The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has outlined measures to build a youth strategy that can be harnessed for national development.
Olaopa spoke on Tuesday at a conference organised by the Citizenship and Leadership Training Centre (CLTC) on “Nigeria at 65: Reviving Values and Volunteerism Amongst Nigerian Youth,” held in Abuja.
In Olaopa’s keynote address titled “Value-Driven Leadership: Bridging the Gap Between Youth Aspirations and the Realities of Public Service,” he said that through the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, Nigeria has the potential to harness youth capital for economic growth and good governance.
While commending efforts to deepen youth engagement through several national summits, Olaopa, however, stressed the need for the outputs of all these conversations to be harnessed to revise the National Youth Policy (NYP).
According to him, in taking advantage of various continental efforts to deepen the NYP, Nigeria need not reinvent the wheel, as the African Youth Charter, its implementation roadmap, and the African Youth Decade Plan of Action provide a veritable benchmark.
“Implementing the new national youth strategy should therefore adopt policies capable of igniting a significant shift from the assumption that youth matter and their progress is an all-government affair,” he said.
Consequently, he urged that beyond the intergovernmental synergies expressed through public-private partnerships (PPPs), significant allowance should be made for NGOs, CBOs, and faith-based organisations, who might indeed be the biggest contributors in the value chain.
He highlighted measurable objectives that could be embedded into a National Youth Development Index (NYDI) that would be stakeholder-driven and possess a vision of a shared future.
These include a paradigm shift in education and training to breed a new generation of enterprising, skilled, innovative, and self-reliant youth, as well as meaningful plans for enhanced strategic communication for information management, education, and expanded engagement through better-structured intergenerational conversations.
They also include permanent structures for youth-engaged policy research and networking that leverage the strength of social media to build a community of practice and service around the youth development agenda.
He expressed hope that this would, in turn, translate into a national system of evaluation, quality control, accountability, and feedback for robust national youth development and change management.
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