By Nwokoye Udoka Hoffmann
The Labour Party House of Representative’s candidate for Awka North and South Federal Constituency ahead of 2027 general election, Barrister Kachi Aghasili, has criticized the current wave of youth empowerment programmes by politicians particularly the incumbent lawmaker of the Constituency Prof. Lilian Orognu, describing them as a calculated ploy to divert attention ahead of the general elections.
Speaking in Awka recently where she paid some hospital bills of some trapped persons, the legal practitioner and cultural advocate said genuine youth empowerment has been replaced with political tokenism.
According to Aghasili, what Nigerian youths need is not handouts but sustainable systems that will continue to tackle systemic unemployment and joblessness ravaging the younger generation.
“What we are seeing across the country is not empowerment. It is politics. When elections approach, politicians suddenly remember the youths with sewing machines, motorcycles, and N10,000 handouts. After the election, the same youths are abandoned,” she said.
Aghasili stated that this pattern explains why decades of budgetary allocations to education, technology, manufacturing and agriculture have remained below UN threshold standards, while billions are spent on short-term empowerment schemes that lack structure, monitoring and sustainability.
She argued that politicians use these programmes as a distraction from their failure to address the root causes of youth unemployment: lack of infrastructure, poor funding of education, lack of access to credit, and a collapsed industrial sector.
“You cannot claim to empower youths while you have not created an enabling environment for them to thrive. You cannot give a young graduate a shoe-shining kit and call it empowerment when what he or she needs is a job, electricity to run his business, and a loan to scale,” Aghasili said.
The LP candidate further alleged that some of these programmes are deliberately designed to recruit youths as political thugs and for electoral malpractice.
“Under the guise of empowerment, many desperate politicians are putting youths on their payroll to perpetrate violence and rig elections. That is not empowerment, that is exploitation,” she added.
Aghasili called on Nigerian youths to reject cosmetic empowerment and demand real legislative action, including access to quality education, skills acquisition centres that are functional, support for startups, and inclusion in decision-making.
Her comments come as several political office holders in Anambra and across Nigeria have launched youth empowerment schemes in recent weeks ahead of the 2027 polls.
Aghasili vowed that if elected, her representation will focus on institutional empowerment, laws and institutions that outlive election cycles, rather than handouts.
“True empowerment builds institutions, not dependency. We must move from transactional empowerment to transformational empowerment,” she said.
