Without a shred of doubt, Nigeria faces multitudinous challenges, some of them potent enough to threaten its stability and unity. Social dislocations are at an all-time high. Political dysfunction has deepened to a point of stasis and decay, fuelled by insecurity and entitlement. And the economy, which has for more than one decade been subjected to massive depredation, is proving stubbornly resistant to medication. It is in the midst of these challenges that the social media is flexing muscle in promoting all kinds of divisive, ego-driven and often childish and portentous campaigns. Social media has its good side, minimally good side even in the best of times, but because it is unregulated in Nigeria, its bad side overwhelmingly corrodes societal fabric.
It is not certain that a growing economy could attenuate the social media’s fondness for extreme rascality, but because the economy is distressed, the government’s voice has diminished to a whisper, and radical postulations by impressionable youths, complete with recipes for textbook revolutions, have flowered all over the internet, aping unrest in other countries, and advocating through opposition politics total system collapse. The social media may not have created the economic catastrophe being witnessed in the country, but it has seized upon that existential crisis to campaign, without fear of consequence and with little understanding, for anarchy. The campaigns have begun to permeate ethnic relations, political opposition, and insecurity, while poisoning everything in its path.
Consider this brief overview of the economic crisis which Nigeria is immersed in. In a succinct analysis by BudgIT last July, quoting Nigeria’s Budget Office, the economy is portrayed as being in dire straits. The analysis reads: “…Between 2016 and 2022, the Buhari government raised total revenues of N26.67tn and expended N60.64tn, leaving a deficit of N33.97tn. The gaping hole was financed with FG domestic debt, which rose from N8.84tn as of December 2015 to N44.91tn as of June 2023, while external debt rose from $7.35bn in December 2015 to $37.2bn in June 2023. This excludes support provided by the Central Bank amounting to N25tn. Ultimately, President Buhari moved Nigeria’s debt profile from N42tn to N77tn. This has had attendant effects on debt servicing, which rose from N1.06tn in 2015 to N5.24tn as of 2022. In fact, under President Buhari’s administration, the debt-service-to-revenue ratio grew from 29% to 96%…In the end, President Buhari leaves a legacy of debt which almost doubled from 18% to 35% of GDP. He leaves inflation at 22.4%, with 133 million Nigerians in poverty…” This unbearable situation is compounded by a series of crude oil-backed loans, which between last year and now is estimated to be over five billion dollars, ensuring that except oil production rises significantly, not to talk of the production of goods and services, Nigeria would continue to suffer naira depreciation, inflation, increase in poverty, and a dizzyingly high debt-to-GDP ratio currently estimated to be about 53%. This appalling situation is not caused by the social media or even the opposition; however, the response to the crisis has given plenty of room for concern.
The crisis has indirectly birthed ethnic recriminations on a scale where no one is sure whether social media will not tear the country asunder even before economic crisis gets half the chance. Consider two short and recent examples. In late June and early July, organisers of the hunger protests produced a list of 12-20 grievances for government to resolve in order to avert street actions starting August 1. The problem was not that any group mustered protests, but that by the instrumentality of the social media, they managed to make the largely farcical list look sexy, and their protest tag, 10 Days of Rage, cool and acceptable. Others tagged their action Revolution Now. Days after the protests fizzled out, some other fellows announced their plan for what they tagged Fearless in October, starting from October 1. Again the problem is not that many of these actions are sponsored – that is for the security agencies to uncover and grapple with – the danger is that the tags are enormously appealing, and those who whimsically generated them or buy into the agendum have little understanding of the consequences. Similarly celebratory pro-democracy and human rights protests shook Sudan between 2019 and 2020, produced a coup d’etat in 2021 which in turn led to more protests in 2022, and finally culminated in a civil war begun in April 2023. Now, no one is protesting.
Social media confers a measure of anonymity on trolls, leading many angry youths and heedless and unreflective opposition figures to boldly advocate protests in extreme language and terms. Ethnic bigots have seized the difficult and contentious effort of national rebirth to promote all kinds of agenda, with some threatening ethnic genocide and others warning that secession could follow any coup interpreted as targeted against their ethnic group. Such extremisms are a natural follow-up to the bad-tempered campaigns on social media, campaigns rendered in infantile but beguiling slogans. The anarchy the campaigns are capable of breeding is hidden in the thicket of ‘days of rage’, ‘revolution now’, ‘take back Nigeria’, and ‘fearless in October’. Nigeria’s economic and existential crises are real and in need of urgent and serious remedies; but if nothing is done to rein in the naivety and madness on social media, they will provoke anarchy, or worse, war. Real life is more than sloganeering. Here, the opposition parties, which have refused to acknowledge their defeat in the last election, are encouraging the stultification of Nigerian politics, mindless of the fact that the template they are sculpting today will undermine them on a hypothetical tomorrow.
Given the battering the economy had received, it seemed assured that a president would come sooner or later to grapple directly with the disease. President Bola Tinubu, on assumption of office, elected to be that man, braving the odds to apply unpopular measures that strike at the core of years of national indolence and complacency. It is not clear that some of his measures had been properly calibrated or executed. But he took away fuel subsidies, and in its place introduced a debilitating regime of steep price increases, while he also hit at foreign exchange round-tripping by positioning a numbing floating exchange rate that has made many people destitute and manufacturing concerns to teeter on the brink. Rather than print more money and risk total economic collapse, the administration at first went for oil-for-cash loans, before convincing itself that only comprehensive surgery stood a chance of solving the crisis. If not President Tinubu, anyone else would inevitably have to face the same conundrum, whether a coupist or any of the two leading opposition candidates in the last poll. Regardless of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) histrionics, or the subterranean interference of their lackey, the highly politicised and unreflective Briton, Andrew Wynn, who is on the run, or any threat to instigate civil disorder or social media-led insurrection, whoever is president will find the current panaceas in one form or another inescapable. The country was so broken that there is no easy way to fix it. But perhaps some other ways might be more tolerable. However, the sooner Nigerians come to terms with their brokenness, the shorter the pain would last.
