Our contemporary lifestyle: not medically recommended

By Mustafa A. Awad

Although it was certainly one pathetic way to go, I can’t say I sympathize with Gaddafi for getting toppled like that. For decades, Gaddafi and likeminded Arab leaders of his era – i.e. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali of Tunisia – ruled their respective nations with an iron fist which they used to cringe all sort of opposition. It’s been dubbed the “Arab Spring” as the “come-out-to-depose-tyranny” campaign spread across the Arab world like wildfire.

Yet, the youth riots that ensued and swept across the UK as well as the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” in the US demonstrate that angst and despair are clearly not experiences unique to Arab youth. That tyranny comes in all shapes and sizes – for some, it comes in the form of imprisonment and murder for dissent; for others, it means an unlevelled playing field amongst the classes, which, for a society like America that prides itself as classless, is terribly ironical.

Nevertheless, this shows exactly how collective discontent has increasingly come to symbolize the parlance of our times. Youth have generally been crucial to any social transformation that has occurred at the global scale since time immemorial. But, after having remained startlingly quiet for the past two decades, the world’s youth population is once again asserting itself as a powerful and dynamic change agent.

As a force-to-be-reckoned-with, they are establishing, at once, “the powers that be” will not continue to be without a reexamination of the prevailing status quo. And, despite all the challenges, it is happening. Now!For years, tension remained pent up and synergy misplaced. But, the inadvertent convergence of social media and the wider and cheaper availability of IT resources have revolutionized the way youth across the world make sense of their world. Instead of the strong proclivity to remain passive, which has persisted among the world’s youth since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ongoing IT revolution gave way to active participation on their part. The “Wi-Fi” generation has a greater notion to make a difference as the emergence and widespread availability of wireless technology brings them closer – thereby rendering their concerted effort ever more imposing.

But, oh the youth of Somaliland, where’s your clout?! With the availability of means that make it much easier and cheaper for you to try and have your two-cents heard, why the prolonged silence? Everything in Africa, Somaliland in particular, begins and ends with politics. And, so, before the politick engines start revving, let it be made clear that this isn’t a campaign to provoke a revolt against President Silanyo—he certainly is no Gaddafi, nor frankly his predecessor Rayale for that matter. However, this is more accurately an attempt to get a better handle on where your cause lies – if at all, there’s a cause.

There is something extremely unsettling about the great divergence which you seem to be undergoing at the moment. On the one hand, you are the first generation of youth in this country to have such remarkably unprecedented accessibility to resources for peaceful societal transformation. Yet, while IT has certainly sped up your exchange of information and social networking through email and Facebook, little connectedness is evident amongst you. Equally astounding is the fact this has meant little for the sheer dormancy that has predominantly characterized you as a social group since the advent of peace and stability in this country.

The generation before you brought to its knees the second most powerful military state in Africa of its time. The generation before that spearheaded the ousting of the British, freeing Somaliland from colonial rule. Even though there is no tyrannical dictator to depose of or foreign intruders to oust, there is still so much to be concerned about for you—so much at stake! From widespread unemployment and poverty to illegal migration, you have shown little initiative in taking up a cause. Information technology has given the youth across this increasingly smaller globe a voice and the means to stimulate change. It seems that your time has come!