By Charles Onunaiju
It is apparent and obvious, that our routine or normal politics will not save Nigeria because the stranglehold of vicious vested interests is so pervasive and deeply entrenched. The overwhelming strangle-hold of vested special interests in the country is manifested in their enormous power to vitiate any rational policy initiative and bring it to nothing with respect to its potential for sustainability and impact. The structure and nature of normal politics here which promotes the primacy of entitlements and privileges inevitably pave the way for the political trajectory of social exclusion, which provides the impetus for the popular perceptions of ethnic and religious marginalization, thereby fueling ethnic and religious tensions.
Economic and electoral reforms and other measures designed to generate and promoted rules-based process have all proceeded on empty rhetoric by relevant state organs, without any impact in shaking-off the perennial toxic behaviors of influence- peddling by narrow circles of vested interests. .
The judiciary, the proverbial last hope of the common-man has been thoroughly upended and the stench of corruption and nepotism that oozes from the branch was graphically illustrated recently by the report of the United Nations office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) which among other things said that “The report found that in 2023 alone, over 721 billion naira in cash as bribes were paid to public officials” and judges were among the highest recipients of the bribe money. To further emphasize the endemic strangle-hold of vested interest, the UNODC report found that “around 60 percent of public sector in Nigeria were hired as a result of nepotism, bribery or both in 2023”. Recently the media was awash with reports of how sensitive judicial posts are filled through kin-ship connections. Political parties, both the ruling and oppositions including even the fringe parties have no known appetite to confront and break the strangle-hold of vested special interests, the main cankerworm that has not only eaten deep into the fabric of the country’s political and social life, but has disfigured its substance and form.
The perceived solution of a political anastasia of swapping political parties has proven to be short-lived, as opposition parties that later become governing parties has behaved in worst manner of mismanagement, pampering and nurturing special interest groups, and riding high on impunity and arrogance.
The mass of the Nigeria working people including farmers, artisans, peasants, the intelligentsia, professionals, operators of small and medium businesses, manufacturers should not stand idly by and expect a political process dominated by as parasitic clique and a narrow circle of priviledgentsia to dictate the tune and tempo of the country’s social and political life. The call for protests by the youths against bad governance and wide-spread and still spreading hunger and poverty should be a prelude to a national rally to build a genuinely patriotic national platform to rescue the country from asphyxiating strangle-hold of the vicious special interests that have continue to distort and wickedly vitiate any effort to refocus the country to a path of redemption, resourceful and resilient economic reconstruction.
The dishonorable prism of a “fantastically corrupt country” from which the rest of the world view Nigeria because of the unending and remorseless conduct of the special vested interests, whose audacious veneer is protected by our formal state institutions cannot, any longer be accepted.
Special and vested interests not only have sapped the vitality of public institutions but has willfully and maliciously reconfigure public institutions to serve their nefarious purpose and that is why bribe paying and taking is the defining characteristics of our government organs including the supposedly “hallowed” judicial organ.
The spurious campaign of calumny against the protest and wanton waste of scarce public resources to smear it is the typical delusion of disconnected and insensitive elite.
About two hundred years ago, Thomas Paine wrote in his classic text , “The Rights of Man” that social disturbances or protests is symptomatic of a deepening structural injury of a society straight from governance malfunction to which a sensible elite should be alerted to its it’s shortcomings.
This protest organized by patriotic civil and youth groups, which aims at calling out bad governance is a national seed for social and political renewal and should been seen it in this context by well meaning Nigerians. The panic and paranoia of President Tinubu-led administration to demonize and smear the protest and wear it, a toga of anarchy is the evidence of its desperation to continue to put the country in the pocket of the vicious special and vested interest cliques.
The protest must not only be seen in the narrow legal framework of exercising a constitutional civil rights but an outright and definitive political manifesto and a compelling national will to take back the country from the throes of definitive political death sentence passed on it by a conscienceless, remorseless and parasitic clique who want to maintain Nigeria as an eternal paradox of a country with enormous natural resources and riches but with the largest numbers of hungry and poor people in the world.
The protest may not necessarily and immediately birth a new Nigeria, but would be a vital birth-pang for a new Nigeria that all her hard working people earnestly desire.
• Onunaiju writes from Abuja