Those in Nigeria who look towards the youths of the country, against the backdrop of the recent happenings in Kenya, and expect a similar redemptive stance need to be fair to young Nigerians. It is an entirely different hemisphere. Kenya is not Nigeria. And Nigerians are not Kenyans.
The tendencies of the political leadership in Kenya and Nigeria may be quite similar but the two societies retain their differences all the same. In standing up to brute force and putting their lives on the line to oppose an economic policy of the government, which they believe will only lead the society to turmoil and further grief, the youths of Kenya did what their counterparts in Nigeria would also do, under normal circumstances.
For the youths of Nigeria, however, the circumstances are not normal. The government has worked assiduously in recent times to sow seeds of dissonance among the youths, with the primary aim of breaking their ranks and making them incapable of doing what youths do, the type of thing they did in Kenya. The cost of the vicious offensive against united youth and union fronts in recent times, motivated by the need for political survival, will definitely come home in due course.
The robust rise by the youths of Kenya against an unwholesome government policy is instructive. Unlike their Nigerian counterparts who seem to have been forced by neglect and sheer wickedness of their governments to wear suffering and deprivation as an outer garment, the Kenyan youths had, by their courage, showed unwillingness to accept mindless policies that will mortgage their future.
In the final analysis, the youths of Kenya paid a steep price to make their point, with no fewer than 20 innocent, unarmed young men and women mowed down by the brute forces of the state. Unfortunately, it has become apparent that the political leaders of many African countries have remained bloodsuckers whose greed, unparalleled corruption and viciousness will only take blood to dismantle. President William Ruto has now joined the long list of African political leaders with the blood of innocent citizens on his hands.
The defiant and haunting words of Crystal Asiga, the visually impaired senator of the Kenyan Parliament, on the tragedy of the Kenyan governmentâs repressive response to the youth protest in Kenya, speaks of hope, even in the face of such a calamity. And to imagine that Ruto has to be dragged down such ignoble lane of the Finance Tax 2024, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who corralled him to increase the yoke on Kenyans, no matter how much they wail. Is the scenario familiar to Nigerians?
To point the youths of Nigeria to Kenya and allude to the difference they can make with self-sacrifice to save their future may, however, be unfair to the youth. Grossly unfair. In the last two cases that the youths in Nigeria dared to challenge the system, they ended up being undermined, maimed, imprisoned and killed. Their ranks were badly broken, as they faced thick lines of parochial segregation they hardly thought about. That is the way the political elite in Nigeria play.
That Kenya is not Nigeria is not just an obvious fact, it is a statement stacked with profound meanings. In the recent Kenyan debacle, Ruto has made himself a villain. There is no report yet that his tribesmen are up in his defence. Ruto is, to all intents and purposes in this matter, a âtribelessâ potentate, a villain. Where he is from is not an issue in the crisis. It may not be so in Nigeria, a country consistently pushed into the mud of ethnic politics by those who believe they can only thrive that way.
The ENDSARS protest of October 2020 remains a bad lesson for Nigerian youths. In structure and in substance, ENDSARS is, perhaps, the most cohesive anti-injustice protest by the youth of Nigeria in memory. The brutality of the police across the country, led by the so-called Special Anti-Robbery Squad, had evolved into a huge menace and threat of lives in the society. While the intentions of establishing the squad were wholesome, the operations of the police squad soon turned into a nightmare.
SARS, was, by nature and by the challenge before it, expected to be tough and rough. They were all that. Impunity and criminality soon overtook the squad. Innocent Nigerians, whether at home or travelling, at noon or oftentimes, in the evening, became victims of a unit of the police established to offer them security.
When the youths felt so suffocated and had a massive protest against the state instrument that was being used to undo them, the response by the state was as brutal and primitive as what Ruto has just done in Kenya. The protesters were shot at. Till date the exact number of casualties and who exactly authorized the shooting by the security agents remain unverified.
Of course, it is not the nature of the government of Nigeria in such circumstance, to either establish how many citizens lost their lives or who ordered the killing, not to talk of addressing the citizens on such crisis. Nigeria moved on.
If the response of the government and the state to the ENDSARS protest was disgusting, a greater unfortunate dimension to the protest was still to come.
The twist of the motive of the ENDSARS protest down the line marked the height of crookedness and unconscionable drive by political forces, to break the rank of cohesion among Nigerian youths. The political interpretation of the ENDSARS protest during the heady days of the 2023 national election campaigns as an expedition launched by those who set out to destroy Lagos remains, till date, the most ignoble and pernicious assault on a cohesive initiative by youths to fight against injustice. With such distortion of the raison dâtre of the protest, the gross abuse and brutality that marked the state response to the initiative disappeared in reckoning. Poor Nigerian youths. Many of them will understandably be hesitant to be part of any new united front against bad policies of the government. That, of course, was the goal of those who worked hard to break their ranks.
Then followed another coalition of youths to gain a voice, this time in the challenging arena of politics. The emergence of the coalition of youths under the loose, but strong umbrella of the Obidients, turned out to be an unparalleled force of the voice of the voice in Nigerian politics. Expectedly,the initiative was bound to be tricky. The arena of politics is like the kitchen. Fire is always involved. Even at this, the assault on the youths and the attempt to stifle their voice, including dubbing them Fascists, by those who the youths expected to know better, was another betrayal of the youths of Nigeria. All because they dared to gain a voice and express their wish for their future.
So, while the young patriots of Kenya hold up their victory of the moment, costly though that may be, their Nigerian counterparts, reeling under such big tags as Fachists, and such headache as the undermining ploys of ethnic segregationists, can only bid their time and soak the pains of the times, alongside their elder compatriots, who have invested so much to break their ranks, for selfish political calculations.
