How many skit videos do your children watch daily? Be honest. Probably tens or even hundreds. How many books do they read daily? Probably none. Am I lying? Nigeria is producing a generation addicted to pleasure and entertainment. One Emmanuella was okay. Maybe even cute. But when you have hundreds of thousands of our young people all doing skits and sexy booty dances all over the social media spectrum, then perhaps there is a problem.
It is not only Southern Nigerian women that God gave buttocks to. And our young men are not the only ones with a sense of humour or fashion. Skitting is not the only other alternative to Yahoo and Yahoo Plus. There is blockchain. There is coding and game development. There is the stock market and forex trading. American children are mowing their neighbours’ lawns to earn money to buy NVIDIA stock. Please fact-check me. There is more to life than shaking booty and cracking jokes!
How are our children going to compete with Chinese and German children, who are not allowed to watch these videos but are given free devices to watch science, technological and educational videos? TikTok is about to be banned in America. But we just allow it to be proliferated without regulation in Nigeria. Meanwhile, in China, where it comes from, children are NOT permitted on TikTok. Again, please fact-check me. If I sell something to your child, but me, the manufacturer, refuse to consume it or allow my child near it, then I know something that you don’t.
Not all our children can grow to be the next Burna, Wizkid or Davido. Sports will only offer an escape for less than 1% of 1% of our youth. For every Osimhen in Napoli, there are fifty thousand in poverty. We will need professionals in STEM areas in the future. But in Southern Nigeria, we are raising many girls who only know how to do booty-shaking videos and boys who know little besides funny skits.
We may want to watch videos of what Chinese and Indian children are doing. They don’t know Jesus. They don’t understand popular culture. They don’t know Beyonce or Drake. They are boring. But boring is good. It means they have structure, discipline, consistency, and a life path that gives them clarity of what will happen to them from the cradle to the grave.
They can already innovate technology before they are teenagers. If we don’t intervene on a governmental and parental level, our teenagers will end up producing more babies that will be consumers of the products created by Chinese and German teenagers.
