According to a popular proverb, you do not beat a child and expect him or her not to cry. Crying is just a protest to register pain from the assault. Hence, denying the victim the liberty of protesting the administration of pain, becomes double jeopardy and smacks of insensitivity. That must be the dilemma faced by the Bola Tinubu presidency as it grapples with a looming nationwide protest ostensibly organised on behalf of hungry Nigerians, and which is scheduled to start from August 1st 2024 being next week.
For some time the Tinubu government has been striving to contain the eventuality of a looming nationwide protest, which has spawned fears that unintended consequences may follow, since historically such public outings easily attract uninvited trouble makers, who come to execute mayhem. The question before all now is what remediation measures is the government adopting to address the matter. This consideration borders on the fact that public support for the government will depend on the response its drivers adopt.
So far, the consensus has indicted the government as acting in denial of the problem on ground. Yet there is a scourge of real time hunger and starvation which is ravaging the country at an unprecedented level. And as is public knowledge, the syndrome is widely traced to several factors – the principal of which is the removal of fuel subsidy on May 29th 2023, by President Tinubu, right from his inauguration ceremony.
Courtesy of that development, the prices of foods and other essentials of life have gone beyond the purchasing power of the majority of Nigerians. The challenge now is that some smart alecs are cashing in on the widespread malcontent, to stage a political statement against the administration, come August 1, 2024.
Considering the pallid circumstances which the Tinubu administration inherited from the preceding administration, it is tempting to concede to it a wide swath of initial missteps. However, in the light of the gravity of the situation, and its early mismanaged measures – especially the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy, nothing short of conjuring a solution to the problems is the expectation of Nigerians from it. In any case, the president must even count himself fortunate that the organisers were ‘charitable’ enough to have given him fore knowledge about the impending nationwide protest. At least Tinubu is not as handicapped as his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari was whose administration was rather ambushed by the ‘EndSars’ protest, and in turn deployed some responses which led to equally disastrous ending.
The question now is what the Tinubu presidency makes out of the situation, as with the scare the protest has already taken place technically, with the eventual outing on August 1, 2024 due for abortion. In that respect the elements in the administration have manifested two options. In one vein is the adoption of strong arm tactics in responding to the real and imagined organisers of the protest. In this respect has been a mark-up in preparedness by the country’s security establishment to contain any likely contingencies.
The foregoing is being complemented by tendencies such as the saber-rattling disposition of the Special Adviser to the President on Media, Bayo Onanuga, who not only planned a counter protest dubbed ‘savenigeria’ but also singled out the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 general polls, Peter Obi, for excoriation, and accused same of being an arrow-head of the planned protests.
Typically, no mention is made of the real causative factor of the protest being the scourge of hunger and starvation raging across the nation! Such is hardly surprising to not a few observers of the presidential aide, given his proclivities in office with respect to raising enemies for Tinubu on a daily basis.
In the circumstances, the way forward is not by matching the impending protests with belligerence, but by adopting a more discretional approach which identifies with the inherent, unmistakable weaknesses of the administration. This entails an admission of fault lines in its structure, which are in conflict with the renewed hope agenda.
Placed in context, the failure of any structure or programme often does not occur on the day and time of collapse, rather failure commences from the moment performance deviates from conception. While the foregoing may accentuate a sense of failure for the administration, it constitutes the bare truth of how Nigerians see the Tinubu administration, as before them the administration is yet to get its act together.
If there is one take away from the protest scare or actual threat, it is the cue it offers the administration to embrace the wisdom of not taking Nigerians for granted, just because of a complement of promises on the platform of the renewed hope agenda. The second take-away is that even if the government musters the muscle to wade off the coming protest, the scourge has been etched into the nation’s psyche to require rapid reversal of the nation’s fortunes to erase from memory.
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