By Idowu Akinlotan
Almost in quick succession, the federal government betrayed its shifting but unflattering perception of the #EndSARS protest by taking three actions last week. First, through a legal action allegedly inspired by the Force Police legal unit and filed on behalf of the police by a senior legal practitioner, O.M. Atoyebi, the law enforcement agency sought to stop the various judicial panels probing the misdeeds of the disbanded special anti-robbery squad (SARS). The suit, filed last Wednesday, was withdrawn on Friday after widespread public outrage. No statement was issued to explain why the outrageous suit was ever contemplated, whether by the police in their official capacity, or by rogue elements within the police. Second, unnamed sources in the intelligence community reportedly disclosed last week that should fresh EndSARS protests take place, the government would interpret it as an attempt to cause regime change. Such protests, especially if violent, would be put down forcefully, said the unnamed sources.
Third, after catching its breath, the federal government, through the Information minister, Lai Mohammed, last Friday suggested that law enforcement agents had been scared off their jobs by adversarial and one-sided reports of the EndSARS protest procured almost overwhelmingly by the unpredictable and feral social media. He opened a window into how the government conceived the protest, a window that seemed to eschew the causative effect of police impunity and gross governmental incompetence in the outbreak of the protest. The minister was more preoccupied with what others did to promote the protest and its attendant violence than what the government didn’t do to forestall both the protest itself and the follow-up violence.
Start with the Information minister’s diagnosis. Not only was it one-sided, almost in equal proportion to the deprecated social media reports and analyses of the protest, it was predictably silent on widely held views of why the protest began in the first instance. He should be reminded. Complaints against SARS had inundated the media for more than two or three years before the October conflagration. Neither the government, which he serves, nor the police whom he fawns over with empathetic glee took firm or remedial measures to address public grievances and the anguish of victims. It is widely believed that the administration of which he is a member lacks the representativeness and competence to rule a heterogeneous society like Nigeria. Since 2015 when a desensitized, apolitical and amoral cabal reportedly hijacked the administration, with of course the complicit aloofness of the president, the country became a fiefdom to which liberal values had become an anathema. They were thus unable to appreciate the danger inherent in untreated public grievances against police excesses.
It is true, as the minister suggested, that fake news had become a major and growing concern, and the social media was correspondingly being abused. It is incontrovertible that mainstream media abdicated their responsibility to the social media in reporting events faithfully and accurately, particularly at the Lekki venue of the EndSARS protest in Lagos. There is also no explanation for how the media downplayed the killing of security agents, inadvertently fostering distorted news of the protest in Nigeria by foreign media. But the minister cannot pretend to be unaware of the incompetence of the administration in handling the protest and responding to the breakdown of law and order subsequently. Cabals can hijack an administration, but let them at least be competent hijackers. Before Abba Kyari, former Chief of Staff to the president, died from Covid-19 complications, he was the public and servile face of the cabal. His administrative and political acumen was questionable, despite his personal brilliance. His quaint position seems to have been inherited by Abubakar Malami, the Justice minister who is even more lacking in administrative suavity, more fanatical about hegemonic policies and methods, and is far less accessible and universalist than his predecessor. It was not surprising, therefore, that a comparatively tame challenge, such as the EndSARS protest presented, could quickly snowball into a tempestuous rage of young and dispossessed citizens, with both the before and after badly and incompetently handled. The incompetence is not deliberate; it is intrinsic.
Next, the police. It is inconceivable that anyone could file a lawsuit on behalf of the police without their approval. They may investigate their legal unit as much as they want, but it will not mitigate their complicity and poor judgement. They may go on to expose a few sacrificial lambs, but the public is convinced that the lawsuit is premeditated and designed, as some say, to lessen the opprobrium to which the police are being consigned as a result of the disclosures emanating from the judicial panels. Undoubtedly, the revelations from the judicial panels have been gut-wrenching and depressing. The impunity alleged against SARS is unspeakable and damning. But rather than seek to stifle the stench, should the police not engage in deep introspection to find out, through a parallel panel, how service rules became so badly degraded in the Police Force, and why senior officers turned deaf ears to the groanings of the victims of SARS? It is a reflection of the incompetence and immorality of senior police officers that such abuses were perpetrated in plain view and lasted for so long. Had the Buhari administration the capacity to govern, there would have been a major shake-up in the Police Force years ago.
Finally, the regime change analysts. Convinced that the EndSARS protest quickly transformed into a regime change ploy, sources close to the intelligence and security communities of the government have reiterated that any further protests will be treated as treason. The Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, and the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, have both warned that some elements and groups appeared bent on regime change. It would be resisted, they chorused. The ogre SARS became was of course not birthed under the leadership of the present IGP; but if he had the competence and depth needed to run the police, he would have arrested the drift to chaos orchestrated by the rogue anti-robbery section of the police. And there would have been no EndSARS protest.
Lt.-Gen. Buratai, like the IGP, is unable to comprehend the Nigerian Constitution. He sees himself as the chief protector of the administration, and has warned, probably for the third or fourth time, against any attempt to plot a coup d’etat. But if anyone is plotting a coup, it is an indication that the army chief, like his predecessors, has been spectacularly remiss in managing the affairs of the army to produce fine officers who can think through problems. A coup, given the mess political leaders have made of the country, would worsen the problem. Soldiers, as Nigerian history has also shown, are products of the society like policemen. They do not transcend the filth in the society, and are as corrupt and susceptible to the centrifugal tendencies tearing the society apart. They subvert the constitution with impunity, impose unrealistic and fragile law and order regimens on the society, feather their own nests with even more impunity, are more archaic than generally realized, and are now so badly led and poorly equipped that they cannot even exterminate fewer than four or five thousand insurgents. No officer worth his education and training would countenance a coup. And no sensible politician would encourage such idiocy when the Buhari administration, as incompetent as it is, has just a few years to go.
It is possible that in the middle of the EndSARS protest some people romanticized a revolutionary overthrow of the ancien regime, evoking images of Ghana, Cuba and other countries which have passed through similar trajectories. The youths who led the protest disavowed such goals and swore innocence of the plot. But given the manner they managed the protest, and their reluctance to accept responsibility for the farcical end of their protest, not to talk of how aspects of their protest were run, infiltrated and deployed, they do not give assurance of their readiness to assume the quality leadership they so passionately castigate the elders for lacking. On the whole, rather than continue to place undue emphasis on the plot to actualize regime change, the government and the security agencies should concern themselves more with managing the post-EndSARS period more adroitly. So far, they have been lax in handling the end of the protests as they were also inept in managing the problem when violence and disorder raged.
There are two urgent steps the Buhari administration can take to tackle the ripple effect of the EndSARS protest, apart from the judicial panels already emplaced and the other promises of reform pledged to protesters. First, the president needs to urgently reconcile the factioned ruling party in order to tap its best brains for national progress and growth. The All Progressives Congress (APC) has not lived up to expectation, particularly in exploiting its diversity and harnessing its ideological promise of progressivism. That ideology may be flimsy, and even sometimes fatuous, but it represents a significant hope of giving direction and purpose to the country. Sadly, there is little indication that the president appreciates what his party stands for, or the discipline and sense of being the party can gift the country. Worse, the party is engaged in deep fratricidal conflicts thus making its combatants see the future only through the dangerous and sensational dualism of young and idealistic politicians.
Second, and even more urgently, the administration needs a revolutionary approach to restructuring the political and economic frameworks of the country. It is frightening to know that the government often sees the country’s crisis as one of indiscipline rather than the deeper and finer issues relating to the country’s structural integrity. EndSARS is nothing but a minor manifestation of the monstrous structural imbalances afflicting the country, imbalances that stifle growth and development, and produce the distortions that suffuse the polity with religious and ethnic conflicts. Alarmingly, the economy, even in the best of times, is not growing as fast as population, nor is it being modernised; and there are no coherent and enforceable population policies to aid planning and management of resources. Disaster is looming, made worse by incompetent leaders produced through faulty and compromised electoral processes.
The judicial panels probing SARS impunity will come up with some far-reaching recommendations, depending of course on the tenacity of the affected state; but far-reaching remedies are unlikely to be applied to produce a reformed and modern police establishment. The country’s decrepit structure and woolly-minded leaders will not permit the kind of fundamental change envisaged by the EndSARS protesters. Indeed, judging from statements by the army chief, police boss, Information minister, not to say the silence and aloofness from the presidency, nor the convoluted ethnic and religious fractures in the country, it is already obvious that the protest has been misconceived by the government. There will be cosmetic changes, but hopes and expectations will eventually be dashed. Will the protest recur? It is unlikely to break out on the scale it did in October, when the intelligence community, despite their protestations, were caught napping. The government in some instances deployed hoodlums to break up the protest; next time, they will deploy ethnic and religious factions. In fact bandits and insurgents, much more than civilized and organized protests, are more likely to succeed in demolishing the system.
The government appears to resent the EndSARS protest, partly because it does not understand the import of the revolt or its exquisite nuances. Yes, the protest had its drawbacks; but the government needs to reserve its energies and resentment for the far worse and more sinister problem of large-scale breakdown of law and order likely to be inspired and superintended by nihilistic bandits and insurgents. There won’t be a coup; there won’t be a fresh or huge EndSARS protest; few will be interested in regime change outside the ballot box; those who latched on to the protest to activate their own private agenda will be disillusioned; and more than two-thirds of the geopolitical zones appear to want a complete change of structure before 2023. The country is already fracturing deep down in its tectonic plates than is likely to manifest in the observations of public officials and security agents. The fracturing is continuing apace, and relentlessly too. There is no stopping the fracturing because officials are looking for the wrong reasons in the wrong places. Indeed, watching officials ineptly declaim on the EndSARS protest in the past one week reminds a patriot of the shortsightedness and political gravity that undid the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and scores of empires, nearly all of which were more disciplined and more purposeful than Nigeria. An eerie sense of inevitability, not to talk of irreconcilable contradictions, seems to be descending on the country like a pall of thick and unabated foreboding.
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