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Vibrant and clear-headed young people of Nigeria,
Today, the twelfth of August, the world pauses to celebrate you. International Youth Day is not a ceremony of balloons and applause. It is a mirror held up to a generation, asking one searching question: will you use the strength that God and nature have placed in your hands, or will you sleep through the very hour that history has reserved for you?
We at The Narrative Force write to you not to flatter you, but to rouse you. For too long the Nigerian youth has been a somnambulist in the affairs of his own nation, walking through his destiny with his eyes wide shut, strong of limb yet asleep of purpose. That season must end. It must end here, and it must end now, one hundred and fifty eight days before the sixteenth of January 2027.
YOUR NUMBER IS YOUR POWER
Consider first what you already carry. On the register of the Independent National Electoral Commission, the young are not a minority pleading at the gate. You are the gate. By INEC’s own reckoning ahead of the 2023 general election, Nigerians between eighteen and thirty four made up close to four in every ten registered voters, the single largest bloc on the roll. Add to them those in their late thirties and forties who still count themselves young, and the arithmetic becomes plain. No one governs this country without your consent, whether that consent is freely given or carelessly surrendered.
A vote uncast is not neutral. It is a vote donated to the very hardship you complain about.
Strength that sleeps is strength that serves another man’s purpose. The energy you pour into the internet, into the marketplace, into the football viewing centre, into the endless argument about who is failing us, is the same energy that can be gathered into a thumbprint and made to speak.
YOU ALREADY KNOW THE PAIN
I need not describe your condition to you, because you live it. Official figures put inflation at nearly sixteen per cent in June, with food inflation higher still, so that the plate grows smaller as the naira grows weaker. The World Bank reports that roughly six in ten Nigerians now live in poverty. The new minimum wage of seventy thousand naira translates to little more than forty seven dollars a month. And so the japa wave carries away our best and brightest, young doctors, engineers, nurses and coders, not because they hate this land, but because it offered them no room to breathe.
This is the ledger of a generation asked to build a future on an empty table. You did not create this crisis. But you hold the single instrument that can begin to reverse it.
THE MAN WHO WALKED YOUR ROAD
Understand who is asking for your mandate. By the accounts of those who have chronicled his life, Atiku Abubakar was once exactly where many of you now stand. He lost his father while still a boy, fended for himself, went into enterprise with empty pockets, and built his first house while still in his twenties, rising not by inheritance but by honesty, discipline and sheer industry. He is not a man who read about the struggle of the young in a policy paper. He lived it.
He is also a builder of enterprises, and a builder knows how to build. As Vice President in the Obasanjo administration, the years in which he drove the economic team, Nigeria’s economy grew from fifty eight billion dollars in 1999 to two hundred and seventy billion dollars by 2007. He founded the American University of Nigeria in Yola, committing personal resources to the education of the young when it would have been easier to spend that fortune on himself. This is not theory. It is a record, and a record is the only honest promise a leader can make.
HIS PROGRAMME FOR YOU
Hear then, in plain terms, what he has placed on the table for your generation.
On work, his consistent pledge across his policy programme is the creation of three million jobs every year. The documented breakdown reaches for up to three million self and wage-paying opportunities in the private sector each year, one million apprentices, two million jobs, five hundred thousand student enrolments and one hundred thousand entrepreneurs, supported by a microcredit scheme for home-based income, an expanded school feeding programme, and a drive to pull unemployment down to single digits.
On learning, in his own acceptance address as the African Democratic Congress candidate, he confronted the scandal of over twenty million out-of-school children and pledged that he will deliver free and compulsory education at the primary and secondary levels and invest in leadership, entrepreneurial, technological and innovation skills among our teeming youth, and further to rehabilitate educational infrastructure and lift the conditions of teachers.
On the economy that must carry these jobs, his method is investment, private-sector participation and enterprise. Note where his own money has always gone: into the real, productive sector, into production and manufacturing, the industrial activity that actually employs a young population, and not into the short-term rentier ventures that make a few men rich and leave the many idle. And his lifelong creed of restructuring, of devolving power and resources to strong federating units, is aimed at exactly this, that your state may compete, industrialise and keep a fair share of what it produces, so that opportunity is built where you live and not begged for at a distant centre.
Do not vote for the loudest tongue. Vote for the steadiest hand that has built before.
PROTECT THE STRENGTH YOU CARRY
Numbers alone will not save us. A strength unguarded is a strength stolen. The candidate himself has told your generation the plain truth, that you must turn online influence into offline participation: register, verify your registration, understand the Electoral Act, serve as polling agents, observe the process, and protect the people’s mandate peacefully and lawfully,
So collect your Permanent Voter’s Card if you have not, verify it, and treat it as the most valuable document you own. Know your polling unit. Know the safeguards the new Electoral Act of 2026 has given you, the statutory electronic transmission of results and the BVAS record, and resolve to stand and watch your vote until it is counted and uploaded. Do this in peace, without a single stone thrown, for our weapon is the thumbprint and the vigilant eye, never violence. The way to bury apathy, and to bury any schemer who imagines your generation will look away, is under a mountain of votes and a wall of watchful young faces.
THE HOUR IS NOW
You are the salt of this nation, and salt that has kept its savour preserves what it touches. You are the light of this country, and a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. On the sixteenth of January 2027 you will decide whether Nigeria continues to sleepwalk, or whether a generation finally awoke and chose the builder over the boaster. Then, on the sixth of February, you will do the same for your states.
Wake up, gather your strength, guard your card, and give it to the man who has walked your road before you.
The giant is not coming. The giant is you, and the giant is awake.
Happy International Youth Day.
YouthForAtiku #AtikuForNigeria #ADC2027 #January16 #InformedInspiredInvolved
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
12 August 2026
