In 1980 a little known reggae band – ‘The Ethiopians’ released a track – “Everything Crash” which enjoyed rave acceptance by aficionados of that music genre.
Part of the lyrics goes as follows “Look de now, everything crash, Look de now, everything crash. Firemen strike, watermen strike, telephone company too, down to policemen too! What da bad a-morning can’t come good in the evening, ohoo! Every day carry bucket to the well, one day the bucket bottom must drop out, everything crash…” As the now abating street-rage driven wave of protests was running, not a few street-wise Nigerians of the older generations would have had these words course through their minds, and leave them wondering over the prophetic endowments of the band called ‘The Ethiopians’, especially with reference to the Nigeria’s experience in the last three weeks or so.
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Even as the band may not specifically have had Nigeria in mind, their track enjoys significant tie-up with the prevailing conditions of living for countless Nigerians, as far as their daily run on life mattered. For a society that has remained trapped in the vortex of privation of good governance, with the bulk of the citizenry living from hand to mouth in a state of ever deepening hunger, it was clear that a breaking point was imminent, and as the song said, “the bottom of the bucket must drop out”. Undeniably too, the intensity and scale of destruction witnessed in the course of the recent #EndSARS wave of protests, literally manifested as the case of the bottom of a bucket full of the country’s problems and solutions, dropping out, with everything crashing… or nearly so.
Starting from Lagos and spreading to Abuja, Port Harcourt as well as several other cities, the protests claimed a significant toll of deaths of protesters, security agents as well as innocent by-standers in one vein. In another vein it laid to waste a large number of high profile public and private buildings which were looted, vandalized and even set ablaze. One of the most bizarre, reported incidents was the attack on the palace of the Oba of Lagos Rilwan Akiolu, and the carting away of the monarch’s staff of office for public display and denigration. Given the sanctity of the palace of a typical Yoruba monarch, it is not likely that such a sacrilege will go unattended to properly, in the course of time.
Just as well, the protests also betrayed some other better subdued faces of the citizenry that perhaps required sheer anomy to unveil, given the widely held public perception of government – rightly or otherwise, as perennially obdurate to care about the governed, beyond what serves the interest of the ruling class. One of these is the deep seated state of malcontent in the Nigerian social fabric against the powers that be – a state of affairs which is captured by the cliché that a hungry man is an angry man. Apparently glossed over by the government, is the reality that debilitating poverty and hunger – the painful and debilitating forms of such, have held a wider cross-section of Nigerians in a vice-like grip. Whoever is in doubt should ask any of the protesters.
Given the primacy of food in man’s hierarchy of needs, it is traditionally the primary index for appraising the quality of life in any society. And in Nigeria, food is unmistakably scarce, as even official figures hold that the bulk of food eaten in the country is imported at a high premium to the detriment of other pressing national needs. However, even as the all too obvious scarcity of food may seem trivial to the government and members of the ruling class, to the ordinary Nigerians it is a daily critical challenge, which makes much of government pronouncements which do not lead to increase of food in quantity and quality for the ordinary citizen on the streets, a ‘tale for the marines’, (an euphemism for a cock-and -bull story that does not qualify to be believed).
In the circumstance, much of government’s pronouncements and initiatives especially on food related policy objectives as well as palliatives are likely formulated and launched on the basis of the mass of misleading official statistics and situation reports, which are routinely churned out by coach-potato officials, who hardly leave the comfort of their offices to harness real life scenarios as the bases of their prognoses. Such hollow positions often adopted by government on critical national issues, constitute the areas of discrepancy which misdirect government to act out of tune with the socio economic realities on ground. A typical instance of this situation remains the wide disconnect which many observers noted between the speech of President Muhammadu Buhari in the nationwide broadcast last Thursday with respect to the #EndSARS protest on one hand, and the high points of the protesters’ demand on the other hand. Many observers saw the President’s speech more as a talk-down riot act than a palliative, given the fact that what the country needed now to move forward, is Presidential empathy and ego massage for the agitated citizens, instead of the power show which this government characteristically displayed. Ordinarily, the President owes a constitutional duty to direct government machinery towards maintaining law and order, hence Buhari remains duty-bound to adopt measures to arrest any instance of anomy which the wave of protests in the latter days, was spreading.
However the same Constitution vests on the government the responsibility of actualising the Fundamental Objectives and Directives of State Policy as enshrined in Chapter 2, comprising sections 13 to 24 of the Constitution. Without equivocation, had the government allowed itself to be guided even halfway by that critical chapter of the Constitution, no Nigerian youth would have indulged in any street protest for a greater part of two weeks, and exposed himself or herself to sudden death from bullets or any other cause.
Granted that the protests started on the premise of #EndSARS, it was also clear from the beginning that the grievances would extend beyond the mere grudge against a small but mission-critical operational unit (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force. After all, the litany of grievances for the protests which started with the highhandedness of the police went on to turn obtuse when it included the daily worsening socio political conditions of living in Nigeria, to include the plight of the country’s youth in terms of escalating unemployment and the attendant state of despair for them, perennial failure of government to fulfill its promises to move the country forward and the perceived mortgage of the future of the nation to creditor nations like the unforgiving China.
That is why the President needs to see the recent developments as the concrete evidence that his administration is failing, and therefore needs a thorough rejigging from top to bottom, in other to stem the decline in its rating. When citizens have to die in order to keep in power, a government they ostensibly voted into power, that government literally eats its own citizens to survive. And that is nothing other than pristine cannibalism.
