TheCable

Christopher Imumolen, presidential candidate of the Accord Party (AP) in the 2023 elections, says youth leadership is the key to achieving rapid development in Nigeria.

Imumolen is reacting to the electoral victory of Bassirou Faye as Senegal’s fifth president.

The 44-year-old Faye, who is Africa’s youngest president, was inaugurated last Tuesday at the exhibition centre in Diamniadio near Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

Faye defeated Amadou Ba, Senegal’s former prime minister, and won 54 percent of the vote cast in the March 24 presidential election.

Before the election, Faye was detained alongside Ousmane Sanko, his political mentor, who was accused of “defamation” among other offences.

Imumolen said Nigeria should borrow a leaf from Senegal and move away from the “politics of the old” to the politics of the young if the country must achieve a rapid development.

“The emergence of Bassirou Diomaye Faye as Senegal’s new president is something that has greatly encouraged me to believe that there is hope for Nigeria and Africa,” Imumolen said.

“That the Senegalese people chose youth, vibrancy and dynamism over age or tradition in voting in Faye — a very young man at the age of 44 — as their president, only reinforces the position I have always held that youth is the way to go if we are to achieve rapid cultural, socio-economic development both as a country or continent.

“I entered the race for the presidency in Nigeria in 2022 at the age of 39, convinced that I had the wherewithal to deliver to our people good governance and the full dividends of democracy that the older generation of politicians had often promised them but never, for once, delivered on.

“Those who scoffed at the notion that a youthful president neither had the experience nor the capacity to deliver have repeatedly been made to eat humble pie as a generation of youthful presidents and prime ministers now dot the global landscape in France, UK, Italy, Chile and so on.

“I regard our slowness to grasp the wind of generational change in leadership now blowing across the world as a conservatism that will do us more harm than good as the youths are more adequately configured to lead in a world more digitalised than analogue.

“So, Faye’s emergence is a wake-up call. Countries around the world are beginning to realise that the future belongs to the youth and are putting systems in place to encourage them to be more involved.”

Imumolen said he is not in doubt that the Faye will “open more doors for a new generation of young leaders to burst onto the scene in the coming years”.