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As we wait for the
final results of the first round of voting in our general election
cycle, there’s one trend I’m looking out for.

No, not whether –
if the Peoples Democratic Party returns the majority of legislators
again – that automatically means that their presidential candidate,
Goodluck Jonathan, is going to win. No serious contestant for executive
office (and after he has invested so much of our time, money and other
resources towards being elected, I think we can agree that Jonathan is
a serious candidate) ought to have their own electoral fortunes tied to
a group held in such thorough disregard as the nation’s legislators.

Even their own
party is anxious to get rid of them, having given its flag to only a
third of legislators to return to the National Assembly in June 2011.
That’s an improvement on the 80 per cent that it sacked in 2007, but if
this time the electorate happens to apply a ‘three strikes’ rule and,
deciding that after three attempts (in 1999, 2003 and 2007) that they
really can’t trust the PDP to pick good lawmakers, turn to other
parties to populate the Senate and House of Representatives, it won’t
necessarily mean that they won’t vote for the PDP’s presidential
candidate.

It’s also entirely
possible – even though doing the same thing time after time and
expecting a different result is the classic definition of madness –
that the electorate will again choose PDP candidates, perhaps consoling
themselves that the problem isn’t with the party, but with the people
it presented in past elections.

No, the trend I’ll
be watching for is whether one group that has been loud about its
entitlement (but short on everything else) will have any discernible
impact on the vote. ‘De yoot’ (not to be confused with their English
counterparts, ‘va yoof’) were on the lips of every candidate this
election. Perhaps, having seen what young people claim as their
achievement in the ‘Arab Spring’, our politicians thought that they had
better appear deeply concerned about the condition of our own ‘yoot’.

Even if they
hadn’t, ‘de yoot’ themselves have been insisting that since they are
over 60 per cent of the population, they are entitled. The National
Population Commission classifies only those between 18 and 24 as youth,
but assuming that they are including the under 18s: the 2006 Census
puts the 0-24 years population at 64 per cent of the total.

That’s a bigger
percentage than, for example, Nigerian women, who scraped in with an
anomalous 49.2 per cent of the total population, but who, thanks to the
Beijing Declaration and Platform of action, are supposed to have 35 per
cent of all appointments.

What is more, Mr.
President himself (at the end of a ‘debate’ in which the only woman
participating was the timekeeper whom he resolutely ignored) has
undertaken to keep the promise made at Beijing in 1995. True, he didn’t
explain what stopped him from achieving 35 per cent in the year that
he’s been in power so far, but the all-male panel didn’t ask him.

And his Congress
for Progressive Change challenger, whose military dictatorship started
the ball rolling by insisting that each state must appoint at least one
woman as a commissioner, wasn’t there to trumpet his own credentials …

In an election
when even middle-aged ‘uncles’ of 50 are touting themselves as ‘de yoot
candidate’, it isn’t surprising that young people tried to make
themselves a big story in the ongoing elections. Though it wasn’t quite
clear what they felt their numbers entitled them to.

If as long ago as
1991, the Population Commission recorded that 59 per cent of household
members searching for work were the children of the heads of those
households, the woeful failings in education and employment that have
characterised the intervening 20 years must be at least as worrying to
their parents as they are to ‘de yoot’.

Had numbers alone
justified special recognition, the status of the ‘giant of Africa’ with
its claim to house one fifth of the world’s black population ought to
reflect that. But it doesn’t. Worse still for ‘de yoot’, if the group
classified by the NPC as ‘children’ – the under-18s – are stripped
away, they shrink back to a much less impressive 13 per cent, with the
remaining 51 per cent left to whistle Eddie Cochran’s old Summertime
Blues song: ‘I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote’.

Still, de yoot’s
insistence on their own importance seems to have won at least one
convert: at the end of last month an old-timer who started his own
(unsuccessful) campaign with the flat assertion that young people are
not qualified to run Nigeria, apparently discovered that they are
exactly what the country needs. But will the vote reflect that?