Following the rising cases of criminal activities in perpetrated by youths in Taraba, the state commissioner of youths and sports Alh Ibrahim Adam Imam has said that the ministry will commence a deliberate has put in place a strategy to drastically reduce youths restiveness through gainful engagement and sensitization.
The commissioner stated this in Jalingo in an interview with our correspondent shortly after resumption of office following his swearing in and assignment of portfolio by the state Governor Darius Ishaku.
Imam said that as a for chairman, House committee on youths and sports and a youth leader, he understands the reasons why youths are easy targets for recruitment for criminal activities and promised to ensure that these vulnerabilities are made away with.
He said that “I have mapped out strategies with the relevant technocrats in the ministry to ensure that we carry out massive sensitization for our youths in the state so that they begin to have value for their lives and that of others and see the dignity in labour and productivity.
” The next phase of our strategy is to gainfully engage them in sports activities and other self sustaining skills that will not only keep them too busy to make room for idle thoughts, but make them too profitable to want to indulge in any criminal activity.
“The state is full of potentials that are grossly underutilized. We hope to tap into these and empower our youths. We are beginning with massive sensitization because what the youths need first of all is reorientation and behavioural change. Once we complete this, we will move to the next phase which is empowerment. We will do this using the various potentials in the state. We will collaborate with other ministries such as Agriculture and take our youths off the streets.
“We are confident that once they see other profitable sources of genuine and stable income, they will not male themselves available to be used by those who turn them to instruments of destruction. Our main focus is to ultimately end youth restiveness and reduce crime to the barest minimum. Without gainfully engaging the youths, the work of the security agencies can only get more and more tedious”.
He further assured that sports activities will be given a major boost with “urgent revival and repositioning of the FC Taraba and Taraba Queens football clubs and the local teams across the local government areas in the state where young talents will be hunted, harnessed and fully developed”.
The former minority leader of the state House of Assembly called on the youths in the state to shun vices such as drug abuse and peddling, cultism, thuggery and banditry, kidnapping and armed robbery and to make themselves available for rehabilitation and empowerment.
