Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has charged Nigerian youths to take over leadership positions and not allow anyone to address them as leaders of tomorrow.
Mr Obasanjo spoke Saturday on a radio programme on Eagles7 Sports, 103.7 FM, Abeokuta, Ogun State
He said ‘some corrupt leaders’ would destroy the ‘so-called tomorrow’ if the younger generation fails to rise up and take their future into their hands.
“My advice for Nigerian youths is that never let anybody tell you that you are the leaders of tomorrow. If you wait for tomorrow before you take over leadership, that tomorrow may not come. They will destroy it,” he said.
“This is the time, youths get up and make it happen.”
Mr Obasanjo, who was Nigeria’s civilian president between 1999 and 2007, said everything he had achieved in life, except in farming, had been by accident.
The former president took offence to the programme anchor’s reference to his involvement in farming as a “romance.”
I don’t like the word you used, ‘romance with farming’. I am a farmer. What do you mean by romance?
“Everything I have done in my life is by accident. The only thing that is not accidental is farming. Every other thing that I have been is by accident. And you called that romance? No! What do you mean by romance?”
Mr Obasanjo said countries that are currently doing well economically had invested in agriculture.
“First, for the purpose of food security; second, for the purpose of processing what they get from their farms, which is the beginning of industrialisation. Third, to give it out as export, which is for the purpose of foreign exchange; and fourth, as a means of generating employment for the youth.”
