The planned nationwide protest against debilitating hunger across Nigeria, tagged #EndBadGovernance, has clearly shown the extent to which Nigeria’s leaders, their drummers and choir -those who pick the crumbs from their tables- loathe decorum and nicety in communicating with the Nigerian public –those who are not in power.
If you have followed public comments, especially by Nigeria’s leaders, including those from the presidency, ministers, the national assembly, governors, traditional rulers, and even market women and some labourers in the corruption vineyard of Nigeria, as it relates to the envisaged protest, what you get is the sort of communication that occurs between slave masters and their slaves especially when marching them to the fields. It has been a type of communication between garrison commanders and non-motivated troops. It is a language used to express masters’ powers over their servants. And, it always fails.
I have heard such comments as “the protest must not hold”, “you cannot protest in (state)”, “there will be no protest in my state”, “do not plunge Nigeria into crisis”, etc. The military high command and the police also joined in the orgy of threats against the Nigerian people in their bid to express their democratic rights in calling the government to recalibrate and change its ways. This sort of language only dares the aggrieved. It challenges them to do their worst. It tells them that the government (people who have control over the forces and state apparatus of coercion) is prepared to crush any form of protest no matter how peaceful. It dares the hungry and the deprived. It threatens the family that can no longer afford basic necessities including food and medicine. It threatens violence against unemployed youths who, every day hear how much their leaders share among themselves. It challenges Nigerians, who are aware that millions of dollars have been spent to make their leaders comfortable while they spend long hours at NNPC petrol stations buying a litre of petrol at N617. It also tells Nigerians that their participation in democracy is only to the extent that they are used to gather votes. It further tells them that their democratic and constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of association, hold opinion, organise and voice objection to government policy can be brutally abridged at will. Those comments that threaten the people can also be interpreted as inciting the people to violence because when you dare a man who is already down and angry, he is likely to tell you that he has seen 99, what then is 100? Threat incites defiance.
This is wrong. The language and choice of words used so far are not the language of participatory democracy. The language of public communication in situations where the mass of the people feel betrayed, used and punished by their leaders, should be the language of engagement, of persuasion and conviction, not of incitement. It is more productive to engage aggrieved people and convince them that the government listens using the instrumentality of participatory democracy than to threaten them with brutality. That has been missing here. So far, only the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, has been able to attempt to engage and talk to the people in a very respectful manner. He has been temperate in his choice of words. Others have been playing the General Yusuf Buratai template with their public comments. Like Gen. Buratai, they want to “clear their doubts” by letting angry youths know that their protest can be brutally crushed.
Those who have pushed the narrative that public protests have become anathemised in Nigeria because Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the president are sadly, not adding any positives to the president’s image. They are eroding his brand by suggesting to Nigerians that democracy, which Tinubu always talked about and fought for, has been suspended and replaced with a Benito Mussolini-type fascism where even senators, who as representatives of the people, exercise their legislative privilege to speak for the impoverished Nigerian, are punished. Isn’t that enough signal to show that the Senate has been emasculated? These choristers say, with their words and actions, that neither they nor Tinubu believes in democracy. They say that whatever they did in the past, as an argument or action for democracy, was a pretentious push for power and, for the sake of power, and for the exclusive entertainment of a few, and in such an obscene manner to mock and anger those seen as underserving of government.
In this narcissist expression of leadership, there have been very strong efforts to change the narrative and tell Nigerians that public protest against bad governance, or, against wrong government policies, which are having very negative impacts on the majority of the people, is indeed an action to seek a regime change. This concludes to the fact that it is the government itself that is importing violence into the narrative of the protest. Even the sponsorship, by the government, of a ‘no protest’ protest, expands the colouration of violence and further incites the resolve of the protest planners against dialogue. It is the wrong strategy to adopt. There are also other wrong strategies adopted by the government to frustrate the planned protest including alleged plans to ensure the non-availability of cash at the banks. These will only be counter-productive. Strategies to manage public protests are not rocket science. But for the fact that those who were employed to drive the counter-protest narrative do not know what to do, they are busy driving a narrative that the protest is about ‘a coup’ to ensure regime change. For this reason, they have blamed “foreign instigators”, “those that lost the election”, and “faceless people”. A member of the cabinet of the government of the Federal Republic had, in a voice note, wherein he condemned the protests, claimed that the protest was an effort at a coup against the president. That was laughable!
However, it is now immaterial whether the protest holds or not. Those pushing it have already achieved something. The scare they have created should be warning enough to the leadership that the once docile and halleluiah-chorusing youth, is no longer the same. They seem to have embraced the “common sense” revolution that Tinubu called for in 2014 (ref: The Punch, Sept. 30, 2014. P. 22), and the change that was advocated for with the 2015 election. The challenge that Rotimi Amaechi, as governor of Rivers state, threw to Nigerian youths on December 15, 2023, when he said “we steal because you don’t stone us”, seems to gone through its gestation cycle and is now bearing fruit. In case you have forgotten, he said: “…You have stoned nobody; that is why we are stealing… If you don’t take your destiny in your hands, we will go and other leaders will come and continue stealing.” The youths have taken heed. They are now ready to take their destiny into their hands. Thank you, Mr. Amaechi, for waking them up with that challenge.
Now that the youths have imbibed Amaechi’s challenge, they are now ready to hurl stones at their leaders. They have started demonstrating that by taking up arms and holding several states to ransom, though not necessary. If we objectively study, and understand, the dialectics of anger and frustration, we will know that the youth, whose life has been frustrated by government policy that delivers almost nothing to him, and who is witness to the obscenity that accompanies the display of wealth by elected politicians and appointees of government, and has taken advantage of freely available light arms, may soon move from the forests to the cities with their guns pointed at those they once chanted their choruses and worked for at elections. Haiti is a reference.