In 1954, Martin Luther King Jr., at 25 years old, became pastor of the Dexter Baptist Church. In 1955, at the age of 26, King organized the Montgomery bus boycott in opposition to the Jim Crow laws that imposed racial segregation in the South.
At Albany, Georgia, he began the nonviolent Albany campaign against all kinds of racial segregation at the age of 32. In addition, at the age of 34, he initiated the Birmingham movement against racial segregation and economic inequality, when he was incarcerated and authored the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
King organized the historic march on Washington where the now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered at the same age.
At the age of 35, his activism resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended racial segregation. By the time he turned 36, he had achieved the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the United States, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which improved the living conditions of all poor people. King Jr. was murdered on April 4, 1968. He was just 39 years old and 79 days old.
The degree of comprehension differs between the young of that era and the youth of today. Martin Luther King was able to accomplish so much because he had the intelligence to argue for strategic solutions to the difficulties facing his community and because he was aware of the issues that plagued it.
The same cannot be true of the world’s present young population (a demography to which I belong). Our intelligence has been so slandered by social media that we neither have the time nor the will to engage in critical thought. Frequently, we are preoccupied with trivialities such as our number of social media followers or the amount of likes our posts have received.
We have no regard for persecution prior to the fulfillment of our most ephemeral notions. We act without thinking, leaving us frequently adrift in the desert. Everything around us occur so rapidly that we cannot cognitively keep up. Before viewing the postings of our friends and millions of dimwitted characters with power (influencers) across all social media platforms, we have already spent 24 hours of our day, and this never-ending cycle shows no indication of stopping.
An example might be the EndSARS demonstration of 2020. Undoubtedly, police brutality is a reality, but we will never be able to cure it if we, the kids who are mostly on the receiving end, do not grasp the root causes. The young gathered across the nation for over three weeks, bringing the nation’s economy to a halt, and we intended to prolong this protest indefinitely without making any Meaningful demands of the government.
Stop SARS, stop bad government, and stop police brutality: these are not intelligent requests. They neither recognized the root source of the issue nor advocated for a permanent solution. As a rite of passage, our favorite celebrities joined us all in the protest. Nobody proposed anything to the parliamentarians; the motto was “No leader.”
I suppose having a tantrum over an issue exceeds its resolution. The young turned out on February 25, 2023, to vote(vent) their wrath; they blame the presidential nominee of the All Progressives Party, APC, and the governor of Lagos for EndSARS and all that transpired. This was owing to the fact that they failed to recognize the infiltration of political actors who viewed their legitimate grievance as a chance to exploit.
In January 2023, when Tyre Nichols was slain by the Scorpion unit of the Memphis police department, it did not take 48 hours to abolish the squad since the Memphis police department was a municipal agency and not a national one. When troops were deployed to kill youths at the Lekki Toll Gate, they would have understood that President Muhammadu Buhari is the only Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces; they would have known that no civilian in private life or in public office could issue such an order. They would have known in which direction to aim their accusation.
The Nigerian youth, infected by the social media bandwagon, has become the proverbial zombie described by the great Fela-Anikulapo: No break, No Jam, No Quench, Na Jooro-Jaara-Jooro. Anything political con artists propagate on social media is accepted as gospel truth.
This is why I recommend that the new administration enact a Social Media Reform Act and include critical thinking lessons into our educational curriculum, from SS1 through SS3 and the first year of every institution of higher education. They will assist in reversing the tendency of my generation’s dumbing down and instilling the fundamentals of analytical thinking in the typical Nigerian youth’s mind.