9 for the ‘90s : Be They 9 or 89, Individuals Harbor Strong Ideas About What the Future Holds : Alive With Hope

Ikemefuna Udeze shines with young faith, fresh idealism and a sense of personal opportunity that is very much the heritage of America. He certainly is its future.

Ikemefuna (“Call me KK because nobody in school can pronounce my name”) is from a large family and a son of parents who came to Los Angeles from Nigeria to live better and achieve more.

Carol Udeze, his mother, is a nutritionist with Kaiser Permanente. Clement Udeze, his father, is an assistant professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

And at 9, their poised youngster is quite clear about his path through the next decade.

“When I’m 19, I’m going to be in college,” he says. “If you get a good education, you know what you’re doing and how to plan your life. If you drop out, you won’t be ready for anything.”

KK, a fourth-grader at 3rd Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, doesn’t know if he will become a teacher or a lawyer.

But he is certain where either career must take him.

He wants to be a governor or a mayor.

Or President of the United States.

The country could do worse than follow the platform of social reform and technological progress represented by KK’s vision of events of the decade ahead.

The 1990s, he says, should see a reduction in gang violence (“I think it is stupid that young people are killing young people”) and drug abuse (“When you take drugs, you make all kinds of other dumb decisions”) by the hiring of more police officers and heavier court penalties.

Smoking and drinking will dwindle to a minimum with broader public acceptance of their health dangers. More government and private money spent on research, KK says, will produce new medicines “to cure diseases like AIDS and cancer . . . so people won’t be dying right and left.”

“In the year 2000, we will have telephones where you see who you are talking to, and that will stop a lot of crank and threatening calls.

“There will be the big earthquake so we might be repairing our city 10 years from now. If it hasn’t occurred, we should be fully prepared for it by then.

“Airplanes will be traveling farther, faster and safer. I think people will be on Jupiter by the year 2000. Terrorism will end as soon as people open up to each other.

“Then there’s this thing called the Ku Klux Klan.

“But it can’t work if we realize that we are all the same . . . that blacks, Hispanics, Asians and whites are all human beings. I don’t mind (other races). I accept them for who they are, not what they are.”

KK isn’t, however, all smoldering humanitarianism and gifted-student grades. He likes Nintendo games, designer sweat shirts over polo shirts and writing good-knight-evil-knight fairy tales on a classroom Apple computer. His heroes are his parents, Bill Cosby and Benjamin Franklin in precisely that order.

KK is boy enough to have busted his chin in a fall, but courtly enough to mention that his sisters are Ifeyinwa, Ije-Enu and Omelogo, and his brother is Arinze, and that their names should be included in any story involving him and the family Udeze.

KK also likes baseball and basketball. His final projection for the next decade: The Lakers will continue to monopolize the NBA championships.