Old age seems to be catching up with “Baba” Olusegun Obasanjo. One of the symptoms of senile dementia is a tendency to say one thing over and over again, obviously because the sufferer forgets he has said it before. In the last two years of my grandfather’s life, he was acting that way. Just as Nelson Mandela is said to be doing now, my granddad was always asking after people who had died decades earlier; he had forgotten that he attended their funerals! Already in his late 80s, in my estimation, Obasanjo could be slipping into a similar state. He should be watched: For he could run under the bed in Ota, yelling at an imaginary Lt. Col. Dimka staging a coup in 2013. Or he could be having dinner with Major Kaduna Nzeogwu in a five-star hotel in Abuja.

The former president currently has obsession with the rate of unemployment in the country. At every other forum he has attended since he left office in 2007, he has harped on the revolution or bloodshed that youth joblessness would trigger. “We have a big problem,” he continued last Thursday in Ilorin where he delivered the 16th public lecture of the Agricultural and Rural Management Training Institute. “The number of universities is going to 150 now without corresponding job opportunities. The students coming out of the universities do not have hope of getting employment. This means we are sitting on a keg of gunpowder. An idle hand is the devil’s workshop, but a hopeless idle hand is a tinderbox.”  And that’s a man who ruled this country for almost 12 years speaking. That’s a man who has influenced government decisions for at least 37 years of his life, including the time a head of state declared that “the problem of Nigeria is not money but what to do with money”.

I am one of those who see what Baba Obasanjo sees and dreads every day. But the message shouldn’t come from a man who had the greatest opportunity of changing Nigeria but blew it. Whenever I hear it, I feel like shooting both the messenger and his message. I’m sure many feel that way too. To whom was Obasanjo directing his alarm? Is it to the current leaders of Nigeria? This time, I have no choice but to defend President Jonathan and his team most of whom belong to my generation. For it’s Obasanjo’s generation that destroyed this country. In 1984, Wole Soyinka said his generation was a wasted one; in 1994, he used more damning adjectives to describe his age group. He was correct. Except that, by 2004, on his 70th birthday, he should have called it “an evil generation”.

For my part, I may be right to describe my own generation as a sacrificed one. Soyinka/Obasanjo’s generation ate up both their future, our future and my children’s future. The time Gen. Yakubu Gowon was making his famous statement above (circa 1973) was a time of unprecedented oil boom that this country should have laid the foundation for technological and industrial breakthrough. There were perhaps fewer than eight universities whose products then could excel anywhere else in the world. But a rapacious band of “leaders” – Obasanjo and his age mates – put the nation in reverse gear. And the descent into the abyss has continued up until this day. Not even when Obasanjo got a second chance did he abandon the folly of his generation. Sometime in 2007, a friend challenged me to name one thing Obasanjo would be remembered for and I couldn’t find any. Is it that he fought Atiku and prevented him from ruling this country? Is it that he rehabilitated himself after surviving Abacha’s jail? Is it “right-sizing” and “downsizing” that led to the sack of over 200, 000 civil servants? Is it that he issued licences to himself and his cronies to found private universities that would keep churning out unemployable graduates?

Were he a younger man, Baba Obasanjo would have understood that the gunpowder and tinderbox he has been envisioning are already exploding. Three days earlier and about 700km from where he stood on Thursday, some suicide bombers unleashed their weapons of mass destruction on a motor park in Kano, killing over 120 and wounding many more. The suicide bombers, I believe, were among the estimated 20 million street children and young adults roaming the streets of Nigeria without food, good education, parental care or employment. They had no reason to continue living and so offered themselves to be used by anarchists. Does OBJ still remember that more than 4, 000 other innocents have perished in the hands of such desperate people in the last three years? If that is not a gunpowder or tinderbox at work, what is?

However, I plead with members of my generation to recognise the reality of Obasanjo’s fears. Next month, almost 2 million candidates will be sitting for pre-varsity exams but the existing public and private institutions can’t accommodate 15 per cent of them. Where will the other 1.5 million work? And, while jobs are vanishing, some 2-3 million others leave primary, secondary and tertiary schools each year without any hope of securing a job or continuing their education. It is no wonder that the things we fear most have come upon us: kidnapping for ransom, bomb and gun attacks, suicide bombing, daylight robbery, silent killer diseases, rape and arson. Life can only get tougher and nastier.

Members of Obasanjo’s generation are in the twilight of their sojourn on earth – in the Departure lounge of an airport, as OBJ himself once put it. But where will his children’s generation and future generations live? My generation must extricate itself from the failed generation that is Obasanjo’s. There is no sense in requesting experience from anyone aspiring for public office in Nigeria. Experience in what? Treasury looting? Bad governance? Economic sabotage? There is little to learn from the older generation. Now that we are surrounded by calamities, let’s get down to brass tacks at once.