Osun Youth Policy will Guide us to Youth Summit for the Benefit of Citizens, Says Commissioner Yemi Lawal

In a chat with the honourable commissioner for youths and sports, Hon. Azeez Yemi Lawal during a courtesy visit to his office by the OSUN REPORTERS CREW led by Mukhtar Ajelogbon at the state Secretariat in Osogbo to congratulate and welcome him to the office, the youths and sports commissioner gave kudos to the editorial management of OsunReporters for the visit to his office, described it as a right thing at the appropriate time.

The commissioner, while responding to some questions pertaining to youths and sports in Osun, explained some of the realistic action plans, vision, mission and the way to go by its implementation.

Mr Lawal made it known that youth policy would guide and regulate the activities embedded in any of the youth activities like Osun youth summit for the government to catch them young.

In his words; “I appreciate your coming, and your coming is timely.
There is need for us to understand the concept so that we don’t particularly mince things up, a youth summit is supposed to speak to the youth direction of the government, youth summit is not suppose to be a gamble questions. Before you are going to have a youth summit, you are supposed to have a youth policy, it is the youth policy that will tell you exactly what the government intends to do. After the youth policy, we are going to have what we call an action plan which is going to tell us what a mandate should be at a given period of time, it is the action plan we are supposed to discuss at the youth summit to tell the youth what the plans are, and everybody will understand where you are supposed to focus your energy, to get attached to.

“It is the youth summit that will tell you the plan we have for youth in agriculture, the youth in tourism, youth in sports and media enterprise, youth in education, youth in health, what we have to do in terms of violence and radicalism. So, it is actually a process and I can tell you that the first responsibility of this ministry is to come up with a realistic youth policy that will tell us the direction of this government for the next 3-5 years. We are seriously working on that.

“Work had been on before we came on board and I can assure you that a committee has been set up to review what had been done in the past and look at how realistic the proposed plans are. I can assure you, as soon as we have the youth policy through which we are going to develop an action plan that is going to speak to the specific moment, then we can have the youth summit. We are all stakeholders being involved and everybody will have a proper direction.”

OsunReporters crew & Youths Commissioner

In another major aspect of the youth activities, the youth commissioner categorically reaffirmed the commitment of the Oyetola’s government in promoting sports to enhance youth involvement in the State when asked how the sporting activities would be transformed in Osun.

“On Sports, there’s no way you will take away sport from youth, sport is primarily meant for people with burning energy and when we talk about people with burning energy we are talking about youth when we’re now speaking about youth policy, it means sport activities is involved. Age categorization that we are trying to capture now is age 15 and 39, but we’re going to have an entry period of age 11-14. The entry period of 10-14 is for those in secondary Schools. They are expected to have an idea of what their youthful days will look like ahead of them so that they will be properly guided when they’re in secondary school to make the right decisions. We won’t wait until they come on board before we begin to correct whatever might have gone wrong at their early age.

“On this note, we are trying to activate certain things at the secondary school level. Discussions are ongoing with the ministry of Education so that certain things will be inculcated through the school curriculum and we are going to activate sport activities at the secondary School level where about 3 to 4hours will be dedicated on weekly basis. At that level, they could discover themselves earlier.
Basically on sport activities, it is a new Dawn in Osun. The only reason why we are here is to serve the people of Osun,” Osun Youths Commissioner said.

On a personal note, while asking on how the seat of commissioner for youths and sports has been comfortable since his appointment, Hon. Yemi Lawal responded that the office of the commissioner for youths and sports is designed for people that are definitely coming to make a change.

In his response, “One thing that is constant in life is that there will always be problems, whoever goes to God and pray that ‘I don’t want to have problem’ that means you want to be out of existence. There will always be problems and what determines how well you perform in an office is how perfect you attend to problems.

“Definitely, the problems will be solved in the ministry of youth and sport and that is why I am here and reason I’m receiving salary. My duty here is to solve problems.” He added.

Presentation of copies of the previous edition of OsunReporters Newspapers by the editor, Mukhtar Ajelogbon to the commissioner was also part of the activities of the courtesy visit.