Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993.
The long orchestrated nationwide hunger and hardship protests have come and gone. The protesters have since gone home, mostly bruised , battered and even more depressed than ever before . Some are nursing broken skulls or irritated eyes from tear gas smoke. Quite a bit of public and private property has been damaged or stolen. Miscreants and plain thieves have helped themselves. A handful of citizens and some security personnel were not so lucky to make it back home alive from the theatres of confrontation. The official dogs of war –policemen and soldiers- amassed to hound the protesters have returned to base to rehearse for another day.
Some uneasy calm would seem to have returned to the streets where some of the pitched battled raged a few days back. But the roots of the protests remain with us. People remain hungry, very hungry and even more angry. The impression that this government is not good for the people whose mandate it claims has remained and has even gone more viral and entrenched. Life remains hard and unbearable across the country. Those who went out to scream and shout have swallowed the bile of their anger a bit, having given vent to a cannibal rage that prompted their protest in the first place. Anger directed at something called government is wasted anger. Government in these parts is nobody in particular! When people troop out in anger against a bad government, their anger may be wasted as it is directed at nobody in particular.
In the recent skirmish of hunger protests around the country, a bad government came face to face with an angry citizenry massed as a mob. A bad government confronted with ugly citizens is a bad spectacle. Citizens transformed into irate mobs have tested the nerves of a rather jittery state. The mobs massed out in the streets and wherever else they felt their anger would be felt by government. They were united by the simple things that make us all human: hunger, want for basic things of life and frustration with the quality of our lives.
Pre-protest rehearsals on the part of government ranged from foolish speculation to laughable political naïvety and predictable security knee jerks. Aso Rock political minions sketched a political geography of the protests and who could be sponsoring them. The wild guesses ranged from Mr. Peter Obi to IPOB and sundry political opposition jobbers. A different lazy gaze beamed the searchlight on the remnants of the last EndSARS organizers. But this was not like that previous encounter. This was something more nebulous with a silly name.
But contrary to the wild berth of official protest trackers, like protesters and mobs elsewhere, the crowds that massed out to protest carried placards and private banners with public messages drawing attention to the roots of their grievance
: “We are Hungry”, “Give us Food”, “Stop Stealing Our Money”. Despite feverish government effort to divide the protesters with politics, the people re-drew the national misery map according to the laws of the necessity of daily living. Hunger, poverty and hardship generate a map of the nation all of their own. That much was evident in the recent protests.
In line with the immutable law of democratic expression, the right of the people to protest their discomfort found overriding expression. Politics could not drown that reality. In return, the obligation of government to manage protest as a feature of democratic expression was observed to a reasonable extent. The hope, going forward, is that government will have learnt the lessons in the very pattern and mode of the protests.
Contrary to official conceptions of the projected map of the protests, the urban centres of the north saw more anger than similar centres elsewhere in the country. The message is the same as has been continuously conveyed by international development agencies and even the National Bureau of Statistics. The 19 northern states contain the poorest concentration of Nigerians with the least GDP per capita, the least access to food, shelter, heathcare and disposable cash. The pains and pangs of poverty are therefore most excruciating in these states, hence the vicious anger of the protests in those places.
If indeed the political elite of the north was attentive to the rhythm and message of the protests, they will have heard the precise message of their long missing mandate and engagement with the common people of the region. The message was loud and clear.
Abuja and Lagos presented a somewhat different picture. They are home to the most politically sophisticated Nigerians populace. They were more likely to play by the rules of democratic political protest than most other places. More importantly, a sense of political ownership of the Tinubu presidency may have doused the temper and tempo of the protests in the urban centers of the South West.
The unprecedented calm in the South East has been variously interpreted. In the first place, it makes nonsense of the pre-protest speculations in Aso Rock that the protests were the handiwork of the political and separatist elite of the zone. Secondly, the calm gave the few noisy South Eastern elements in the Tinubu administration some substance to take to Abuja and brandish the support of the zone for Tinubu. These elements are perfectly entitled to the self ingratiation and overblown self importance. At a more fundamental, geo-political level, it is left for the Nigerian political establishment to figure out why the whole South East would shun a national protest predicated on pains that are so obviously widespread. Any serious political establishment should spend some time trying to understand what exactly is going on in the political unconscious of the Igbos of the South East.
Contrary to the convenient tendency to divide the Nigerian populace and electorate in terms of geo politics, ethnicity, religion and partisanship, the anthems of the protesters were more unifying. Nigerians who trooped out to protest indicated a solid unity of purpose forged by their exposure to common adversities of hunger, hardship, unemployment and inflation, mass poverty, homelessness and hopelessness.
There is of course many things inherently wrong about the mode and framing of the recent protests. The national coordination of the organizers was defective. The framing of the governing message was too large and omnibus. Unlike the protesters in Kenya and Bangladesh, the protests were not powered by any specific demands and deadlines. There were no specific tasks for the NASS, the Executive, INEC, etc. Ending bad governance is such a large chest whose components could be expanded indefinitely. ENDSARS was more pointed hence its targeted objective and specific achievements. This one was rather diffuse. That is probably why the protests ended up as an amorphous futility.
After the protests, the challenges for the government should ordinarily be self -defined. Government should be more people oriented. Public policy should be more tailored towards bringing more immediate succor to the masses. Attention should now be paid to areas of wastage of public resources. Government should buy less luxury goods, build fewer needless mansions, embark on fewer questionable foreign trips and do so with more purposeful and sensibly sized contingents. More importantly, this is an opportunity to look at the matter of corruption beyond the routine invitation and questioning of suspects by the EFCC.
So far, very little timid action has been taken in this regard. A reduction in tariff on imported food has been announced. A curious directive has gone out from the Presidency to the EFCC to donate N50 billion from recovered corruption money to boost the funding of the newly inaugurated Students Loans Fund. All well and good.
On the contrary, government has embarked on some predictable behaviors. Indiscriminate arrests have been made of alleged suspected ring –
leaders of the protests without any specific charges as yet. The office of the National Security Adviser has gone to town to announce the seizure or freezing of over N80bn in suspected protest sponsorship funds. No details. No names, No indictments or specific charges or specific court proceedings. There are loud rehearsals of moves to institute draconian and authoritarian measures probably in order to project the image of a stronger government. For instance, a foolish draft bill to jail or heavily fine people who refuse to recite the national anthem by the House of Representatives Speaker has been dropped like hot potato under threat of stiff citizen resistance. No one knows what else lies in store for a citizenry that is now seen as cowed and defeated.
The abiding question is now this : when citizens in exercise of their rights under a democracy cow under the jackboots of authority, could they be inviting a democracy to transform into an elected dictatorship? The next couple of weeks will perhaps be more exciting for Nigerians than the anxious moments before the futile protests.
