Thinking Ahead Of The Next Rage

By Segun Ayobolu

Anyone who thinks that the obvious failure of the planners of the lapsed ’10 days of rage’ to achieve their real objective – descent into absolute anarchy and consequent regime change – means that there will be no further attempts at national destabilization is utterly deluded. Head or tail President Bola Tinubu’s administration cannot win with its sworn adversaries. Many leading columnists, television and radio show anchors and public intellectuals contend that the President’s speech did not address the demands of the protesters adequately. Yet, there was no corresponding rigorous analysis of the content of the largely farcical demands. What was the President supposed to make, for instance, of the demand for the abrogation of the 1999 Constitution, fuel price of N100 per litre or a minimum wage of N300,000?

True, there is intense hunger in the land. The inflationary spirals particularly in fuel, transportation, food and healthcare costs stem essentially from the administration’s painful but inevitable reform policies. But far from being actuated by sympathy for the hungry and suffering masses and finding concrete solutions to their plight, the planners of the protest sought to exploit the current pains to provoke rage, rampage and regime change. They thus deliberately drew up a list of demands that were utterly impossible to meet so as to manufacture the conditions for the realization of their anarchical designs. It can be said that they succeeded in large swathes of the North while failing abysmally in most parts of the South where there was no destruction of lives and property despite protests against hunger in a few states that lasted one or two days.

In the North, the destructive rage was on display in Kano, Kaduna, Niger, Jigawa, Gombe, and Borno among other states. Public buildings were gutted, critical assets destroyed and private businesses ravaged. The raising of the Russian flag in a number of the states and open calls for soldiers to dislodge democracy indicated that the rage was less against hunger than a desire for the termination of the Tinubu administration and by implication of democratic governance. For, the states and local governments which, apart from the soaring of their allocations since the removal of the fuel subsidy, have received humongous amounts from the federal government to cushion the pains of their people, have more questions to answer for the perpetuation of hunger than the centre.

The unreasoning scourge of destruction in the North and the waving of Russian flags in an undisguised solicitation in Nigeria of the kind of coups that country is believed to have instigated in Mali, Niger, and Bourkina Faso is reflective of the high level of illiteracy, poor political education and the menace of thousands of out of school children in the region. Most of those who perpetrated the violence and waved Russian flags were underaged children. Interestingly, in Kano State, for instance, where governor Abba Kabir Yusuf openly encouraged the protesters, he ultimately had to take desperate steps to prevent the government house from being consumed in the conflagration and stem the tide of destruction from continuing on its ruinous path for the state. The lesson here is that an irresponsible political elite that seeks to weaponize illiteracy and hunger – consequences of its incompetence and venality – for partisan political ends can easily be consumed by unanticipated fallouts of its mischievous machinations.

But then, despite the tame and measured nature of the protests in those parts of the South where they took place, the horrendous #EndSars violence that rocked the region in 2020 indicates that there are also hordes of disoriented, disillusioned, distracted, and idle youths there who constitute a ticking time bomb for social explosion. What we have on our hands is thus the utter failure of a decadent political class across ethnic, regional, religious, and party boundaries to utilize the abundant resources of the country to empower the vast majority of her people with jobs, food availability, healthcare affordability and other necessities of life more abundant. Rather, a microscopic minority has utilized state power to accumulate humongous wealth thereby compounding the challenges of poverty and inequality that were the focus of this column last week.

Professional anarchists and opportunistic activists who do not necessarily operate on a higher moral pedestal than those they criticize in government will always seek to exploit these conditions of poverty and inequality as opportunities for self-promotion and projection through inciting agitations rather than sitting down to do the hard thinking necessary to finding realistic and enduring solutions to identified problems. It is much easier to plan and mobilize for mass violence and mindless rage than to do the hard, back-breaking work of organizing serious and efficient political parties to seek to attain power and offer alternative well thought out policies through the ballot box. The attempt to fuel ten days of destructive and destabilizing rage nationwide has failed this time around but it will only spur more meticulously planned attempts in future. And the security agencies must be as alert and vigilant as ever as the next attempt will most likely be spontaneously instigated without notice.

As amply demonstrated in the President’s speech, the administration has conceptualized and set in motion policies to curb food inflation in the short, medium and long terms as well as stimulate micro, small and medium enterprises to boost profitability and employment. It will take time for these to begin to bear fruit. It is impossible for the President to magically conjure stones into bread to assuage current hunger. But the administration must treat with greater urgency the need for the requisite security re-engineering to make our communities safer and get thousands of farmers back to the farms.

The current mechanism for getting food and other palliatives to vulnerable segments of the population must be overhauled for better effectiveness and efficiency. Above all, the federal government must set the pace and show the example in terms of substantial and visible cuts to the cost of governance so that other levels of government can be compelled to fall in line. The government has a responsibility to govern in such a way that those who will inevitably seek to stir up future rage will struggle to find credible reasons to indict the administration and arouse mobs to madness.

Once it curbs excess costs in governance and adopts a zero-tolerance stance towards corruption with a demonstrated commitment to retrieving humongous amounts of stolen funds in private hands, the government must more boldly tackle those who have hardly disguised their determination to destabilize the polity and derail democracy. Perhaps because of the highly competitive and contentious nature of the elections from which it emerged, the Tinubu administration has treated with kid gloves those whose actions and utterances are difficult to distinguish from the treasonable.

Open calls for coups, threats against judges, and denigrations of its legitimacy have all gone without requisite legal sanctions. This has emboldened those perpetrating these atrocities to ever-increasing acts of anti-government audacity. The sewing and waving of Russian flags in Kano and Katsina states, for instance, cannot be the brainchild of hardly literate tailors and ignorant street urchins. It is the responsibility of the security agencies to fish out, expose and prosecute their influential sponsors.