By Tochukwu Ezukanma
I am unequivocally in support of the planned nationwide protest by Nigerian youths slated for August 1st, 2024. The protest is pertinent and legitimate, and long overdue. It is exhilarating that we are snapping out of our passivity and docility, and the associated bearing the unbearable, suffering the insufferable, tolerating the intolerable and stomaching the un-stomachable.
With the protest, #EndBadGovernance, the youths will be speaking for the generality of Nigerians. They will be trumpeting and dramatizing our discontent with the Tinubu administration. It behoves all Nigerians to join in the protest.
An aberration of Nigerian democracy is that elections have routinely failed to represent the will of the people. The last presidential election disenfranchised the electorate and foisted the wrong leader on the country. And, as “Nobody who steals political power uses it for the good of the people”, the Tinubu administration has betrayed its Renewed Hope mantra, and dashed the hopes of Nigerians.
The kind of president a president is is revealed by the composition of his administration. The Tinubu administration is studded with incompetents, many of whom are trailed by corruption allegations. It is an administration devoid of committed public servants; it is teeming with profligate, money-stealing and supercilious panjandrums.
At the very best, it can only be disastrous for Nigeria. In its dictatorial tendencies, it is muzzling political opposition and repressing free speech. Essentially, the Tinubu government is a dictatorship cloaked in democracy. Its bungled governance has, in the last one year, compounded all our problems, especially poverty and hunger. With the continuous drop of its purchasing power, the naira is speedily becoming a worthless piece of paper. The national economic base is dwindling, inflation is soaring, unemployment is dangerously high, food is scarce and workers’ wages can purchase very little. Thus, hunger reigns supreme in the land.
Extreme hunger, need for palliatives and the scramble for palliatives by the starving masses evoke painful memories of war-torn Biafra. Unremitting, encompassing hunger and food relief (palliatives) are corollaries of war. Why is a country not at war being plagued by symptoms of war? It is because too many things have gone horrifyingly wrong with Nigeria.
To pretend that Nigeria is not edging towards a precipice, and therefore, does not require immediate, determined, profound and wide-ranging reforms is a flight into fantasy. Flight into fantasy is a symptom of the hypnotic and deranging effects of dictatorial powers.
Having exhausted our resource of patience, Nigerian youths are poised to bray out our discontent with a peaceful nationwide protest. They have made known their demands. They include an end to unbearable hunger, crude oil theft, rigging of elections, budget padding, galloping inflation, exorbitant electric tariff, and excessive borrowing for looting; reduction in fuel prices; increase of minimum wage; improved power supply; fixing of non-functional refineries; restructuring; etc., Their demands are lucid, and reasonable. The only viable option for the Tinubu government is to heed the call of the protester, and meet their demands.
As though his administration is oblivious of the constitutional right of Nigerians to peaceful protest, it is so jittery about, and totally unnerved by the planned protest. With blandishments, innuendoes and threats, it is trying to scuttle the protest. In addition, it is mobilizing the police and other security agencies to forestall the protest and/or to attack the protesters once it starts. But, refreshingly, the youths are determined to go on with the protest.
President Tinubu must think that the brute force of the security agencies can repress the expression of legitimate grievances by Nigerians. But has history not demonstrated that power predicated on guns and bayonets is the most treacherous form of power? It has always betrayed those that wielded it excessively. Has history not furnished us the instructive precedence that those that tried to maintain their power against the will of the people have always kissed the dust?
Those that populate the upper echelons of the security agencies are expectedly out of touch with the Nigerian reality because they live in their cocoons of wealth, opulence and privileges. In their isolation from reality and inexorable need to safeguard the status quo, they can readily order violence against peaceful demonstrators. But at the other economic extreme are the gun toting underlings that will carry out the order to shoot. Like the generality of Nigerians, they are consigned to poverty and hunger, and their attendant gloom.
The security agencies have been the indispensable tools of repression for the ruling elite. Their refusal to obey orders to shoot at demonstrators; and their joining in the protest will jolt the Tinubu administration off its dictatorial hallucination. It will buckle, and in order not to totally lose its balance, it will be forced to heed the demands of the protesters. Meeting the demands of the protesters will be transformational. It will make the country functional and livable. It will ameliorate the sufferings of the long, dispossessed, downtrodden and disenfranchised Nigerian masses.
Tochukwu Ezukanma writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
tezukanma@gmail.com
