“A kingdom can endure with unbelief, but it cannot endure with injustice.” — Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, Bayan Wujub Al-Hijra, 1806.
The culture of gaslighting citizens has been the trademark of Nigeria’s ruling class. The colonisers invented such coercive response to civil disobedience to keep together this disparate state for their gains, and then passed the torch to their indigenous successors. The legacy is this federation of hostile groups yearning for genuine meaning and constant search for justice.
When, after the January 15, 1966 coup, politicians and military officers, mostly from the Northern Region and the Western Region, were killed in a coup, the North awaited justice. They believed the coup, which was masterminded by mostly Igbo officers, was a regional agenda to neutralise northern political bloc. The new military head of state, Major General Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi, himself an Igbo officer, underplayed that outrage. The backwash was a bloody counter-coup that consumed him, barely five months in power.
Nigeria’s civil war, which broke out about a year after Ironsi’s murder, was a reaction of the Igbo to their inability to find justice in Nigeria. Between the countercoup and the war, they were victims of pogroms in the North, who had blamed the Igbo for the killings of their political and military leaders. The solution, as led by Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, was breaking away from Nigeria. They were coerced to remain, and they lost the war. While they remain part of the edgy marriage, mutual mistrust continues to fuel Igbo’s political misfortune at the centre, with attendant concerns and perception of marginalization.
Since the return to democracy in 1999, the military-style conflict resolution method has been persistently deployed in responding to civic actions in place of justice. Under the watch of Olusegun Obasanjo as President, between 1999 and 2007, Nigerian military’s responses to killings of their members by some members of a community in Odi, Bayelsa State and Zaki Biam, Benue, were massacres. There was neither an attempt at sincere enquiries to guide such response nor a rethink of the collateral damage.
This style backfired under his successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, whose extrajudicial killings of Boko Haram leaders in 2009 sparked this fire that has outlived him, and likely to consume even generations unborn. Boko Haram is an invention of this tradition of enforcing order without justice. The unsupervised police who caught the terrorist leaders thought it’s a brilliant idea to “waste” them, and the outcome can only be accurately spelt out by the widows, orphans and widowers the consequences have created.
President Buhari, like his predecessors, inherited a federation of hostile units. Goodluck Jonathan, his immediate predecessor, left behind a series of unresolved conflicts that included pacification or taming of the Ibraheem el-Zakzaky-led Shiite group and state-sponsored harassment of #BringBackOurGirl campaigners. In less than a year through Buhari’s first tenure, both groups were at war with the government.
The Shiites, during Jonathan, had had a deadly encounter with military officers, and that left about 35 members dead. El-Zakzaky lost three sons during that attack on Quds day rally by the sect. There was no sincere effort at justice, only the usual condescension and gaslighting. And yet again an order was enforced. It all came crashing 17 months later, with a worse massacre still under Buhari. The convoy of Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff was stopped by the Shiite procession, and that disrespect triggered a dawn invasion that left about 700 Shiites dead—347 by Government’s own account—in just a night.
Instead of pursuing justice to repair that tragedy, the government arrested el-Zakzaky and wife and cracked down on the members who took to the streets to protest. The couple had been in custody since then, and their followers had been begging for justice, and getting hounded, arrested and killed since then. We do this to preserve order.
The #EndSARS protests emerged in an atmosphere of Nigeria’s descent into a police state, with citizens aware of the danger of such assembly. The #BringBackBackOurGirls campaigners had faced resistance from the Buhari government in a fashion more brutal than experienced under Jonathan. Their convergence spot in Abuja had been barricaded and attempts to access it now is an invitation to police brutality.
The #EndSARS protests were initially perceived as another of the youths’ episodic mischief that would fizzle out if left unaddressed. This was, in part, so because everyday Nigerians were almost always reluctant to participate in such civic disobedience. This understanding of such mindset by the political class, who are culturally condescending, precipitated the response that has left the entire nation on edge.
The protests emphasized a few dangers: the youths can mobilize a massive movement to threaten the power and legitimacy of the government; the economic hardship in Nigeria is a prime national security threat and an underplayed symptom of Nigeria’s dysfunction. They also point to how cross-fertilization of ideas between tech-savvy young Nigerians and foreign nations are inspiring bolder interests in governance.
Some hard lessons have been learnt on both sides. The government has realised that it can no longer take such outrage for granted, as it had done in handling promises to ban SARS since 2017. Both sides also reached an epiphany that poverty is a threat to the nation’s stability, as can be inferred from the maddening looting and arson perpetrated by hoodlums who exploited the disorder. Even though the government bowed to pressure and accepted the demands presented by the protesters, it’s understood by the youths that the same government cares less about human rights.
The unpleasant end of the protests, unfortunately, leaves a lot in the balance. The government’s acceptance of the protesters’ 5-point demands failed to keep the streets empty because of extant trust deficit. And the politicians, instead of fast-tracking the solutions, chose to hire thugs to attack the protesters, with the police even offering logistic services to the merchants of anarchy. The agenda, from the word go, was to profile the protesters as violent and justify the use of brute force to stop them.
With the infiltration of the protests failing to produce instant results, the narratives of the protests began to evolve into ethnic and regional wars, and just at the point the Nigerian Army announced its strangely-named Operation Crocodile Smile, which, according to the Acting Director of the Army’s Public Relations, was “designed to identify, track and counter negative propaganda on social media and across cyberspace.” The polarization was instant that even the musician, Burna Boy, was caught pants down. On his Twitter, he asked, “How did Fulani herdsmen get to Port Harcourt?” It was his attempt to make sense of the violence in his hometown. He apologized almost immediately when called out. Not many were that mature, especially one Adamu Garba who asked northerners to overlook Buhari’s performance and perceive the #EndSARS campaign as a southern agenda to retake power from the North.
The calculated deployment of brute force and propaganda warfare to discredit #EndSARS were all to underplay justice. They were another of our quests for order without justice. But the next time the youths are pushed to revolt in such fashion and size again, it would be a worse bloodbath because justice is never the government’s priority. Both sides, I fear, may come prepared. And that would be an explosion that would be the dangerous determiner for the future of Nigeria.
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