by CHRIS NAVOSU
PHOTO/Joel Ogunsola/Flickr
Nearly half of Nigeria’s population is between 15 and 34. Those young people were key to the peaceful transition of power in Africa’s most populous country.
A week before the recent presidential election in Nigeria, I was talking with my friend Ebere Raymond, a third-year student at Imo State University in Nigeria.
He told me that “whoever wins the heart of the Nigerian youth will be announced as the next leader.“ I knew the youth were involved in the presidential election. But judging from the outcomes of the previous elections, in which young people were naïve about the issues at hand and manipulated by politicians to take part in electoral violence, his statement seemed nonsensical.
It would turn out, however, that my friend was right.
Nigeria’s presidential election, which proclaimed Muhammadu Buhari as the victor earlier this April, was groundbreaking for the country’s democracy. Although the international community, including the U.S. government, was skeptical of the election due to the ever-present risk of vote-rigging, many observers deemed the result relatively transparent and credible. The European Union Election Observation Mission reported that they did not find any evidence of systematic manipulation of results. (However, the electoral result from Rivers State may have been rigged in favor of the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan).
It was shocking to hear that President Jonathan phoned Buhari to concede defeat. It was the first time in Nigeria’s history that an opposition candidate defeated the incumbent head of state. Immediately after the election result, the U.S. government and other countries congratulated the Nigerian people on their historic and largely peaceful elections.
Even more remarkable, however, was the level in which the Nigerian youth participated in the election.
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