By Fred Chukwuelobe
Yes, I am.
I Just left a hotel in Enugu where I’ve been staying since yesterday. I opted for a low budget hotel because times are hard.
But that’s not the story; the story is that the hotel is in bad shape, badly run and supervised by a bunch of frustrated staff who, from the look of things, are poorly remunerated.
Again, that not the story. The sad story is that the hotel’s main guests are Yahoo boys and girls in their 20s. Don’t ask me how I know they are Yahoo boys and girls. I know them. I can recognise them easily by their looks, dressing, mannerisms and way of talking.
They made so much noise throughtout the night, with their lady friends screaming as they make out. Poor me, I was alone. Because of the poor facilities in the hotel, my tv couldn’t show the Arsenal – Chelsea match in which we were comprehensively beaten.
As I was mourning our loss to our arch enemies, I was hearing erotic sounds from the sex-crazy Yahoo boys and girls. I had to force myself to sleep off with a heavy heart.
A heavy heart because here we have our youths, the so-called leaders of tomorrow, wasting their lives by Obtaining by False Pretence, popularly known as 419 until the advent of social media and it became Yahoo Yahoo and has graduated to Yahoo Plus. Here they are and wasting their youths on sex, drugs.
These are boys who are either school drop outs, or half-baked graduates and in some cases highly qualified and skilled persons who do not want to think out of the box.
So while we are busy worrying about who becomes president next month and who takes over in 2023, let’s spare a moment to think about this Yahoo menace. It’s spreading. It’s become an industry, or what I may call “The Yahoo Sub-sector of the Economy”.
These guys don’t give a damn. They don’t care about the bad image they’re giving our chequered country. The country’s leaders don’t either. There’s no employment available to them. The small openings are reserved for the lucky ones, especially children of the rich and connected. So why will the youths care.
Everybody wants “to hammer” to build houses, drive big and exotic cars, build one-in-town-houses and marry light-complexioned and beautiful ladies.
The ladies themselves don’t care. They only thing they care about is to protect their pants from being stolen by these Yahoo boys with which they do ritual to make money in the reigning Yahoo Plus.
On the streets of Lagos and elsewhere in our cities, able-bodied young men are running after Keke, danfo, okada operators, collecting money and issuing papers that look like receipts. They’re making billions and are protected by politicians who use them for elections purposes.
Nobody cares. We are looking forward to 2023. A year many of us may not be alive to see. A year we are not sure what will happen.
But in the minds of men, God does order his affairs. Man proposes and God disposes is for the faint-hearted. The hard minds are strategizing and can do anything to get to 2023 and take over the affairs of man.
Each time I look at my children I’m worried. I don’t know what the future holds for them in this dysfunctional system. Are these the people they’d grow up with and marry? I ask myself.
I don’t know for you. For me I care about my children and not 2023. I care about who leads us to 2023 from next month. And there is danger in the horizon. Serious danger.
“This could be the first trumpet. Might as well be the last. Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why” – Bob Marley.
And the time to give a serious thought to that is now.