By Sonala Olumhense
Just to be clear, I firmly support the forthcoming public protests in Nigeria. They are a fair and patriotic reaction, and ought to enjoy the full-throated support even of President Bola Tinubu, just as they did 12 years ago.
By protest, I mean the free and unencumbered open assemblage of citizens to express their outrage over the poor quality of governance and the horrendous conditions under which they currently suffer.
By protest, I do not mean riots. I do not mean violence. I do not mean vandalism. By protest, I mean a free and open expression, in public spaces, of dissent. That includes the denunciation of the government by citizens who are so inclined.
We have been here before, and my position on this subject is as old as my undergraduate days when I participated in campus protests. I have done street protests in New York, including at the United Nations.
Indeed, I have often called for these public political outbursts. In an October 2009 memo I called “A Scream In The Streets,” I urged the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties, Campaign Against Corrupt Leaders, Association of Nigerian Professional Bodies, National Association of Nigerian Students, and the Nigerian Labour Congress to take to the streets. Mr. Umaru Yar’Adua was in power. I wrote a similar memo three months later.
My message was simply this: to harness the power of the streets to express “a collective, repeated and irrepressible “NO” to the forces that drag” Nigeria back.
I wrote “A Scream In The Streets III” in February 2012, adding to my addresses to the Joint Action Force, and — following the events of the previous month when President Goodluck Jonathan eliminated the fake oil subsidy — Occupy Nigeria.
Keep in mind that those events, with Mr Jonathan at the receiving end, enjoyed the support of various political groups that then banded together into the All Progressives Congress, which now owns Nigeria.
I was probably Mr Jonathan’s fiercest critic, paying close attention to his Transformation Plan as well as his empty promises and vows. APC built on the gift of popular reaction to Jonathan’s atrocious performance and won the 2015 election. A contrite and magnanimous Jonathan called Muhammadu Buhari, the APC candidate, to congratulate him on his victory.
How do you measure mediocrity and collapse? In August 2019, I pointed out how Muhammadu Buhari had performed so badly in his first term that he accomplished the impossible: making Jonathan a star.
“Jonathan is enjoying life,” I wrote, “his shoulders and chest considerably more prominent in public: a profile chiselled and polished into pride and prominence by [Buhari] who swore to make transparency a prominent tool of governance but has proved to be far less transparent than Jonathan ever was.”
All of that was despite Buhari’s government accusing Jonathan of accepting bribes while he was president, among others, but itself becoming far more corrupt.
And so here we are, nearly 10 years after Jonathan left office, and Nigeria is on the eve of the public protest aimed at the Buhari/Tinubu regime that took over. Last week, an article in the Council on Foreign Relations described the background to the protest.
It is no surprise that the Tinubu government is in panic and clutching at straws, including attacking its favourite political foe, Peter Obi, of the Labour Party. Senator Ali Ndume, who had fiercely criticised the government for its shortcomings, was swiftly relieved of his position as Senate Chief Whip.
Evidently, the Tinubu government is in the wrong fight. Like Buhari, who said the #ENDSARS protests of 2020 were aimed at removing him from power, Tinubu is afraid he will be dethroned.
But accountability, not dethronement, is the objective. The theme of the protest is #EndBadGovernance, as bad governance has assailed and frustrated Nigeria for too long. Bad governance has inflicted untold pain, despair, suffering, and poverty on our people. It has stunted her development while making billionaires of shameless crooks.
Tinubu knows this. He said so himself. Responding to the anti-subsidy protests in 2012, he affirmed that the people had the right to “kick out” those responsible for their plight.
I quote him at length: “…They make things better for themselves, for their comfort, and their families. Cronyism is prevailing. Today, our rulers in Abuja… you know what they say to us when they remove subsidy and we say No.
“Hunger is increasing? They say, ‘So what?’ Unemployment? They say, ‘We know.’ Why are the people hungry? They say, “Let them face death.” That is what is in Abuja today. The current way of governance makes nation-building impossible. What it does is make poverty and the erosion of a just society inevitable.
“We have gathered at this hour in this place to put an end to the national corrosion and corruption. We have assembled here today to bring a new day and a new Nigeria to our people. Today the Nigerian people are decent and hardworking. They are equally long-suffering. They tolerate for too long. Just because they are long-suffering does not mean they should be forced to suffer until death comes.
“We, our people, we’ve had enough of excuses. Our people have had enough of having nothing. The current government trademark is to throw empty words at our problem [incoherent] as if doing nothing will cause our troubles to leave for sheer boredom. Unemployment increases. Industrialisation, we have nothing. Refineries, nothing is working. Electricity, they lie.
“If this is the government’s idea of transformation, I will have none of it. We should not have any of it. Before, we said the government of slow motion, now it is the government of no motion at all. If they want to stand still at the bus stop or train station and be [unclear], they have their right to do so. And we have the right to kick them out. It is not enough that they are stealing from our children tomorrow. For lack [unclear] in education. They are still embezzling the retirement benefits of hardworking Nigerians including our grandfathers. They are stealing [unclear]…the treasury not even leaving some coins for us to work with. Let them be out. Out, now!!!”
Tinubu was right in affirming the rights of Nigerians to confront their tormentors. While the tormentors may have changed, the torment has only become worse. The hunger and the unemployment and the lying and the stealing and hypocrisy and the bad governance are worse.
If #EndBadGovernance was a faint whimper in 2012, it is a loud uproar now and only those who are perpetrating or benefitting from it can object. I support the protests because poverty cannot wait. Hunger cannot wait. Insecurity cannot wait. Joblessness cannot wait.
If you advocate waiting, come with me to families and communities ruined by incompetent and duplicitous governance; to lives overrun by hopelessness; to starving children deprived of hope.
If your story is that the rejection of bad governance by Nigerians is the work of foreign mercenaries or unknown witches or Peter Obi, you are a liar and a producer of the conflict. You are a sponsor of corrupt and ineffective governance, hypocrisy, greed and duplicity.
To quote Mr. Tinubu: “Let them be out. Out NOW!!”
In this article
