Season of rage

As of Sunday, per the Associated Press, over 700 protesters have been arrested across the country and nine officers injured. Other reports state that at least 13 people have been killed. Nigerians are upset, as they should be. I was in Abuja in June, and even then, the anger in the air was thick. “Things are hard” has been a popular refrain in Naija for as long as I can remember. However, these days, it carries more truth and weight than usual. It’s not just that basic necessities are expensive, they are completely out of reach for so many. And yet the politicians, as insensitive as they are corrupt, are living large like internet fraudsters, spending money like it’s going out of fashion, giving themselves millions of naira in hardship allowance and car maintenance allowance and whatever other allowances they can dream up. Something was bound to give.

You cannot have citizens living near the sea, watching their leaders bathing in the sea multiple times a day, and yet being forced to wash their hands with spittle because they cannot access the water. You – the ruling class – remove oil subsidy but you don’t transfer its supposed benefits through support measures to the masses? You are not making any of the sacrifices the ordinary citizen is being asked to make? Nigeria’s headline inflation rate rose to 34.19 per cent in June 2024, the highest since March 1996, and food inflation to a record high of 40.87 per cent in June, according to Trading Economics. You live so obscenely lavishly, only distributing small bags of rice to some citizens once in a while and you think there would not be disquiet? Perhaps, the surprising thing is that it’s taken this long.

The average Nigerian with a job is finding it difficult to survive. A Twitter user very helpfully broke down how much anyone who earned N200,000 a month in Abuja, and who lived alone, and who lived modestly, and who never got ill, and who didn’t have dependent parents, and whose salary was consistently paid, would be able to save per month: zero. Null. Nada. In fact, the person would most likely have a deficit in excess of N100,000. The person might have to beg for money to sustain themselves. Comments on his post were mostly to say that he’d been very conservative with his estimates of the expenses his hypothetical citizen would spend. Someone wrote that the budget for food would mean that the person was eating only twice a day.

People are doing what they can to survive. I saw a heartbreaking clip of a trained teacher who, out of a job and unable to get a new one, now hawks in traffic together with her daughter whom she has recruited to work too. Those who have jobs exploit whatever positions they are in to make supplementary income, whether it is begging you to “bless” them or asking for bribes to perform whatever task is in their job description. They are at our airports asking for money so that they don’t have to check your suitcases properly. They are at checkpoints asking you to find them something. They are teaching in our schools asking for money so that your children passes, or not teaching at all because they are busy with whatever side-hustle will bring them money.

And the ones who ought to make sure that the country is run well, whether they have been elected or selected, are feeding fat on the sweat of the citizens. I share in the anger of the average citizen. The oil subsidy has been removed, yet none of its supposed benefits has been transferred to the masses.

Corruption permeates every level of government, with public officials syphoning off funds that should be used for development and public services to further enrich themselves; multi-million naira projects that exist only on paper; our politicians owning multiple homes and cars across the world while the people they ought to be serving struggle and have to literally beg them for money to survive. The disconnect between the ruling class and the average Nigerian has become so stark that citizens have had enough. The recent protests are a sign that Nigerians have had enough.

President Tinubu has asked for the protests to stop, accusing them of being driven by a “political agenda.” Perhaps he (and his administration) should live on N200,000 for a month to understand what agenda is pulling people out on the streets, despite the teargassing and the real threat of death. Maybe there is nothing left for these protesters to fear. They have driven Nigerians to that. The 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” The rich in this case are our corrupt, greedy, selfish politicians. It behoves our ruling class to remember that.