October 20, 2020, the #EndSARS protester paraded careless angst in trendy herd. He was the plebeian statue sculpted of spunk and spittle. Governors, lawmakers, and the presidency considered him to be a dangerous cuss. But he saw himself otherwise.
In truth, he was the proverbial yowl plundering rage slipshod, a revolutionary of dubious grace. His flashing eyes, vagrant rage, combined insolent swag with gruff panache. Flashing eyes may command and pierce but they can also incinerate from within. Ever wonder why the protests imploded and died?
Violence was a mutation of the #EndSARS protest. When it broke, it was uninformed, primitive, and vast, like the chaos of savage night before the dawn of blossoms. Yet dawn erupts with sickly carnations. Despite the flowery fantasies of the protesters, their clamoured dawn illumined with moonshine.
The fruits of the protests were negative for the same reason that they were positive for the youth; the resultant mayhem counselled the need for caution, tact, and masterful self-containment. One positive takeaway from the protests was the timeless opportunity it offered the youth to regroup and restrategise.
Come 2023, they won’t seize power from the incumbent ruling class. That is a tall dream. But this minute, they could set about reordering in numbers and might, to renegotiate the nature and extent of their participation in the political process.
Their inability to unite constructively for the good of all and their incapacity at achieving a rational engagement with the government and other demographics manifested as a desperate defect of the #EndSARS protest.
The most sublime act they could have aspired to was the renegotiation of their terms of political engagement en route to the 2023 general elections and further. But they blew it.
Many would rather seek cheap consolation and play to the gallery by romanticising the Lekki Tollgate shooting as a massacre. There was a shooting there quite alright, and it was in bad taste, but there was no massacre. Journalists should stop whinging reports to reflect the truth they can’t substantiate.
Of course, several writers, presumed and self-appointed leaders of thought, celebrities, and publicity junkies would rail and declare this politically incorrect, their frantic grief is understandable. I accord them their right to it. “We move,” to echo one of #EndSARS purgative slogans.
With #EndSARS, the youth seemed to speak with one voice but all they did was weaponise dissent and angst into a shrill orchestra. For a generation that prides itself on its disruptive capacities, their response to disruption was frantic, juvenile, and predictable – which further affirms the pointlessness of their rudderless protests.
Contempt was a black hole of the protests, the disdain for constructive criticism, dishonesty, and a spiraling convolution of psyche. Little wonder the movement unfurled ethically-knocked.
The youths must learn not to cherry-pick aspects of an insurrection to validate their caprices for change; life happened through #EndSARS, and they must deal with the consequences of their actions and inaction through the carnage.
It’s inspiring that the youth have finally realised that their expectations of a better future are imperiled on the watch of a selfish political class but it’s self-serving to blame the older generation alone for the Nigerian crisis, the youths had always partnered with them in pillaging and carnage.
The #EndSARS romantics, predictably, sought to immortalise October 2020 as the day soldiers killed an unsubstantiated number of protesters at Lekki Tollgate. But while they conjure the bodies from lies and bouquets of rage, we must remember that it was the day Nigerian youths murdered 22 policemen, roasting and eating some of them in Ibadan. A day the youths burned 205 police stations, and other critical private and public infrastructure. A day the so-called leaders of tomorrow burned over 164 police vehicles, looted, and bankrupted about 265 private businesses, leading to the joblessness of over 10, 000 youths.
It was a day over 200 new public coaches were torched by angry youths; a day Lagos State and some other states lost over N20 billion to destructive youths. October 20, 2020, was the culmination of Nigeria’s loss of over N700 billion in economic value – over 14 days.
It was a day Nigeria’s youths jointly escalated the crisis, leading to the deaths of at least 73 civilians, far from Lekki Tollgate. But the dubious, clout chasing celebrities and their unwitting groupies wouldn’t address these truths as they commemorated their fictive massacre at the Lekki Tollgate.
Vladimir Lenin’s homily of a successful revolt benchmarks all three Russian revolutions in the 20th century; he said, it is not enough for a revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes, what is required for revolution is that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way.
Only when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution win.
Youthful Nigeria dabbled with such reality until criminals among them and the ruling class perhaps hatched venom into their ranks. The youth were wooing the police. Videos of protesters sharing sumptuous meals and drinks with police patrol teams went viral and raised eyebrows among the ruling class. It scared them silly.
Like all despotic regimes, the ruling class understood the import of the events. They dreaded what the endgame of such camaraderie of protesters and the police could manifest.
They understood that once the foot soldiers of the elite – the policemen, soldiers, party hooligans and random street urchins, the civil servants, the courts, the press and academia, and finally the army – no longer have the will to defend the regime, the regime is finished. When these societal elements shun the whims of an oppressive regime, it crumbles.
To rebuild Nigeria, the youth must seek legitimate means of participation in the political process. It’s about time they adopted or established a viable political party, duly registered, and founded on humane principles of nationhood, citizenship, and thought.
They must present through legitimate means, to the parliament, a heartfelt wish to participate in the forthcoming elections. To achieve this, they could urge the National Assembly to normalise the use of the international passport, driver’s license, national identity card, and BVN (for electronic ballot) as acceptable means of voting at the 2023 elections.
And if the youths truly intend to assert themselves progressively at the forthcoming elections, they must begin to woo societal segments they had hitherto ignored and dismissed as too violent, too dumb, too compromised, and too wild.
They must accommodate the random hooligan, street urchin, among others, as co-travellers in the march towards the Nigeria of our dreams.
Nobody was born to serve as a hooligan, arsonist, assassin; the youth must initiate debates and deliberations spanning various fora, nationwide, whereby they would honestly thrash out crucial issues that aid the reduction of Nigeria’s youth to disposable social elements and cannon fodder for political violence.
They must eschew violence and the inclinations for hate speech, and their synergies must be guided and adapted through an ad hoc and premeditated coordination in repelling moles, armed goons, and saboteurs, who would be sent to disrupt their rallies with tribal toxins, fake news, religious venom, and filthy lucre.
None of these is achievable where the youths remain faceless and buried in herd feral.