The National Youth Council of Nigeria, NYCN, Thursday, disassociated itself from the purported second #EndSARS protest to hold on December 7, 2020.
Speaking with Vanguard, the President, NYCN, Solomon Adodo, said it is totally unnecessary to call or mobilize for second round of #EndSARS protest across the country.
According to him the NYCN has not been contacted about the second round of EndSARS protest, but have heard about it, while they are engaging youths across the country.
He said: “We at the National Youth Council have not been contacted about second round protest of #EndSARS but we are hearing about this and also engaging with the Nigerian youth.
“With the last count during the last protest we made our doors open to Nigerians and said if you have any challenges come to us, contact us, and we are not only having offices in the 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory but also online real time.
“And if the Nigerian youths have these challenges they should come and we will see how to address them.
We cannot address problems only by protest, and protest will only exacerbate and take a turn to crippling the economy, and we saw how Nigeria was shut down during the first protest, and we are already facing an economic recession.
“So we need to be wise, this country is not just about Buhari or a governor somewhere. It is about us also, we have roles to play, but what we are telling the Nigerian youths that if they have any challenge we are equal to the task rather than engaging in another round of protest.”
He also acknowledged that the first #EndSARS protest at the end resulted in loss of lives, livelihoods, businesses, and property, and it will be inhuman to embark on another protest seeing the damage caused by the latter which has led and plunged the country into economic recession.
“The first protest we had lives were lost and properties were damaged, and therefore these are factors we should not temper, joke or toy with.
We therefore advise the Nigerian youths to explore other channels to ensure that if we have grievances they are heard and also addressed. We at the National Youth Council will also be there”, he stated.
Meanwhile, on the update of government meeting the demands of #EndSARS protesters, he said the Council is following up on that and other issues as well.
“We have been following up on the demands of the #EndSARS protesters and we know very clearly that the demands we have 5for5 demands and general demands on issues of governance and the rest of them.
“We see the #EndSARS thing that SARS was disbanded and we heard that SWAT is to come up, and now also we have not gotten new cases reported to us at National Youth Council on molestation.
We are not only looking at brutality from the Nigerian Police but from any other security agency including the military and others.
“We heard of other issues and engaged with these security bodies both the Nigerian Army, the Nigerian Police and others. So government on ending SARS but going forward we want to see that human rights are totally and strictly obeyed.”
He also called on government to take the unemployment issue seriously as a major panacea to youth grievances and frustration, though acknowledged efforts by the Buhari-led government through social intervention programmes to address it, but said there should be proper implementation and monitoring that would produce the expected results and impact on the lives of young people and the economy in general.
“Government should religiously look at the complaints of unemployment. It is not about throwing funds out there but should be strictly monitored for implementation for productivity.
‘We call on the government to address this issue and working by ensuring that these funds are injected to ventures that triggers productivity, economic growth and also that are measurable, translate to the betterment of Nigerians and create jobs for us.
“These are the key areas. If we have our youths engaged meaningfully and employed you will find less of them on the streets protesting. So that is one are government should really wake up and double up effort.
“We know a lot is being done but these efforts should be targeted at achieving results, these efforts are good intentions but like I will say outside as quoted in the collection of Essays, ‘Good intentions are not enough, these intentions translate to clear actions with proven results that impact on the people’.”