Yoruba wisdom is clear: “Bí òkété bá dàgbà tán, omú ọmọ rẹ̀ ní í mu” when the bush rat grows old, it is the child’s breast it sucks. The parent does not raise the child so that the child remains a permanent passenger. The parent raises the child so that one day the child can drive and, when the time comes, carry the parent. That is the natural order of the African home. Experience remains in the car. Counsel remains necessary. But the steering wheel must change hands.
Nigeria’s political class has refused this order. It has treated an entire generation as if the child must keep waiting forever while the elder clutches the wheel, insists on driving the same old roads, and then complains that the child is impatient, lazy, or disrespectful.
The world has already changed. Artificial intelligence, digital economies, robotics and global competition are not future concepts to the young people living inside them every day. Yet Ogun, a state that sits beside Lagos, hosts industries, and produces engineers, creatives, entrepreneurs and technologists, still risks becoming a museum of yesterday’s politics: roads commissioned, appointments distributed, photographs taken, while the real corridors of power remain closed to competence that happens to be young.
This is not a call for an age war. It is a demand for succession. The elders built the road. The young have inherited a different world. The wise thing is not to throw the elders away. It is to put experience in the passenger seat, competence behind the wheel, and allow the journey to continue.
The next government of Ogun State will choose: unleash that generation’s potential, or cripple it by refusing to let it drive.
This is the story of that choice.
The world has not merely shifted. It has been rewritten.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a research paper. It is already rewriting entire industries, from logistics to medicine to finance. Digital payments move trillions across borders in seconds. Robotics is transforming manufacturing floors. Knowledge economies now outpace traditional resource economies. The countries that understand this are building the future. The countries that do not are being left behind.
Look at the data. The World Bank and multiple development reports have shown for years that nations which deliberately channel their young populations into productive, technology-driven roles extract a clear demographic dividend. A one-percentage-point increase in the working-age population can raise real per capita GDP growth by roughly 0.5 percentage points. Regions that once rode large youth cohorts into manufacturing and services East Asia in particular turned that energy into sustained economic transformation.
The gap between generations is no longer just cultural. It is technological. A young software developer lives inside artificial intelligence daily. A digital strategist understands that attention itself has become an economic asset. An entrepreneur runs entire businesses from a phone. An engineer prepares for automated production lines. Many older decision-makers still approach these same tools as distant concepts delivered in briefing documents. That difference is not an insult. It is a fact of lived experience. And it is precisely why excluding the generation that already inhabits the new economy is not caution it is economic self-sabotage.
Return to the African home. The father who mastered the old maps of politics, bureaucracy and patronage now faces a landscape of algorithms, platforms, data and global competition that did not exist when he learned to drive. The son or daughter already lives on that new road. To insist that the elder must keep driving forever is no longer protection. It is control that freezes the journey.
There is a difference between an elder saying, “I have travelled this road; let me show you where the potholes are,” and an elder saying, “Because I travelled this road before you were born, you cannot drive.” The first is wisdom. The second is control. When that control becomes institutionalized, it becomes political stagnation.
No society can keep telling its younger generation to wait until it is older, richer, more connected, more politically useful or finally approved by a godfather and then complain that young people are impatient. Impatience is sometimes what happens when a generation has been told to wait for too long. When the waiting room is guarded by networks that determine access before competence is even considered, the problem is no longer generational courtesy. It is political architecture.
Then comes the favorite accusation: “Nigerian youths are lazy.” It is one of the easiest stereotypes to deploy because it places the burden entirely on the young person and conveniently removes the state, the economy and the institutions from the conversation.
Look around. The young Nigerian is driving a ride-hailing business in the morning, freelancing for a client abroad in the afternoon, selling products online at night and learning a new technology before going to bed. Another is building a fashion brand from a room. Another is writing code. Another is producing music consumed in countries he may never have visited. Another is running a digital agency with clients across continents. Another is learning artificial intelligence from the same internet that government offices often struggle to use efficiently.
A generation that has repeatedly created work for itself in an economy that has not created enough formal opportunities cannot honestly be reduced to a caricature of laziness. The better question is what that generation could accomplish if institutions were designed to multiply its energy instead of frustrating it.
And that question leads directly into politics, because there is no economy of the future without a government willing to understand the people who will build it.
The evidence is not theoretical.
In 2016 the UAE appointed Shamma Al Mazrui as Minister of State for Youth Affairs at age 22. That decision was not symbolic. It reflected a deliberate philosophy: young people are human capital that must help design the future they will inherit. The country went further establishing one of the world’s first ministries dedicated to artificial intelligence in 2017, building youth councils, and creating structured pathways for young talent into policy and industry. The results are measurable. Hub71 in Abu Dhabi has supported more than 400 start-ups from over 60 nationalities. Abu Dhabi’s start-up ecosystem generated an estimated $73.4 billion in value in a recent period and ranked among the world’s top 50 emerging ecosystems. Youth-led SMEs and start-ups now form a significant share of industrial and digital activity. Ministers openly state that investing in young people is no longer a social priority; it is an industrial and economic imperative. The UAE’s rapid diversification away from oil is inseparable from this deliberate inclusion of the generation already fluent in the technologies of the new economy.
Rwanda has placed youth at the centre of its digital transformation. ICT has become one of the fastest-growing contributors to GDP growth. In the first quarter of 2025 the sector grew by 19 per cent and contributed 0.7 percentage points to overall growth second only to wholesale and retail trade. Government programmes, including the 1-million-coders initiative and targeted digital entrepreneurship training, have equipped thousands of young people with practical skills. ILO-supported projects have trained hundreds of young entrepreneurs in digital business tools, leading to measurable increases in sales, new customers and job retention. AI is projected to contribute up to 6 per cent of GDP in the near term. Rwanda’s story is not merely about infrastructure; it is about deliberately connecting a young population to the digital economy and watching the numbers respond.
Oyo did not need to travel to Dubai or Kigali to demonstrate the point. The appointment of younger commissioners, including Wasilat Adegoke as Commissioner for Youth and Sports, sent a clear signal that competence from a younger generation can sit at the cabinet table. Under the current administration the state has trained thousands of young people in digital marketing, coding and practical skills; employed more than 23,000 youths as part of a deliberate succession strategy for an ageing civil service; and created pathways that have seen trained young people move into local government roles and productive enterprises. These are not empowerment seminars for the camera. They are concrete steps that expand the pool of capable people inside the machinery of government and the local economy.
These examples share one pattern. When governments stop treating youth as an audience and start treating them as co-designers of policy and the economy, measurable results follow: faster digital adoption, higher start-up activity, improved skills matching, and contributions to GDP growth. The reverse is also true. Systems that keep the steering wheel locked in the hands of those who mastered yesterday’s road produce stagnation, frustration and wasted talent.
This is where Nigeria’s problem becomes particularly painful. We have normalized a political and bureaucratic culture in which things that should be ordinary become occasions for celebration. A basic government service is delayed. A citizen is sent from one office to another. A document requires unnecessary references. An approval that should take hours stretches into weeks. Somebody asks who sent you. Somebody whispers about an envelope. Somebody else shrugs and says, “That is how things are done.”
But that is not how things must be done. It is simply how a system accustomed to inefficiency has learned to survive. And when a young person enters that system asking why a process cannot be automated, why records cannot be digital, why an application cannot be tracked online or why citizens must keep returning to the same office, the young person can suddenly become the troublesome one. Why? Because innovation threatens comfortable inefficiency. A digital system does not know whose nephew is waiting outside. An automated process does not understand godfatherism. A transparent system does not care who attended the last political rally. Technology becomes uncomfortable when discretion has become a substitute for accountability.
This is the politics of irritation: making the citizen unnecessarily frustrated until inefficiency begins to look normal. And every needless reference, every unnecessary delay, every demand to “see somebody,” every brown envelope and every layer of avoidable bureaucracy quietly teaches the citizen that government is a favour rather than a service. That is not merely administrative failure. It is a political culture, and political cultures are precisely what serious leadership must have the courage to change.
Now bring the argument home to Ogun. This is not an insignificant corner of Nigeria. It sits beside Lagos, hosts major industries, possesses educational institutions and has a generation of entrepreneurs, professionals, engineers, creatives, academics and technology enthusiasts who understand a world much larger than the boundaries of the state. Yet the uncomfortable question is whether Ogun’s political imagination is large enough to match the capacity of its people.
Why should Ogun’s ambition stop at building roads, commissioning projects and distributing political appointments? Why should the state not aspire to become a serious technology, manufacturing, knowledge and innovation hub? Why should an entrepreneur in Ogun have to look towards Lagos before imagining a globally competitive business? Why should a young software developer in Abeokuta be more connected to Silicon Valley than to the government operating a few kilometres away? And why should sensitive appointments continue to be viewed through the prism of political loyalty before competence?
These are not merely questions about any single administration. They are questions about what comes after it and, more importantly, what kind of political culture Ogun intends to carry into the next one. Because governments change. Political parties change. Governors leave. But a political culture can survive all of them if nobody is brave enough to challenge it.
Let us destroy the easiest counterargument before somebody builds an entire defence around it. Nobody is saying the elderly should leave government. Nobody is saying experience is irrelevant. Nobody is saying every young person is competent, just as nobody should pretend every older person is competent. The argument is much more precise: competence should determine responsibility.
If a 62-year-old economist is more capable than a 30-year-old economist, appoint the 62-year-old. If a 28-year-old technology expert understands digital government better than a 60-year-old bureaucrat, appoint the 28-year-old. If the best person is 45, appoint the 45-year-old. The age is secondary. The capacity is primary. Meritocracy is not young. Meritocracy is not old. Meritocracy is competence.
What Ogun must resist is the politics in which age, loyalty, proximity to power or political usefulness becomes a stronger qualification than the ability to deliver.
The next governor will inherit the machinery of government, but more importantly, he will inherit a generation that has watched the world move faster than its institutions. A generation that has learned to create opportunities where formal structures failed to provide them. A generation that has survived economic shocks, unemployment, inflation and institutional frustration, and has become remarkably creative partly because necessity forced it to become creative.
That government must therefore stop asking only, “What can young people do for government?” It must ask the harder question: “What can government do to remove the obstacles standing between young people and their potential?” That is where serious governance begins. Ogun’s young people do not need another cycle of empowerment seminars, photographs and symbolic gestures while the real corridors of decision-making remain closed. They need institutions that allow competence to breathe, opportunity to expand and innovation to become policy.
There is much more to say, and this is where the real Ogun conversation begins. We have not yet opened the history of political appointments in the state. We have not yet interrogated who has controlled the youth portfolio, what meaningful power young people were actually given, how political loyalty has interacted with competence, how bureaucracy has protected itself from disruption, or how new media has forced open doors that traditional politics once kept firmly shut. We have not yet asked what youth inclusion under the present administration has really meant beyond the headlines, appointments and photographs. Those questions deserve their own scroll, and they will.
For now, leave Ogun with the lesson our own homes have understood for generations: the elders built the road; the young people have inherited a different world. The wise thing is not to throw the elders away. It is to put experience in the passenger seat, competence behind the wheel, and allow every generation to contribute to the journey.
Because the world is moving.
And Ogun cannot afford to remain stationary while calling it stability.
Dimeji Sodeke’s Scrolls.
To be continued.
