A Nigerian singer and rapper, Jude Abaga has explained why some Nigerian youths resort to internet fraud, ritual killings and other crimes.
Abaga, who is popularly known as M.I, opined that Nigerian youths are not lazy.
The musician spoke on the sideline of Ogun TechSummit, organized by an IT expert, Olaniyi Ayoola, in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
Reacting to why some Nigerian youths have decided to engage in Yahoo-yahoo, ritual killings and other heinous crimes instead of engaging in legal businesses, Abaga retorted that the situation was as result of the youths’ inability to secure jobs.
“The youths of Nigeria have been looking for jobs. For anyone to make a claim that they are lazy, the person must be able to look at the indices. You can’t just make that sort of conjecture without having the economic framework within which that’s true.
“You can’t say youths are lazy and don’t want to work if unemployment is high. The unemployment rate tells you that there are no jobs. If you look at the job market, you will see that there has been serious gross unemployment for a long time. Anytime that there’s gross unemployment, there’s also a tendency for there to be high crime rate, which is what we are experiencing.
“But the high crime rate is not the indication of young people’s attitudes. It’s an indication that there is an ecosystem where there is no opportunity for them to work.
“And, because they can’t work, and they have to eat, that’s why they have to find a means to survive. That is what we are experiencing in Nigeria today,” he stated.
However, Abaga advised the youths to take advantage of the opportunities provided by information technology.
He called for greater collaboration between “creatives and the tech space”, saying, “I think the creatives are sort of left as the unserious people of the society. What we want to show today is that creatives make everything better. They run the tech space.”