Thursday, the protests started and are scheduled to continue for 10 days. It was not supposed to happen. Government said it must not happen, it will not happen and it should not happen because it is addressing all the complaints of the movement. The people did not believe the government and disregarded all the threats and the inducements. The core message is clear; hunger and suffering in Nigeria today is real and though government is all-powerful, hunger breeds anger and protest. It’s that simple.
The politics is more complex as governmental panic was caused by the Kenyan youth whose protest turned into an attempted insurrection to bring down the Kenyan Government. No government accepts the possibility of an insurrection. They will fight it with determination and the fight might be effective or less effective. The Nigerian government’s fight has so far been less effective for the simple reason that they refused to address the fundaments, the hunger and the suffering. Government had a month’s notice to respond to the demands of the protesters but chose to play politics.
Government’s response through its security agencies started with ethnic baiting as they suggested Peter Obi and IPOB militants are the culprits who are determined to bring down the Tinubu Administration by claiming there is hunger in the land. Government supporters in Lagos threatened the Igbo community as they had done during the 2023 elections. The day before the protest was to start, Deputy Speaker Benjamin Kalu made a passionate speech to his Igbo community warning them not to protest. We know that ethnic baiting often works in Nigeria but government underestimated the fundaments – the hunger and suffering is real.
Government also massively mobilised religious and traditional leaders, bringing them to Abuja where they were given marching orders to stop their people from protesting. As is usually the case, they obeyed the instructions given, begged their people not to protest and got jeers and insults in return, after all the hunger and suffering is real.
- Hunger protest: Public, private properties looted, set ablaze
- Day one of protest: Deaths, destruction in some states
Government then made it clear to the youth that every protest ends in violence and the business of the government is to protect the people from violence. The youth were duly informed (threatened) that the army, police and other security agencies would deal with them if they dare to protest. The cheeky youth responded that they had read the constitution and it guarantees their freedom to protest and would operate by the constitution rather than government’s anti-constitutional threats. Government’s response was that the law-and-order threat was justified because no one knows the organisers (don’t forget at one point it was Peter Obi), so the security establishment would do its work. When the government realised the threats would not work, it started having meetings with them to beg them to cancel. Eureka, the government discovered the unknown protesters.
As government panic grew, a brilliant minister then initiated a poker move to break the deadlock. He convened hungry people in Abuja and promised to pay them handsomely if they protested against the protest at the Eagle Square. They did and held up their beautiful don’t protest posters for the cameras. Unfortunately for him, many of the rented protesters were not paid their promised N5, 000 each and they started to protest to journalists that they were still in the normal mode of hunger and suffering. As government itself was organising protests, the failed poker move became the strongest legitimation for the protest to hold.
The internet became an ally of the protest movement as videos of a certain Bola Tinubu making the case for the legitimacy of protest and the responsibility of security forces to protect, not attack protesters spread. Government got trapped in a language dilemma. If the current president was once a protester who had elegantly defended the constitutional right to protest, they had to adopt a more complex argument that blunted their message. On the one hand, protest is allowed by our laws but on the other hand, protest is not allowed by our laws as it always leads to violence. This lack of clarity weakened the government’s argument.
In desperation, the government rushed to the courts and obtained rulings that the demonstrators must be confined in specific named spaces in Abuja, Lagos, Ilorin and so on. Maybe it would have worked had the protestors not been obliged to march to these named spaces of confinement. That was how the protests happened in many parts of the country.
The protest was themed “10 Days of Rage,” as a response to economic challenges, perceived as negative impacts of President Bola Tinubu’s economic policies, which has led to a severe cost of living crisis and widespread socio-economic grievances. The philosopher Bob Marley has sung that a hungry mob is an angry mob so the government had legitimate fears of possible violence. The reality in Nigeria is that often, it is the way government polices the protest or the use of thugs that produces violence. In addition, the insensitivity of the Nigerian ruling class is another factor. The Senate President, Akpabio, who has an uncommon ability to annoy people, made jest of the protesters by announcing they will be eating while the protesters were demonstrating. Every Nigerian understood what he meant by eating – the ruling class will continue with its culture of reckless corruption that ensures that the governed don’t benefit from governance. The roots of the anger are that the cost of corruption is very high in our society and the suffering of our people is directly linked to this history of corruption.
Given this history, one of my greatest fears about the future of Nigeria is our collective loss of the capacity for anger. It was the Cameroonian author, Celestin Monga who reminded us in his book – the anthropology of anger – that the capacity of civil society and citizens in Africa to advance the developmental and democratic agenda of their countries is a function of their ability to express outrage at the destruction of their societies and its assets. The nouns that define how we feel are important indications of our capacity to act. Anger, rage, fury, ire, wrath, resentment and indignation are vital elements in creating human agency. Fury denotes our marked displeasure at a particular situation and demonstrates we have not given up and substituted anger for passive sadness at the terrible states of affairs we find ourselves in.
For over 60 years, every week, Nigerians have been inundated with news stories about corruption; starting from small brown envelopes in the 1960s to huge Ghana must go bags in the 1990s. The process culminated in simply taking billions of dollars from the Central Bank of Nigeria or NNPCL and brazenly posting the money to private accounts.
My sense was that rather than channel energy on per second bursts of indignation, Nigerians took a more strategic approach of working to remove corrupt governments through electoral means and bring on board new governments with the resolve to fight corruption. Today, it has become clear that elections cannot redeem government as the corrupt have the resources and skills to reproduce themselves through manipulating the electoral process. And when people come out to show their anger, they get killed.
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