By Toyin Falola

This is a long read on an important subject. We are about to phase out, in the next three years, the Gen Z and replace them with the Gen Alpha. The first set will graduate from high school in the 2025/2026 session. Get ready! Africa is strangely plagued with a long list of issues that have endured for many years despite being a nation full of possibilities. A widespread and persistent taint of corruption has crept into the fabric of government, undermining confidence and development. For young people, in particular, the high unemployment rate paints a depressing picture of wasted potential and unfulfilled aspirations. Outdated political structures and a leadership class more focused on preserving power than fostering an innovative environment often eclipse the promise of democracy. Also, economic instability induced by government errors and global inflation puts many millions of people on the brink of destitution.

Despite the persistent challenges, Africans have, over several decades, developed tools to navigate this volatile environment, tenaciously persisting and adjusting through demanding times. Still, over a great part of the nation’s history, collective actions against these systematic flaws have been sporadic and essentially reactionary. Many Africans, especially the older generations, have accepted the government’s shortcomings as inevitable, a weight that cannot be avoided, rather than issues that must be actively addressed. Cultural standards that emphasize respect for authority and the idea that change must start from the highest levels of political power have further eroded the concept of responsibility.

Born into a continent already suffering from political stagnation, economic inequalities, and unrest, Gen Alpha is poised to join this reality. Unlike their predecessors, this generation is being raised with the required tools to address problems rather than merely inheriting them. Equipped with an intuitive knowledge of technology, a strong sense of global citizenship, and a creative streak that blossoms even in the face of shortage, Gen Alpha is rewriting the script. These children and teenagers are growing up in an atmosphere where demands for accountability, activism, and demonstrations are no longer subdued but rather yelled loudly on global forums. As the first generation to witness the full potential of online activism in real time, they allow even the voices of the most underprivileged people to start movements that transcend national borders. Gen Alpha is showing a relentless need to create their responses, question accepted fate, and demand more from those in charge in a nation where governments have regularly fallen short of their promises.This generation is not waiting for a revolution; they are steadily creating one in a calm, consistent, and peaceful manner. The activities they engage in reflect a notable shift in the African social fabric, defined by a rejection of blind patriotism, the challenge of complacency, and the embrace of responsibility and creativity as essential tools for nation-building. Gen Alpha is fundamentally a reflection of the creativity to make the ideal of a better Africa a reality and the boldness to dream of such.

Africa’s Gen Alpha is ready to challenge conventional wisdom and bring in a new age connected with responsibility, development, and innovation at a time when young movements all around the world have been responsible for overthrowing governments, redefining economies, and reshaping societal norms. Their activities are already being felt in homes, schools, and internet groups, and this is only the beginning. This generation will redefine wealth creation outside the idea of handouts, hold power responsible in a manner never seen before, and use technology to realize goals.

With Gen Alpha, Africa is entering a new era, not merely experiencing the birth of a new generation. This is not just because they were born in 2010 upwards, but because they are growing up in a world quite different from prior generations, which sets them apart from any other generation. The early memories of these children and teenagers are shaped by a society full of connectivity and creativity. Globally, they are the offspring of Millennials—a generation that bridged the gap between analogue and digital technologies. Gen Alpha has only ever known the smooth integration of technology into daily life. Their environment is one in which everything is on demand, including smart devices and touchscreens, which are rather the norm.

When kids grow up, they begin their entrepreneurial path with their first YouTube channel or coding project, where creativity becomes a form of money. Gen Alpha is starting businesses, creating content, and influencing markets across the globe even before they reach the age required to vote. Their technical knowledge is not learned; rather, it comes naturally, paving the way for a future generation that will rethink what it means to create, work, and live. While these traits are global, they are especially unique in Africa, where the furnace of political and economic changes has shaped the Gen Alpha.
Unlike their counterparts in more stable countries, Gen Alpha in Africa is personally familiar with the consequences of malfunctioning systems. Adversity is not just a concept for Gen Alpha in Africa; it is the backdrop against which they are growing up. Their early years are marked by systemic corruption, where inefficiency and exploitation regularly complicate even the most fundamental civic processes. They grow up driving on pothole-filled roads, attending schools where strikes cause months of interrupted learning, and experiencing such frequent power outages that generators have become a common feature of life. Yet, instead of caving into despair, these children are learning to be tenacious and solve problems.

Parents from the Millennial and Gen Z generations who are tech-savvy, informed, and progressively dissatisfied with the status quo contribute to this resilience. By helping their children to take ownership of their lives, these parents—many of whom have struggled to find opportunities in a system designed to stifle them—are building a sense of independence and agency in their children. Rather than seeing technology as only a source of entertainment, they teach their children to question authority, think critically, and use technology as a tool for empowerment. In many African households, when it comes to the future, waiting for government participation is no longer a topic of conversation. Instead, they concentrate on self-sufficiency—generating revenue, creating solutions, and avoiding system inefficiencies. Gen Alpha is largely anchored in this idea. To them, conventional paths of success, such as working for the government, getting pensions, or just dedicating oneself to a specific field of work, seem outdated and even humorous. Exposure to lifestyles from across the world made possible by social media has expanded their viewpoint. Seeing young people in other parts of the globe starting companies, creating software, and influencing public policy has influenced their belief that they can achieve the same, if not more. Growing up, these youngsters develop a strong awareness that borders are becoming less relevant in a society that is becoming increasingly digital. The things that count are skill, access, and a willingness to think differently.

The challenges that Gen Alpha faces in Africa shape many aspects of their lives. Regarding their problems, they do not believe that the government will help resolve them. The older generations, who were taught to be tenacious and flexible, do not share their degree of complacency. Still, their lack of resources has made them bold, creative, and relentless in their pursuit of a better life. While previous generations see change as a slow and regular external process, Gen Alpha sees it as something they can create themselves. These children will grow into individuals who create platforms to elevate marginalized voices, design software to solve traffic problems and start businesses that not only survive but flourish in an unsteady economy.

For a good part of Africa’s history, respect for individuals in positions of authority has been the norm. Older generations, shaped by military regimes and colonial dominance, often adopted a calm tolerance when faced with systemic flaws. Whether it was held by a government official, a traditional king, or an elderly member of society, challenging authority was uncommon. Respect was linked with obedience, and dissent was considered irresponsible, as it was deemed a direct assault on the well-ingrained cultural standards of hierarchy and order. Children were taught to accept decisions made by those in authority, regardless of their competency or good intentions, and to lower their eyes when speaking to elders. Many houses followed this daily ritual, and the docile culture permeated even government, where successive administrations thrived on a population too weary from economic hardships to confront them.

Many Africans, believing that change could only be brought about by supernatural intervention or a miracle passed down from generation to generation, accepted corruption, ineptitude, and simple apathy as their reality. For many years, their collective attitude focused more on survival than confrontation. However, the narrative veers differently as soon as Gen Alpha shows up. This generation is rejecting passively accepting the status quo, as they have been raised in a digital era where knowledge can be obtained instantaneously and without any filtration. Now, they scream into the internet the tales of corruption and exploitation their parents told behind closed doors.

Retweets, hashtags, and viral videos help to validate these tales. Without them, silence becomes complicity, fueling system degradation rather than a virtue. Unlike their predecessors, Gen Alpha are not shy about demanding responsibility at every level of government. They find it puzzling that roads remain unpaved even though money has been allocated for development. They question political officials who try to evade public scrutiny and hold them responsible for unmet promises. Through social media channels such as Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, they can instantly expose inefficiencies, corruption, and injustice. Africa is most likely to witness a more robust culture of openness.

The 2020 #EndSARS movement was a significant event that challenged police aggression and demanded responsibility from an agency meant to protect lives, not recklessly waste the lives of young people for baseless reasons. Though Millennials and Gen Z were the major players in the production, it was difficult to ignore the presence of Gen Alpha’s voices and their eyes giving testimonies. Many of them, though too young to participate physically in the protests, heard the shouts and saw the images on social media. They absorbed the lesson that silence is complicity and that change is possible when people gather. Consequently, they engaged in online campaigning, acquiring the tools and tactics of activism. They witnessed the effectiveness of collective action and the futility of silence, absorbing these lessons in readiness for the challenges their generation will encounter going forward. These experiences are shaping them into more informed and active participants, emboldened to attempt restoring sanity and integrity in a society plagued by widespread corruption across various sectors.

By  Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha

One of the interesting proverbs I picked up in our General African Studies (GAS 201) course with the late Professor Jabez Olowo Ojoade in the University of Jos in 1979 was ‘it is a bastard child that points at his homestead with his left hand! The Akan people of Ghana put it this way: a bastard child points to his father’s house with his left hand’. The Yoruba say that ‘a person who points to their homestead with the left hand is not a good person’, while the Luhya of Kenya say that ‘when pointing to your village, use your right hand’. It is in the Swahili language that a sort of generalised use of the left hand is concretised when it says ‘the left hand is for personal hygiene, not for pointing!

Bastard child! Homestead! Pointing with the left hand! These three constituents and functional parts of the proverb tickled my teenage imagination to no end. What is it about the left had that it should not be used to refer to one’s family? Why is this metaphor common across the continent? Indeed, there must be something about the family, about the homestead, about one’s origins that deserves respect no matter the circumstances.

By the way, some Nigerians in the diaspora also point to Nigeria with their left hand. ‘That country’, is often used to describe the place where some spent eighteen or thirty of their lives as they tried to find their feet. So, in a sense, Kemi is simply doing what some full-blooded Nigerians do in reaction to the anomie which currently rules the land. Kemi stands out because of her delicate and prominent position in the world. We all took offence when Bully Donald Trump referred to ours as ‘shithole countries! At that level, who said what becomes very important, that is, the message is given prominence because of the stature and calibre of the messenger.

            The proverb, according to Wikipedia, is ‘often used to convey that someone who is not respectful or grateful to their roots or heritage will eventually be rejected or ostracised by their community! The left hand, we are told, is for personal hygiene. We don’t use it to give or receive gifts; we don’t use it to serve drinks or for traditionally important functions.

             In the African context, a bastard child is not one who was born out of wedlock or whose father is not known to the family. Bastard child represents a person who is disconnected from their family. Pointing to the family house with the left hand is indicative of disrespect.

            These thoughts flooded my mind when I read recently elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, gave some hard and bad knocks to Nigeria, the Nigeria Police, and governance in her Nigeria, her ancestral home. To be sure, nobody who has encountered some men of the Nigeria Police in action can fault Kemi. Her chemistry of being brutally frank is what has taken Kemi to the heights in Conservative Party politics. Whether she can indeed lead the Party to victory in an election is a different kettle of fish. As the potential leader of the British government, all cards will count when push gets to shove. Which is why Kemi should remember that no well-trained child points to the family house with the left hand.

            Nigeria is in process. It is a building site. And we started this project of disparate and different cultures fused together when the British pounced on our ancestors to create Nigeria. We look back to the years when a British monarch, King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), who ate two of his six wives for breakfast and dinner. Wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed by beheading. Jane Seymour died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps if Diana had emerged in the 15^th century as wife to a British monarch, the reigning king would have sent her to the guillotine instead of the tunnel in Paris! Some British monarchs actively participated, supported, and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. British monarchs oversaw the colonisation of indigenous lands in Africa, North America, and Australia sometimes through genocide! No where in Africa, our dear left-handed and grandly insolent Kemi, would a Prime Minister allow his wife to remain in an adulterous relationship for decades as Harold Macmillan did with wife Lady Dorothy Macmillan did with the bisexual Bob Boothby in the 20^th Britain!

            We may need to remind Kemi that racism still dominated policing in Britain as it does in much of the Western world. Yet, we have not painted the entire police system as being racist. Indeed, Kemi, without officialdom around her can still be profiled by a police officer if she were found driving alone in some areas of London! Her skin colour, is not typically British, I dare say. Yet, we have not said that Britain is racist. The ‘how dark’ racist discussions which precipitated Harry and Meghan fleeing the British monarchy is still very fresh and raw in our consciousness; yet, Nigeria’s Vice President has not called the British monarchy a racist institution.

            Time will fail me to discuss the Damilola Taylor case in year 2000 when the Metropolitan Police handling of Taylor’s murder was seen as slow and inadequate due to racial bias. By the way, Damilola was both British and Yoruba like our illustrious and petulant Kemi who believes in giving hard knocks! What about the Stephen Lawrence 1993 murder case which the Metropolitan Police badly handled owing to racial bias? In 1999, Roger Sylvester, a Black man, died in police custody and an inquest showed that the police used excessive force. In 2009, newspaper vendor Ian Tom died after being struck by a police officer during the G20 protests in London. The 1999 Macpherson Report, which investigated the Stephen Lawrence case, concluded that ‘the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist! As late as 2017, the Lammy Review which was led David Lammy (MP) concluded that “black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts! Need I say more?

So, our dear daughter and bright star Kemi in the British firmament, we shall not point to you with our left hand, because in spite of you, you are our daughter. We can only say that the Nigeria Police is in good company of the Empire of the Police system which was created in 1820 by your progenitors from the other side! Colonial vestiges are not easy to shake off!

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com