By Aniekan Udofia
When 41 year old Bosun Tijani stood at the floor of the Senate for Ministerial Screening, it evoked a sense of elation that a generation like his can be trusted with such responsibility by the generation that has for so long relegated them to the background. Many senators lauded his nomination by Mr. President and said it was a major statement that had been made.
As Tijani reeled out his profile, everything pointed to the fact that merit had brought him this honour and not mere political compensation like many others on the list who many Nigerians believe have nothing to do in shaping the destiny of our nation. In a few minutes, Tijani justified the trust and confidence that had seen him be thrown up for the exalted position of a Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Then, the moment came for Senators to grill this young ministerial nominee to find out whether he had the mental capacity for the position he had been nominated. Little did the public know that it was not going to be on the qualification of Tijani for the job but what many will described as his past “sin.” The first Senator fired the first salvo, presenting a past tweet made by Tijani against the green passport of Nigeria. Just as he was about to recover from that tweet, another Senator brought up the tweet where he described the Senators as morons. The leader of the Senate, Michael Opeyemi Bamidele, rose to the rescue with what became a serious salvo on the generation of Tijani. From Opeyemi’s submission, those who brought out Tijani to slaughter were his own generation.
How sad that at the announcement of Bosun Tijani as a ministerial nominee that it was people of his generation that swung to action to harvest his previous tweets to discredit him and ridicule his choice as minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Unarguably, a large number of the 109 senators are not tech savvy and most likely will not know or bother about how to harvest past tweets of individuals. But the same generation that should have celebrated the rise of one of them in a difficult Nigeria, were the same people who made it trend that Bosun Tijani is not patriotic enough to be appointed minister
Twitter and other social media platforms dominated by Tijani’s generation feasted on him, castigated him, and provided the knife for him to be slaughtered by the Senate. One is left to wonder, who will save this generation from being an atomistic one perpetually at war with itself.
Tijani is not the first to have been sacrificed by his own generation. Even when the older generation celebrated the ministerial nomination of 36 year old Betta Edu, some of her generation alleged that she earned the position because she is the “side chick” of the former governor. With the intelligence that Betta has demonstrated, her generation could not give her the credit she deserved. The young medical doctor Betta, who has given a good account of herself in every office she served, was still subjected to ridicule by her generation.
Like Tijani, Betta, and the rest, their generation must move away from the pulling down syndrome of one of their own. If this generation must rise to the occasion and take a front role in leadership, it must also deploy social media as gain and not pain. The notion that “social media doesn’t forget” and the era of “screenshot and save” are witchcraft that will hunt this generation to ruin.
