Yolde Pate Youth Forum Tackles Drug Abuse, Career Crisis and Social Media Trap Facing Nigerian Generation

On the afternoon of Friday, March 21, 2026, the Redeemed Christian Church of God Mercy Seat Yolde Pate Parish became something it is perhaps not accustomed to being. It became a classroom, a counselling room, a career office and a safe space all at once.

That transformation was the work of one man and one forum he built from conviction rather than capital.

Maher Joshua Kefas, host of the Yolde Pate Youth Development Forum, opened the doors of that church at 3pm with a summit themed “Empowering Youth for a Better Future” and a tagline that captured exactly what he was aiming for: Empowered Today, Lead Tomorrow. What filled those hours was not the kind of event that gets announced by government press releases. It was the kind that gets remembered by the young people who sat through it.

“Life is evolving. The world is evolving,” Kefas told The Gazette News. “We are the youth of this generation. We are supposed to be passionate and vibrant, and the world is ours to conquer.”

For many Nigerians accustomed to empowerment programmes that arrive with fanfare and disappear after a photo opportunity, what Kefas is doing stands out for one striking reason. He is footing the bill himself.

“There is no donor. There is no support from anywhere,” he said. “I am doing this personally, from my own account. It is just because of the passion that drives me.”

The summit did not begin with speeches. It began with stillness. The RCCG Pastor of Mercy Seat Yolde Pate Parish led the opening prayer, setting a tone that was part spiritual and part intentional. It was a deliberate choice, a signal that what was about to unfold was not merely another event on a calendar but something that carried genuine weight. Kefas then delivered his welcome address, looked out at a hall of young faces and formally introduced the speakers who had come to pour into them. What followed was a day built around one central conviction: that Nigerian youth are not broken; they are simply uninformed. And information, delivered by the right voices at the right time, can change the entire trajectory of a life.

From the Dangers of Betting Apps to the Silence Around Women’s Health

Pastor Nahum Ochoyi opened the first session on Awareness and Social Issues, and he did not ease into his subject gently. He named it plainly. Drug abuse. Gambling. Sports betting.

These are not abstract statistics in Nigeria. They are the realities playing out in neighbourhood corners, on smartphones and in the lives of teenagers who are still figuring out who they are. For many young Nigerians, a betting app has become more accessible than a school textbook, and the dopamine pull of a potential windfall has quietly replaced the slower, harder satisfaction of building a skill or completing an education. Pastor Ochoyi laid out the dangers not with condemnation but with clarity, making the case that awareness is the first form of protection. It was the kind of session that makes a room go quiet.

Pastor Isaiah Manasseh followed with a career guidance session aimed specifically at secondary school students, addressing a gap that Nigeria’s education system has long struggled to close. Across the country, students sit examinations, pass or fail and move forward with almost no structured understanding of what their abilities could mean for their futures. They know their subjects but not their options. They know their grades but not their direction. Pastor Manasseh worked to fill that gap, walking participants through the relationship between their interests, their talents and the career paths available to them in a rapidly changing Nigerian economy. It was practical, it was grounding, and for many in that hall, it was the first time an adult had mapped that terrain for them.

Between sessions, Min. Witness Emmanuel offered a music rendition that gave the room a moment to breathe and to feel rather than just to think. Apostle Emmanuel Sani then addressed the summit on the subject of discovering personal purpose, a topic that sounds philosophical until someone begins to teach it well. His message cut to something essential: that a young person without a sense of purpose is not just directionless; they are vulnerable to every distraction and every wrong crowd that comes along.

Miss Lilian Oliver brought the personal development session to life with a talk on leadership, confidence and self-growth, making the case that confidence is not a personality trait some people are born with but a skill that can be learnt and strengthened the same way a muscle is built. She challenged a generation that has been told what it cannot do far more often than what it is capable of, and the room responded to that challenge with the kind of attentiveness that speakers rarely command. Kefas himself then delivered the session on the positive use of social media, navigating the tension between platforms that quietly destroy self-worth and the same platforms that, used with intentionality, can become among the most powerful tools available to a young person building a future.

Perhaps the most quietly courageous session of the day belonged to Miss Gabiya Danladi Yusuf, whose Health and Awareness talk on menstrual hygiene and menstrual dignity addressed something that Nigerian community gatherings have historically avoided with almost practised discipline. Across Nigeria, girls miss school because of menstruation and suffer in silence because no one in a position of authority has ever stood before them and said plainly: this is normal, this matters, and you deserve dignity.’ Miss Yusuf said it plainly. Her session did not just carry health information; it carried permission. Permission for the young women in that hall to regard their bodies not as inconveniences to be managed quietly but as realities deserving care, conversation and respect.

Mommy Paulina, Peter Didam followed with a spiritual insight segment that drew the conversation into a broader framework of self-worth and faith before the floor opened for questions and answers. It was in that open exchange that the day revealed its true texture. Young people who had been listening for hours began to speak, asking the kind of questions that had been sitting in the back of their minds long before the event gave them somewhere to land.

A Man Who Invests Before He Speaks

The Yolde Pate Youth Development Forum did not appear from nowhere. Maher Joshua Kefas has been building toward this kind of community investment quietly and consistently, and the summit at Mercy Seat Parish was the most visible expression yet of a pattern that has been years in the making.

In 2025, he personally paid the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board examination fees for 30 students, giving them access to a doorway that many Nigerian youths simply cannot afford to open. He also carried out humanitarian work at the primary school he once attended as a child, a gesture rooted in the conviction that no matter how far one travels, one must always come back to the base.

“This is my community. “I am the son of the soil,” he said. “This is my base. Irrespective of wherever you go, you have to remember and come back. My people know me, and I know them. It is very easy for them to believe me because they have seen my upbringing.”

At the conclusion of the programme, Kefas plans to support participants, particularly young women, in accessing tailoring and other vocational skills. That support, too, he confirmed, will come entirely from his own resources.

When asked whether his sustained community investment signals a future political ambition, he offered something measured rather than definitive. “I will not say no. “I will not say yes,” he said. “But I believe when time comes, time will be the revealer of truth. It will manifest itself. For now, I am just doing what I am supposed to do for the vision I have for my people.”

His closing remarks to participants carried a weight that went beyond any single session in the day’s programme.

“Why are we living? What is the purpose of our existing? Did we just come to this life to live and die?” he asked. “What legacy are we leaving behind for the younger generation? What footprint are we leaving? Your life is a book before people’s eyes. They read it every day. What you do should introduce itself before you even tell people who you are.”

The Yolde Pate Youth Development Forum is a young organisation with an old idea at its centre: that a community which genuinely invests in its young people does not have to wait for the government to rescue it. In a country where that kind of community-led investment is rarer than it should be, what happened at RCCG Mercy Seat Yolde Pate Parish on March 21 was worth more than its entry fee.

There was none.