They say there is no disinfectant like sunlight, and even science supports that. I type this as I think of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s “address”, which sputtered and went kaput on arrival. In fact some analysts have claimed that it sounds menacing, and more like a threat than an address, especially one meant for a tired, hungry, and angry nation. He should have used the opportunity to shed sunlight on whatever he and his team are doing, in order to disinfect the minds of citizens, and have them rethink a continuation of the protests-turned-deadly. If you’re expecting a tally of the dead, you’re reading the wrong column. I choose not to play those up out of respect for their families, and not to further poke the figurative lion.
Back to Tinubu’s address, I would have pinned it on ChatGPT, but even AI would have penned a warmer script. It instead showed the Tower of Babel-level of confusion going on around him, and all because the wrong words were used. All over Nigeria, people are affected directly or indirectly, and in the most negative ways. Unfortunately, while this ‘house of commotion’ we are currently living in is mainly the doing of the president, a good chunk of the blame should go round other people, like the so-called opposition figures, in the person of Peter Obi, and Atiku Abubakar (imagine him ‘hailing’ protesters, during a time when the protests were already deadly, accompanied by looting and arson). They gleefully hopped on the train and appeared to cheer on the protesters.
Ordinarily, that would not be too much of a problem. But our country is hanging on a precipice right now, for many reasons. While the elephants do their thing on their level, the grass, of course, is suffering. Speaking of the grass suffering, I watched a video of a female Nigerian teenager, who looked frail and sick. She mentioned in her video that she couldn’t afford paracetamol to alleviate her suffering courtesy of malaria that was ravaging her young body at the time she made the video, which had a time stamp that suggested it was made some days ago. She spoke so passionately and so pitifully, basically offering leaders the choice of continuing with bad governance, as long as ordinary citizens have food to eat.
Food, ironically, is the main bone of contention in all of these protests, especially in the north, and the young woman in the video underscored everything. The young lady, let’s call her ‘Lady X’ was almost in tears, with painful-looking fever blisters on her lips, her face the very picture of hunger and exhaustion. She asked why a protest against suffering has become a crime, when it was prompted by bad governance, itself a grievous thing. Driving through the streets during the height of the protests in Abuja, I saw many faces which hers now remind me of.
While I condemn the violence and criminal acts that marked the protests, I cannot but wonder if they would have gone that far if a proper address was given by the president. You know, one in which he would allay concerns and fears, as well as offer hope, while shedding light on what he plans to do to make things better. Instead, what we got was chaos and commotion on a scale reminiscent of Hollywood movie ‘The Purge’, which no-one should watch during these jarring, troubling times.
It wasn’t only Atiku and Obi who were hurling verbal missiles willy-nilly. Jibrin Ibrahim, a professor of Political Science, said on a Channels TV show that Nigerians are angry because they are being deceived by Tinubu’s government. He said: “When they removed the fuel subsidy, they said in weeks we will have CNG buses and the price of transportation will crash. They said this 13 months ago. Nigerians have not seen those buses. It is called ‘waiting for Godot’ in literature. When you are told continuously that you will see something good and you wait for weeks, months and a year and nothing is coming, you know that what you are told is not based on reality.”
Jibrin continued: “That is why Nigerians are very upset. They are very angry. They are being deceived regularly and systematically by a government that feels that it can tell stories and we survive. We refuse to do what we need to do but we survive because we tell stories that will cover up. And Nigerians said ‘no, you can’t tell stories’.”
Jibrin also noted that patients were dying on a daily basis because they did not have money to buy medicine, and that while Nigerians are starving because of the economic situation in the country, the government wants them to starve in silence. The problematic part of this kind of ‘opposition’ is that it sounds like it is endorsing protests-gone-wrong, if not even projecting a bad case of sour grapes, even if I am sure that’s not the case. If we, as citizens, do not protest in a lawful manner that speaks to uprightness, then how do we expect to have righteous anger with which to criticize, or even protest well enough to usher in a positive change?
President Tinubu is failing woefully at the moment, but he is not the totally hopeless case many are painting him to be. He still has time – and motivation in the form of posterity, and of course a second term – to course-correct and mend his subsidy-deleting ways. Yes, I flew the kite of subsidy’s return, rather cautiously, might I add, and later began to see across the public space more and more calls for a reconsideration. While I know most Nigerians are at a point where nothing can, ahem, renew their hope, a good beginning would be to win back some trust and respect. While things are being planned and put in place to make things better, a proper, fatherly, and considerate national address should be considered. That would be a good start, while Lady X – and us other hungry citizens – await real solutions, including food.
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