Dialogue Should Be The Only Way To Resolve Conflicts In Africa – Obasanjo

Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo has come out to charge African youth to employ dialogue, rather than resorting to conflicts and violence in resolving their differences.

He recently had his say while speaking to the press, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, there must be conscious efforts to build and inbibe the culture of peace and security in the youth to spur them to be at the vanguard of promoting peace across the continent.

He added that rather than pushing forward the narratives of hatred which brew conflicts and lead to violence, we must begin to embrace love, tolerance and see peace as not negotiable for economic growth and prosperity.

His words, “We must begin to bring up our youths in the culture of peace and security. The chances are where we have culture of love, we will have peace. The first thing to do is to inculcate in the youths the ingredients of peace which is love and fellowship.

Look at the attributes that God gave us to have life of stability, life of peace, they are as I mentioned, kindness, mercy and forgiveness. All of these attributes are professed by God and He shared same with us to make life pleasant for us. But when we build negative attitudes, pull him down, then there will be problem.

We have youths in the Bible like Esther who was able to secure her race from being exterminated. Same thing goes for Joseph, another youths who helped to fight famine.

The youth must be at the vanguard of pursuing peace, they must be able to persuade those who believe that gun and violence is the way out of conflicts to have a rethink, the way out is conversation and dialogue.

We have had our issues here during the civil war. We killed ourselves mercilessly, destroyed our best facilities, but we still came back to the roundtable to get the challenges resolved

Youths must develop culture of peace, culture of humanness, culture of living the way God wants us to live.”