By Sam Omatseye
Nothing new happens in politics. They just take on new guises. Just like the series of haters of the Tinubu government. Many have said that the government is the first in our history not to have settled down before catcalls for a new era. They began the campaign for 2027 once they lost 2023.
First, they wanted to delegitimise it through the internet, they crashed. Through street protests, but it foundered. Through an army coup, but no cruise. Anonymous billboards, no airborne. The foreign courts, no visa. Through our courts, what an anticlimax.
After that, no respite for the victor. If Atiku was not making a sour-grape critique, Pitobi was in tow with his fulminating aside. Tribe and diatribe have become Siamese twins. Now it seems they have run out of patience. They cannot wait for another poll. They want to take it by force. If they cannot coerce the army towards a putsch, they want a push from the streets. They have issued bile upon bile on the name and policies of President Bola Tinubu, but the man does not fight back. He just focuses on his goals. He must be thinking like the German playwright and novelist, Johann Goethe, author of immortal play Faust: “The likes of thee have never moved my hate.”
The call for a protest has been coming in trickles. Online soldiers in masks and disembodied voices have risen from a slow, burning cadence to a staccato. Now, the federal government says it is from a group known as Obidients. Translation? Sore losers. LP says it is not them. Obi says, without proof, that they want to arrest him. This essayist has no beef against opposition. It nourishes democracy and puts the government in alert mode on its erring policies.
But everything has to be done according to law and decency. Whoever is plotting a street protest should, at least, identify themselves. When students fomented Ali Must Go, the leaders of NUNS did not hide in the shadows. So did the protests against SAP and the June 12 annulment. And many others. So, why are these protesters hiding in the shadows? It is protest by cowardice. If they are democrats, they cannot be hollering for the so-called end to a constitutionally guaranteed term. They want to be who they are: barbarians on the streets.
If they cannot identify who they are, they have no right to engineer chaos in our society. Refinement separates democracies from autocracies. When a group without a name mobilises citizens against the state, it is because they have no public legitimacy, and no moral anchor, and no legal mooring. They are harbingers of anarchy. Poet T.S. Eliot describes them as hollow men, who have “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.”
The concept of Disobedience is different from these shadowy men. The man who conceived it was Henry David Thoreau. He never intended it to operate by stealth. Two major personages implemented it. They were Ghandi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States. They did not hide. History is their witness. The impending one is disobedient but not civil. Maybe Disobedience is their proper name. But they have to get the spelling right first.
We saw this same obnoxious show before the judiciary handed down its verdict on the 2023 presidential poll. They hung billboard signs through anonymous means, until they were exposed.
This time, they want to do same. Information reaching this writer reveals that a good deal of the instigators does not live here. Ensconced in their safe homes in Europe, North America and African homes, they claim to suffer on behalf of Nigerians. They say they are hungry and angry on behalf of those who live here. They are the ones who encouraged the ENDSARS imbroglio and were not here when it ran out of steam after some died on the streets of Lagos and made bonfires.
We do not want the sort of mayhem we witnessed in Lagos. I personally witnessed it and was a psychological victim, and it should not come our way again. The TVC premises was torched, and its newsroom, the best in the country, was tossed by hoodlums. The popular show, Your View, abruptly went off-air and the goons threw all the staff in disarray. They roared to this newspaper and set up a bonfire, and I feared for my personal office library and started calculating the cost of recovering the books. I recalled Thomas Jefferson’s words when his home caught fire. He asked, “Was not any of my books saved?” I was more fortunate than the third American president and author of the Declaration of Independence. My books survived because of prompt intervention.
Opportunists took over shops and looted at will. The major transportation hub in Oyingbo is a scary exhibition of madmen who burned new buses that the poor have been deprived of ever since. It will take billions of Naira to get those buses back. Some wondered why nearby Jibowu was spared. I am happy they didn’t go there. That transport area has charmed my memory from a little child when as a family we traveled home and I also traveled to school through the hub. We cannot forget online calls from Nnamdi Kanu for his hirelings to burn down the zoo, which is Lagos.
The ENDSARS was projected more innocently than this impending one. Youths started it with a naivety of mission to solve a specific wrong. They even were praised for their dignity of comportment, the grandeur of the processions, and focus of their agenda. But naivety collapsed to cunning and, later, savagery. It recalls the novel, Butterfly Revolution by William Buttler about teens who were staging a mockery of a revolution until it spun out of hand and led to deaths and tragedy and regrets. Fantasy mutated into a barbarian hour. It is a reimagined Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the Nobel Prize winner.
Many who do this in Lagos will not dare it in their own states. They are always picking Lagos where governance is head and shoulders above where they come from. They hold Lagos to a higher standard but say almost nothing about the turpitude of their states’ political elite.
The so-called protests are a picture of unresolved malice. They hate the president, and nothing he does will please them. During the election campaigns, they all agreed that subsidy should go and the naira was overvalued, and we should follow a different path. But having done it, they are up in arms. They are like the children of Israel who complained about Pharoah’s whips but became wistful and romantic about their oppressor after crossing the Red Sea. They wanted to wheel back to Pharoah’s whips.
They have not set out a suite of policies as alternative. They just holler and affect righteous poses. They remind one of the first few days of the Obama administration. The first black leader wanted to embrace his Republican foes. Rather, the senate leader, Mitch McConnel held a caucus meeting and they decided they were going to browbeat Obama into paralysis and shoot down anything and everything he proposed to Congress.
In spite of that, he triumphed. That is what these Obidients are afraid of. They fear they cannot force Tinubu to fail. They have not stopped the superhighway projects, the food sent to the poor, the local government reform, the scholarship/ loan for students, the credit scheme for entrepreneurs, etc. What they are exercising is what Goethe, Germany’s greatest writer ever, calls “impotent hatred.”
They are fighting against ideas larger than they, and they cannot come out of the shadows to identify themselves. They are Nigeria’s craven mob. What they are planning is the mockery of protests, a caricature of public rage. It is opportunism in the guise of a grand idea.
They are in fruitless search, and they wish they can eliminate this democracy in order to enthrone their candidate. Will that be democracy or despotism? They are not even clever. They are blinded by hate, nurtured by hubris and emboldened by delusion.
Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) has said “anger is not a strategy.” For these people, we can only say anger is their destiny.
They cannot unseat the man or derail the president. As Goethe writes, “one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.” They are T.S. Eliot’s hollow men.
Minimum Agbaero
At last, Agbaero comes to judgment. After all the fanciful figures, the President and his team were able to make labour reason. They had been labouring in vain. One might have called it, like Shakespeare, all labour’s lost. But something came out of it. Not Agbaero’s fantasy, though. They still need to let us know how they swiveled from about half million naira a month as salaries to seventy thousand. It will be a revelation of humility.
It is interesting that they did not only accept, they applauded. They did not only applaud; they shook hands with the president. And after warm handshakes, the waxed into choir. It looks like a comedy of sorts from a people who had made a cartoon image of the president.
We know this agreement is the beginning of what will be a tweaking of the salary scale upwards for all cadres of civil servants. Corporate Nigeria has hailed the move. But what of state governments who could not pay the last approved pay? We are waiting for Labour’s next move. At last, Agbaero and co. have now come down to the minimum.
