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The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs, Ambassador Tibor Nagy, has said Nigeria is home to the sharpest young people he has ever met.
Ambassador Nagy spoke yesterday from Washington, D.C. ahead of his official visit to Nigeria and other countries.
He said authorities should address the issues that can make the youths become “distraught young people” that will make the African continent unstable.
Governments should make progress in democracy, human rights and economy,otherwise Africa may become a continent of extremely upset, distraught young people vulnerable to radicalization, according to Nagy.
“I had an opportunity to meet the returning Nigerian Mandela Washington fellows, who had been in the United States that summer, and I have never in my life met a sharper group of young people anywhere in the world.”
He said from his experience, the future of Africa is not the horrors that are going on in the Sahel with Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, but the “phenomenal young people that he met.”
The population of Africa is expected to double by 2050, making it a young continent that can only thrive on investment in human capital development.
Speaking on the Chinese loans and investments flowing into African countries, Nagy said the solution is twofold, assuring that he would do everything he could to encourage American businesses to invest in Africa.
Also, the Ambassador said the responsibility also lied on the African side to put environments in place which give everybody an equal chance at the contract and where parties involved receive equal justice in business dispute.
Nagy noted that with the Boko Haram crisis in the northeast, herders and farmers crisis in the middle belt and the general elections in 2019, which he said “will be very, very interesting,” he could not have come to West Africa without visiting Nigeria.
