Youth immorality: who is to blame?

With Shuaibu Ahmed Abba

Decadence of morality in the Nigerian
society has reached such an alarming
level that even a blind individual can see.

The young leaders of tomorrow do not
show respect to the elders, they behave in
a way the society finds repugnant. They
engage in all sorts of anti-social behavior
injurious to the society. Any society that is not morally sound is bound to witness all sort of social menace as a result of decadence of moral values and cultural norms that guide the actions and conduct of individuals living within such a society.
Moral values are found in our religion,
culture and traditions yet our youth, for
one reason or the other are not that
religious, they consider our indigenous
culture outdated and our traditions
barbaric. Therefore they queue up to
embrace westernization in its totality and
abandoning our indigenous culture and
tradition entirely, thereby losing their
identity.Now that the issue has been
reached an alarming rate, as it is the
tradition in our dear country whenever
an issue arise, we point accusing fingers
and play the blame game instead of
brainstorming on how best to tackle the
problem. Some blame the parents, some
point accusing finger to the media while
others believe it’s the youth whom are
responsible for their behavior or
misbehavior.

Whichever of them you think is
responsible, you may be right and as well
be wrong. Here’s why.Parents are
responsible for training their children
morality, compassion, respect as well as
acceptable do’s and dont’s in line with
societal values and religious dictates. As
such, they becomes responsible for the
action or inaction, behavior and attitudes
of their children towards others from
childhood to maturity. If a child behaves
well, people conclude that the child is
from a disciplined home and if they
behave otherwise, people fault the
parents for not properly training the child. You hear people complain “dint your parents teach you this?” or “dint your parents teach you that?” The unfortunate thing now is that parents abandon these responsibilities.

For example in a working class family, the
father and mother goes to work in the
morning when the children are going to
school, the mother will not comeback
home till 5pm and the father till 9pm.
These children will comeback from school
and have the whole house to themselves,
they do whatever they like, with whatever
they like and however they like. This is
not because they are alone, but because
the house-help was instructed by madam
and oga to play nice with the kids, should
she do otherwise, she stand the risk of
getting fired. Or maybe there was no such
instruction but she herself wasn’t trained
properly. So what is she going teach
them? Imagine asking someone to give
what they never had! Now let’s examine
the media. The role of the media in
society is to inform, educate, entertain
and serve as the watch-dog of the society.
Unfortunately, it is no longer so. The
entertainment industry for example
through music videos, movies and some
publications have successfully polluted
the minds of the youth and promoted
indecent dressing, drinking alcohol and
other dangerous intoxicants, smoking,
jamboree spending and other forms of
immoralities we have to live with. Such
youth model their lives in accordance to
any of their favourite actor, actress,
musician, model and the like. This remind
me of the hypodermic needle theory and
the bullet theory of mass communication
which says that all the media need to do
is to send a message and the receivers
will respond accordingly.

They therefore dress, talk, walk, and
misbehave like their unworthy role models with the highest sense of justification. This may include not paying attention to school or worst, which is dropping out of the school, acting though
to their parents, misbehaving in the
society and worst of all dedicating their
most productive stage of life to temporary
fun. What a mistake. For those who blame
the youth, here’s your score. Some children are good liars and perfect pretenders. They act and behave like saints in the house and become demons
the moment they step out of it. It is universally believed that once a child is
18 years of age, he or she can think and
make decisions, iscern between truth and
false, right and wrong, good and bad and
so on. But the truth is, they need guidance
and counselling of the old in order to avoid making an ill conceived decision
the repercussion of which may not end on
the individual alone.The time for blame game is over, and each and every one concerned should take up their responsibilities. Parents, no matter how
busy you may be, find time to train your
children to be the perfect child you ever
wanted.
The media should be socially
responsible to the society and promote
morals and values found in our indigenous culture and traditions.
Whereas the youth need reorientation to
include compassion, respect, tolerance
and understanding. Above all, it must be
understood that training the youth is a
collective responsibility of the members of the society. If you train only your children, my untrained children whom are friends and go to school, mosque or church, play and socialize together can
spoil your trained children. By joining hands together we can achieve morally sound society that we can be proud to call home.

Shuaibu Ahmed Abba, Department of
Mass Communication, Bayero University,
Kano.