THE world celebrated this year’s edition of the World Youth Day, WYD, on Saturday, August 12, 2023. The United Nations General Assembly, UNGA, on December 17, 1999, approved August 12 for this anniversary to underscore the importance of the youth in every human setting and the world at large.

This is in recognition of the youth as the future of mankind, and the need to attend to their needs and prepare them for the future challenges that await them.

This year’s theme: “Green Skills for the Youth: Towards a Sustainable World”, aptly captures the needful engagements with the youths which will enable them to step up and take the reins of leadership in a rapidly-changing digital age. According to the UN, Green Skills are “knowledge, abilities, values and attitudes needed to live in, develop and support a sustainable and resource-efficient society”.

Beyond the usual official conferences and public events organised around anniversaries such as the WYD, the UN has a duty to press home the urgency of encouraging its member nations to prioritise education and digital skills to prevent a future where any section of the world will be left far behind.

In many parts of the world, especially the Third World, governments are not doing enough to keep their youth in tune with the fast pace of development in digital technology and environmental awareness. While almost every young person has access to the worldwide web and the social media and use them as they deem fit, not enough percentage of them are properly guided to use them to create a better future for themselves.

Here in Nigeria as in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, bad leadership has for decades rendered the youth an abandoned lot. Despite abundant troves of natural resources, the selfish elites leverage on their positions to build rosy futures for their children while neglecting the children of the poor, especially in terms of education and employment opportunities.

Nigeria remains the country with the highest number of out-of-school children. Predictably, in some parts of the country, some of the neglected youth have picked up arms and are terrorising their own people as we see with the Boko Haram terrorists, bandit terrorists and separatist terrorists. Some of them have also been recruited and armed to terrorise indigenous populations as armed herdsmen.

The newly-installed Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is perfectly placed to tap into the Green Skills agenda of the WYD to bring our strayed youths back on board as our future leaders. Good governance is needed to persuade our angry youths to drop their weapons and once again become the vanguards of social advancement.

The positive roles the youth played in our controversial general elections in 2022 and 2023 show they are ready to engage.

We must engage them.