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OSCA WOVEN WORDS COMPETITION – OLUSEGUN OWOLABI

“Imagination gives birth to things unknown but the writer’s pen turns them into shapes and gives to them living breaths.”

ALSO READ: BOWEN WOVEN WORDS COMPETITION WAS A HUGE SUCCESS

The 2018 OSCA WOVEN WORDS COMPETITION was organized by My Woven Words and it was only for undergraduates of tertiary institutions in Osun State as approved by the ministry of education, Osun state. There were Terms and Conditions for contestants.

OSCA Woven Words Competition remains the “first-of-its-kind” and “one-of-its-kind” in Osun state, Nigeria. To avoid Conflicts of Interest, we reached out to a number of unbiased scholars in a university outside Osun State to assess the submitted manuscripts and select the best contestants. All the contestant got a certificate of participation and some of the submitted manuscripts were selected for online publication.

TOPIC: The Tenacity of Nigerian Youths in National Development and Leadership Roles.

Tenacity -persistently and doggedly pursuing an option or solution until it succeeds and/or others see the brilliance of it. Innovations is a key factor in leadership and development and let’s face it, innovation needs a significant level of tenacity on the path of he that does the innovation and in this sense, he who seeks innovation must do tenacity, at least Equity will agree.
Living in a Nigeria ruled by the considered aged of men, amongst a whole lot of corruption and poverty, we think of a rather plausible solution to all our problems, or rather the lot we can solve, and in doing this, the close opposite of what we consider the cause of our problems comes to mind, “the youth”.

Youth. Benjamin Disraeli said, “The youth of a nation are the trustees of prosperity” and we would jocundly embrace this saying in seeking our solution. We consider the youth as the hope we have for betterness, so much so that we implore God, through our anthem, to direct them. We believe, with so much passion, in our youth as leaders that right from time,we sang, “parents listen to your children, we are the leaders of tomorrow, try and pay our fees and give us sound education” yet, till today we await our yesterday’s leaders of tomorrow. In seeking solution however, we fail to ask whether or not these “leaders of tomorrow” are in fact ready for leadership today, and in this, the resolution of youth in relation to leadership we neglect.
When we talk of tenacity in leadership, we talk of capacity; the ability to persevere, the determination to lead, with resilience, the country to the better place we believe we need or at most, deserve. But do the youths have, in sensu Vera ex eo, the tenacity for national development?
We are at the age were we find our youths attending more leadership conferences than churches, but yet do we get the effects of these? No. Rather, a large number of our youths are stuck, much occupied with social trends in place of leadership submits. Ask a whole lot of them what tenacity means and you will put them in the state of tabula rasa.
There are youths who believe in the strength of a leader in place of character, in “fighting” for rights, mistaking it for “grit”. It is not just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. Tenacious leaders are those who know which hill to fight for and which to let go of, but our youths bother rather on whether to let go of the Samsung for the iPhone or not. Tenacity begins by knowing what the right thing is to do, having the right vision, and then having the ability to stay the course even though there will inevitably be opposition. But with the present day youth and their ideology of persistence being for the seemingly jobless of elders, can these same youths be regarded the “leaders of today”? God forbid.