Forty, Foolish, and Dangerous!

B By Folorunso, Fatai Adisa

There was a time when the phrase “Not Too Young To Run” surged through the Nigerian consciousness like a prophetic hymn. It was sung with conviction, recited with the fervour of daily adhk?r, laced with hope and youthful defiance. But in hindsight, perhaps a more honest mantra would have been “Not Too Young To Ruin.”

The proof is no longer abstract. A former Youth Governor now dances with the EFCC, accused of plundering billions meant for the people. And just yesterday, the Speaker of the Osun State House of Assembly, barely past his 40th birthday, was accused in a circulating voice recording of threatening a traditional ruler. His own king. His own town. A 70-year-old man. In his words, he barked at the king: “Ogun maa fi eje Kabiyesi w?.” He assured: “Won a gba ade l’ori Kabiyesi.” He cursed: “Eranko lasan-lasan ni Kabiyesi.” He declared: “Ko ni da fun Kabiyesi t’iran-t’iran.” And many more missile-like utterances too caustic to repeat here.

I listened. And what poured from that tape was not just disgrace; it was a desecration. A violent evisceration of the codes that govern respect, culture, and public decorum. His language seethed with arrogance, soaked in the bile of impunity. The monarch, by reports, fled to Lagos for safety. Imagine that, a king exiled by a boy drunk on borrowed power.

Now pause. Think. If the third most powerful man in a state can, without hesitation, vow to unleash thugs on a traditional ruler, to slap him, to throw him into detention without cause, what then is the fate of the ordinary Osun citizen? When lawmakers morph into gang leaders, what scaffold remains to hold justice upright? When those entrusted with the gavel trade it for a whip, democracy loses its voice, and tyranny dons youthful skin.

A youth untamed is chaos in motion. Like a trigger-happy policeman with an AK-47, he is dangerous, directionless, and devastating. Compare that to George Finch, a 19-year-old who now leads Warwickshire County Council in the UK, managing a £2 billion budget. You would expect recklessness. Instead, you meet composure, seriousness, and public spirit. Traits sorely missing in our own domestically-grown, forty-year-old ‘youths’.

The English say, “A fool at 40 is a fool forever.” Let us hope, for the dignity of Osun and the soul of governance, that the Speaker does not become a living monument to that proverb.