FORMATION OF THE CHRISTIAN YOUTH AND ITS IMPLICATION ON INTEGRAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE NIGERIAN SOCIETY
The place of the youth in the growth and development of any nation cannot be overemphasized and Nigeria is not an exception. Many today on the African continent have blamed the West for the underdevelopment of Africa as a people and as a continent because of the transatlantic slave trade that devastated the continent for some centuries. The transatlantic slave trade was a segment of the global slave trade that transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century. It was the second of three stages of the so-called triangular trade, in which arms, textiles, and wine were shipped from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, and sugar and coffee from the Americas to Europe. However, though such African youths who were part of the slave trade saga rather than being formed in Africa were exported to the Western world, this paper aims at assessing critically the formation of the Christian youth in Nigeria today with the intent of looking at its implication for the development of Nigeria. How are the youths being formed in Nigeria? Who are the formators? Are such formators utilizing the right tools of formation in our time and age? Are the youths being formed aware of their roles in their training? Why are the Nigerian Christian youths always so eager to migrate to any country in the world? Why are so many Christian youths involved in all kinds of criminality in Nigeria and abroad today? What is the way forward at curbing the challenges facing the Christian youths in contemporary Nigeria? What indeed is the problem with Nigeria, is it the youths or the system? These questions would form the basis of this paper. This work utilizes the socio-historical method.
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