Was the protest that started yesterday in parts of the country only because of hunger? Yes. It was. It was because of deprivation. It was because of poverty. It was because of hunger. My compatriots were and are hungry. They are hungry for food, water and light. They are hungry. They are hungry for security. They are hungry. They are hungry for progress, for a new national identity. Mahatma Gandhi, it was, who once said that “there are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” In other words, when hunger, when the desire for three staple meals per day are not satisfied, all sense of deprivation become exacerbated.
But wait a minute! Hunger in our land did not just begin last year. No. It only got worse when fuel subsidy was removed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He did that, so he argued, in order to plug leakages in our economy. He did that, he contended, in order to rescue the future of our nation from the stranglehold of the privileged few who had fed fat on government policy on fuel subsidy.
He promised to redeploy the monies that would gained from the policy to the development of critical infrastructure in our nation – the bad roads; the empty hospitals; the dilapidated infrastructures in our institutions of higher learning. What about the carousels at our nation’s airport that constantly jerk as a sad metaphor for the forces that had continued to pull our nation down. PBAT did what other presidents before him dared not do. He knew that there would be pain in the land. He probably never knew how grim and grievous the circumstances of his compatriots would be.
Grim and grievous. Dire circumstances. Hunger. Seeming hopelessness. Hyper-inflation. Soon the known to the ordinary Nigerian citizens became unknown. The homely became unhomely. Rice became a ‘king’. Beans became ‘’emperors’’. Yam became “its majesty”. Carrot. Ordinary carrot became like the only damsel in the ‘’village’’ – you appreciate its ‘’beauty’’ by your inability to come near let alone to touch it! Then it began to feel as if ours is now a jungle. In the jungle, only one law predominates- eat or be eaten! The market seller. The fish vendor. The pepper seller in the popular market. Everybody began to seize on the moment. People began to exploit one another. Four pieces of carrots became one thousand naira! I asked my friend, the Mallam close to the campus, why should that be. He responded with just one word- “Tinubu”. Yes. It is the President who is responsible for the normal and the abnormal; he is going to be held accountable by His Creator for the sense and the nonsense in the polity.
“The President actually meant well by that policy of removing fuel subsidy”, I told my younger brother. But he looked me in the eyes and wondered whether what he heard was actually from me. He then retorted: “Of what value is a policy meant to discipline the rich but from which vast majority of people are now suffering?”!
In other words, one of the reasons we are all suffering as a nation is that we sometimes prefer to remain silent while perpetrators of evil enjoy a field day; we conduct ourselves as if it does not matter even when the ship in which we are passengers take a turn for the worse.
Whenever the leadership fails to attend to genuine grievances, whenever we fail to provide direction and hope for our youth, whenever the collective conscience of the society is weakened to a point whereby immoral practices are not suppressed, where people indulge in evils without any sense of shame and even go around vaunting their immoral deeds, whenever good people adopt a passive attitude and are content with being righteous merely in their own lives and are unconcerned with or prefer to be silent when others are committing heinous acts and sins, then the entire society invites its doom. Such a society then becomes the victim of a scourge that does not distinguish between the grain and the chaff. Thus, the given politics of the protest was to serve as a catalyst; to give voice to the muted ‘voices’ of the masses. It was meant to ventilate the frustration of the electorate with the gap between the promise of change and the realities that ‘change’ has occasioned.
Ironically, the protest equally generated apprehensions and anxieties. We do not want Nigeria to turn into Somalia, nor to Sudan, nor to Libya. In these and other failed states in contemporary Africa, protests for and in search of bread led to the spilling of blood and loss of lives and the destruction of the nation. Brethren, if President Tinubu fails to deliver on his promises by 2026, the electorate knows what they should do in 2027.
Prophet Muhammad, (upon him be peace and blessings of our Creator) says: if you desire peace and progress let three habits be part of your daily habit – feed the poor, attend to your obligations to your kith and kin; observe Tahajjud at night while humanity is at sleep”, then your nation would be like a paradise. I take my ‘protestations’ to my Creator; He is the one, the Only One who can effect lasting changes in this nation.
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