Category: Opinion

Jeffrey Isima

READING from various quarters on the current crisis precipitated by police brutality and the resultant ENDSARS mass protest has been bewildering. The overwhelming opinion of commentators has been condemnatory of the federal government and the political class. The thrust of the charge is that government forces, with support from politicians, shot at and killed peaceful protesters on Lekki Bridge in Lagos city on the night of Tuesday October 20. Some would even add that the protests took the violent turn because opposition politicians exploited it to target their opponents.

As we wait for a commission of inquiry to establish the veracity and details of this charge, it has become obvious that the country has been perniciously nudged to the edge of the precipice within the spate of a few days. While the violence before, during and after the Lekki shooting – involving killings of both civilians and security officials, arson, looting and the reign of mayhem (maybe, including rape)  – have been ominous of a dark cloud hanging over the country, what is of immediate foreboding is the bombshell of anti-government rhetoric from various standpoints – a few seeking to be factual, others largely playing to the political gallery, while many hopping on the band wagon similar to the group psychology of the protest itself.

The anti-government narratives are diverse and it serves no purpose to list them here. However, they are united in their philosophical foundation. They presuppose that the protests and the ensuing conflict are about people (or youths) versus government. The arguments are constructed on some flawed premises of a binary fiction, falsely assuming an imaginary dichotomy between the state and society as two parallel universes diametrically opposed to each other. Government (and politicians) constitutes the enemy of the people and must be fought to submission, goes the mainstream narrative!

On this false foundation now sits the edifice that the state is the sole source of the problem and must be the one to be reformed. This wholesale demonisation of the state may have helped, not only in mobilising the youths to join the protests across the country, but may have secured some sympathetic sentiments outside the country for the protest. However, the mental compartmentalisation of the state and the society undercuts the chances of de-escalating the high tension. The false edifice must be deconstructed in our minds in order seek solutions that would help pull the country back from the brink of decomposition.

The state and the society are not two separate opponents seeking to score goals against each other in a bitter zero-sum game! I do not see COMPARTMENTS; I see an interwoven SYSTEM, in which the suffering of one part hurts the whole. A country is an intricate web of organic state-society relations.

Firstly, we may have a police brother in the family, a sister or aunt in the parliament, a son among the protesters and a dear friend in the president‘s team. Evidently, the killing of protesters and the killing of law enforcement officials equally hurt us as a country, distantly or remotely. By the same stretch, we will all be endangered if our security system completely breaks down, giving way to lawlessness and disorder.

Furthermore, when we create this mental state vs. society binary fiction, we make believe that the state did not come from the society. The latter predates the former and the former organically emerges from the latter. Political office holders and policymakers emerge from the wider society and were once private citizens. They were elected by the society, or nominated by the same. They are shaped by values inculcated in them by and in the society. It is, therefore, hard to accept that the society comes from heaven and the state from hell.

Again, the state cannot exist without the society nor can it survive without its support. Security forces and law enforcement agents are recruited from the wider civilian society and exhibit the values of the social milieu from which they emerge. Similarly, rulers cannot hold to power without support from vital elements within the society.

I therefore do not see how our rulers and police officials are fundamentally different from us, in terms of our core values as the Nigerian society. Are the rulers and law enforcement officials more violent, predatory, heartless, self-seeking and disrespectful than the rest of us in the society? Are they more corrupt, dishonest and swindling than us?

This is not denying the well-documented daily experience of police brutality, nor vindicating the excesses of the ex-SARS unit. I, too, have been a victim of the SARS bloody impunity and “license to kill” in 2011. In June of that year, after a brief return to Nigeria as faculty in the University of Ilorin, my friend and I were intercepted by a detachment of SARS operatives in early evening, chased to the university main gate, brutally yanked out of my friends car, made to lie face-down in the open back of their own truck, feeling the menacing cold barrel of their assault rifles on our heads, as they repeatedly yelled threats to blow our brains to pulp if we moved. We were driven around town, as they argued with their other blood-thirsty colleagues over the radio/walkie-talkie on whether to take us to the outskirts and waste us or take us to the station. The marijuana-smelling policemen, who accused us of having committed armed robbery, never questioned us, never asked us for identification, and never wanted us to say a word (for every word we uttered we got a butt of their rifles on our hips and pelvis), as we drove round town waiting for the final decision. Resigned to praying for our own souls and for our families in what seem to be the last few moments of our lives, we were finally relieved to overhear their superiors over their radios ordering our transportation to headquarters after so much argument, with our captors insisting on wasting us. Although nothing came out if it, after lodging a complaint at the National Human Rights Commission in Abuja, I gave a testimony in a church meeting for surviving that chilling close shave with what has been an entrenched tradition of unaccountable, extra-judicial killing by our lawlessness law enforcers. And while the enraged Professor Oloyede, then the Unilorin vice chancellor and now the director general of JAMB, tried to intervene and succeeded in getting the Kwara State Police Commissioner to apologise, the incident was too much for me to take. I promptly resigned and left the country again!

So, this is not a case of “playing the fiddle while Rome burns.” Far from it! My experience tells me that we are not too far from being the same as the men of the disbanded SARS. The moral perfidy and corruption that drives heinous police brutality is deeply embedded in our society; the mutual intolerance and high propensity to violence permeate our marrows; even the most religious of us – who pontificate on Sundays and Fridays – take pleasure in spreading fake news, propaganda and incitement to violence without compunction.

Nigeria has too many enemies and they are distributed across the state-society divide. While corrupt, self-centred politicians and killer police personnel are statist enemies of our country Nigeria, criminals, opportunistic politicians, vote riggers, ethnic bigots and jingoists, those who play to our conflict fault lines, those who do NOT check inciting information (videos, audios, etc.) before they spread, those who manufacture false information and generate fake news (pre-recorded videos/audios, unrelated videos/audios, photo superimposition, etc.), criminals, arsonists and looters, etc., are societal enemies of our country Nigeria.

So as the protests have helped in driving home the urgency of police reform, we equally need some pressure on ourselves to reform, short of which we will never have the country we dream of. It won’t take a long while before we reproduce ourselves in a future version of the rogue SARS!

• Dr. Isima is a public affairs analyst.

By Kennedy Eborka

NIGERIANS are still trying to recover from the woes of the historic ENDSARS protests that rocked the country about two weeks ago. The protests, mainly by young people, spread and resonated across all parts of the country, defying ethnic and religious differences which often play pranks with Nigeria’s unity and subvert her vision of indivisibility. The protests made it clear to the Nigerian ruling class that a new dawn has broken and the people are no longer ready to take everything from government with sheeplike passivity. The long-held belief by political elites that they could do as they wished and fortify themselves with police protection is now shattered, because the police or whatever protection they could secure with their morally objectionable wealth can be swept along with them by the waves of violent protests. Anarchy almost descended on the land with nowhere to hide. With herdsmen in the farms, Boko Haram in the forests, bandits in the bushes, kidnappers on the streets, cultists on the fringes of the neighbourhoods, the Niger Delta militants, and a massive protests that was hijacked by the lumpen proletariat (the underclass, marginalized, criminals, the homeless, and the long-term unemployed), it was only a matter of time that the ruling class would realize that they had nowhere to run to. As the protests metamorphosed into a violent hysteria, only God knows how many deadly rebellious groups would have emerged and try to lay claim to the centre with the associated pestilential consequences, if it had continued. Let’s not imagine how many years it would have taken to recover: Uganda, South Sudan, Congo and Libya, among others, would have been minor cases.

What was the issue? A crowd of young people who had suffered incessant and undeserved harassments by SARS (a special police unit designed to tackle appalling level of criminality, but unfortunately, became a nest of special killers who turned the unit into a money-making venture and commit unspeakable acts of criminality against members of the public and wasted lives as they wished), hit the streets of major cities calling for an end to the special police unit. In a matter of days, the protests had ignited millions of young people who joined the call against police brutality. However, it was clear from the waves of the protests that it was more than a response to the call to end SARS. It was more of an expression of popular disillusionment with the government and frustration that has become the fate of many Nigerians, young and old, who watch daily as billions are misappropriated. Many of them seized the call as an opportunity to express their frustrations and anger against a government that cares little about the suffering of the masses. Indeed, one can wager that many of those who took to the streets to protest had not experienced any encounter with SARS officials, but are definitely under immense pressure imposed and mainly promoted by government after government. The protests turned more violent with the setting ablaze of national assets and the symbols of national institutions perceived to be oppressive. Jails were broken, criminals and convicts were freed, and armouries were looted in the process. To nip the raging storm in the bud, soldiers were sent to disperse protesters at Lekki Toll Gate, Lagos. In the process, live bullets were fired to scare protesters leading to irrecoverable loss of lives. It was a needless crude display of military power against unarmed protesters. There has been a myriad of news relating to the Lekki episode. The truth is being mangled. Half-truths and deliberate exaggeration and abbreviation of casualties, fake news and falsification of facts by both the government and a section of the protests’ sympathizers are being bandied. Rather than see the moment as an opportunity to reassure the youths that the labour of the country’s past heroes shall never be in vain and rekindle their hope in the nation, those whose responsibility it was to address the nation and calm charged nerves chose to blame the protesters and accused them of interpreting the concession by the government as a sign of weakness. It was a huge disappointment and tended to reinforce the view that the welfare of the Nigerian masses is of secondary concern to the ruling class.

As already indicated, many who heeded the protests’ call did so in response to pressures brought upon them by a succession of morally bankrupt and incompetent leaders over the years. But for the aloofness with which the government treats the ordinary citizens, some of the sources of these pressures could be handled through simple and transparent institutional mechanisms by which ordinary people, even at the lowest level of society, could channel their complaints to the government. The pressure could be from the scandalous bills being posted by rogue electricity companies (yes, a woman was heard shouting for an end to crazy bills by Ikeja Electric), market women battling with thugs, commercial motorcycle and tricycle operators under the weight of numberless levies by hooligans, and so on and so forth, giving life to the expression in our colloquial conversations “monkey dey work, baboon dey chop”. Everywhere, the people are going through backbreaking frustration. Complaints upon complaints with no hope of redress. The ordinary people have no access to the media. They fear to go to the police because the police could turn against them if their oppressor can pay the police. With nowhere to channel their stories of daily frustration, their anger is pushed to the background to ferment. The nation is lucky to be given another opportunity for self-assessment and make efforts towards institutional reorganization and reorientation. The withdrawal of the protesters from the streets should not be misunderstood as surrender. They are likely to come back with a more violent wave if the government decides to play the ostrich.

The people must feel the impact and presence of government around them. Many are not asking for food from the government, but they need a government that can listen to their complaints and give them a sense of inclusiveness. This can be done without much costs to the government by revitalizing and popularizing the idea of Ombudsman up to the grassroot level were citizens can bring their complaints. We hear of Public Complaints Commission, but how accessible to the ordinary people is this institution? Another idea is for media organizations, especially the print media, to dedicate a column in their newspapers where ordinary people can express their frustrations and their voices heard. Let the media and the government be closer to the people so that their moods can be gauged. The idea of Olympian government is now far outdated.

• Dr. Eborka is if Department of Sociology, University of Lagos.

By Dul Johnson

Sometime in the early 80s I published an article in the Nigeria Standard in which I predicted that there could be no revolution in Nigeria. I gave three reasons for my claim: We are so blessed with food that we could never get hungry enough to birth a revolution; Religious differences would kill any attempt at a revolution, and, Ethnicity would ensure its still birth. When the EndSARS protests started, I thought I was going to be proved wrong. I don’t like revolutions if they must be violent or bloody. They have rarely brought any good to any country in the world, but I didn’t mind one because of the frustration I thought we were facing then. There have been less violent revolutions after all that have brought changes (even if a few lives had to be lost), like the one in Ghana and Romania. My prediction did not mean that I did not want a better Nigeria. In fact, it was because I yearned for it. Desperately.

But that was the early 80s. If you were born then, you can imagine how bad things have become between then and now. Then Muhammadu Buhari came to power and started to bring sanity to our society. To me, he had started a quiet revolution, but it was short-lived; killed by Ibrahim Babangida in a 1985 coup. The impact of that short period had remained with me, until Buhari returned to power, in a flowing agbada rather than a crisp green khaki uniform. I was convinced the dress did not make the man; Buhari was Buhari. I was wrong. He had not come back with the same spirit even if he had wanted to. Then fate presented him with a gift; an opportunity in the EndSARS protests of the youth, which he appeared ready to seize, at least initially. During one of his earlier campaigns (as he chased power between 2003 and 2014) he had urged his followers to do something similar if anyone tried to upset the apple cart of their desire for change; Change, which became his campaign slogan in the 2014 election that brought him back to power. I saw Buhari in the EndSARS protests, if not the man, at least the spirit. I saw a video in which he was resisting a suggestion to organize a counter EndSARS protests, which didn’t look like fake news to me.

The social media and news channels were awash with reports, both positive and negative, but I still had faith in Buhari, believing that he believed in the revolution that the EndSARS protests were engineering. But to my utter surprise, he failed to go with his conscience and seize the opportunity to prove that he was still the Buhari of the 80s. My hopes were dashed. Dashed, not only by Buhari himself and his lieutenants, but by the emergence of those factors I listed in my write-up of the early 80s that would make a revolution in Nigeria impossible. On the social media, mainly from northern group platforms, I saw videos, heard audios, read texts, all condemning the protests as a southern agenda to destabilize a northerner’s government!  This, in spite of the fact that the protests took place all over the country, even in core northern cities like Kano and Kaduna. What was more fascinating and heartwarming that showed the protests as an insipient Nigerian revolution and not just a protest by angry youths was the presence and charismatic leadership of Aisha Yesufu, a Kano born and bred Muslim woman––neither youth nor old generation but the meeting point between the old and the young––eloquently leading the protests in Abuja, the nation’s capital city. This was symbolic. Though born of Edo parents, Aisha is a Kano woman, through and through, but in the protest, a symbol of the mediating middle force, and simply a Nigerian.

It is true that other forces such as IPOB and individuals who had scores to settle with government, businessmen and women, or political figures had almost hijacked the protests for unwholesome causes. But this was detected very early and the protests were tactically called off. For, EndSARS as we all know, had gone beyond the demand to end SARS, to a demand for an end to bad governance, which our elected and appointed representatives have not only failed to correct, but are in fact the cause of it all. Bad governance is crushing and grinding every generation and every part of this country except the few operating it directly or those benefiting from the rot. And this is the source of my grief, for I am convinced that if this quiet revolution had taken place, the north would have been the greatest beneficiary. Ending the rot in the system would bring to an end, or at least reduce to the barest minimum, cases of killings, kidnapping, banditry, farmer/herders conflicts and the festering Boko Haram imbroglio. Countries that are advanced and peaceful do not get there because they have only good people in government or as legislators but because they listen to the mass of the people. It is to these people the ministers and lawmakers talk before making policies and laws. It is to them they go for advice.

Unfortunately, this is not the case in Nigeria. Once elected, most of our Representatives, Senators, Assemblymen, Governors, Councilors and Chairmen never go back to the people. They make the laws and govern for themselves without any considerations for the people. In the EndSARS protests, Nigerian youths woke us up to our responsibility; they reminded us of our responsibility to talk to those people who avoid us, and at best talk us down once we have elected them. They told us that it is our duty to demand action from our leaders. They made our leaders aware that they have taken the people for a ride for too long and that this was not going to continue for ever; in fact, that the time to end it had come.

What is more, in the protests, the youth had demonstrated a rare ability for social mobilization and organization, for resourcefulness, for management of resources with a high degree of accountability, and to peacefully and persistently demand for a better society. This is why the introduction of religious and ethnic sentiments into the struggle to dampen the spirit of our young men and women ready to lift the real banner of CHANGE was painful. Fortunately, the movement seemed only to have been suspended and not abandoned. This gives us hope. But there are many questions that will need to be addressed by all: the youth, the older generation, and particularly, the leadership of the country. What strategy do the youth have for engineering the revolution they have started? What is (should be) the role of the older generation, the parents of the youth in making the future better? The youth are looking at the future, but they know that the future starts today, and that puts the weight and the heat on the present leadership. What have they learnt from this experience? How did they handle the situation, and with what degree of success or failure? Whether he likes it or not, president Buhari knows that the bulk stops on his table, and that Nigerians and the world hold him responsible for the lapses in the management of this crisis, which started off as an action that his government would have immensely benefited from.

Like Donald Trump who chose to live in denial of the Coronavirus until it had decimated America, Buhari, in his typical “I couldn’t be bothered” attitude, failed to address the situation at the right time. One wonders where all his “advisers”, special and ‘unspecial’, had gone. And, by the way, it did not need Buhari to go out himself; his vice, his IGP, his Minister of Internal Affairs are all there! Anyone carrying his authority could have gone out to speak soothing words to hungry, angry and hurting young Nigerians and the bloodshed at Lekki Toll Gate would have been avoided. The prison break in Benin, the lives lost in other parts of the country, properties destroyed and looted (but not the palliatives, which belonged to the people anyway) would all have been avoided. Is it really true that young Nigerians, armed with the national flag, singing the national anthem sitting on the ground were shot at, and killed by Nigerian soldiers? Can anybody in power, either in the legislative, judicial, or executive arm of government hear this, not to talk of seeing it, and still go to sleep? And do we dare talk about Black lives or Human lives matter?

Nevertheless, there is hope, they say, as long as there is life. Buhari can still redeem his image. Inside or outside of Aso Villa, he has a date with history. There is already a Commission investigating the activities of SARS. This should be extended to the Lekki incident, if one has not been initiated already. I dare say that Nigerians know (and the protests had graduated to this) that it is not only SARS that needs to be investigated. The entire police force (apologies to the few exceptions) needs a complete overhaul. The army has not fared any better in the abuse of human rights; it also needs to be investigated and reoriented. The earlier people armed to protect us know that we have power over them, the better. It is only then that they will begin to treat us with the respect that we deserve. All other agencies of government, as well as the vexed issue of a system overhaul otherwise known as “restructuring” should be addressed as a matter of urgency. President Buhari must neglect the voices of division from the north, and he voices of division from the south. He should know that for the ‘Common’ Nigerian (and we make up 99% of the population) restructuring does not mean breaking up; it means making the country work, both as a federal system and as a functional modern society. He should seize this mood and moment, this singular opportunity to swing into action and give us the Nigeria of our dreams.

• Prof Johnson of the Department of English, Bingham University, Karu, Nasarawa State.