Rotimi Fasan
In commenting on the possible outcome of the ongoing #EndBadGovernance protest when it took off last week, I had in this space made clear that it was as likely as not to end with a whimper rather than the bang that the mostly invisible planners and government officials expected it to be. As I write this, the so-called protest has been on for six days and is beginning to peter out just as predicted- with a whimper, just as Nigerians are calling for the arrest of some of the protesters who had gone rogue with their engagement in both treasonable activities and violent crimes. All of that went beyond their advertised claim of peaceful protest.
Lagos, Abuja and some of our state capitals, were expected to be the ground zero of the protest and it did take off in these places to a slow start. But by the second day, action had moved on to a few states in the North-West and North-East of the country. While a few straggling groups could be seen every morning in parts of Lagos and Abuja, often jostling with security agents, the outliers in Kano, Kaduna and Yobe, etc, had stolen the show and this for totally different reasons.
Since the inflation-driven hunger in the land has operated as an equal opportunity destroyer among the people of this country (with the clear exception of the politicians and their well-heeled friends and families), the protesters in the North couldn’t have remained unaffected by the harsh economic realities. They, perhaps, more than Nigerians in other parts of the country given the widespread disease, food and human insecurity issues and the armies of out-of-school children that are sent by their dirt-poor parents from their rural dwellings in the region to fend for themselves under the careless guidance of religious leaders.
It is evident that the protesters, practising social deviants and miscreants in all their underage ignorance, had been either tricked or suborned into taking part in the protest. From whatever angle the matter is viewed, it is clear that some people are out to play a cruel joke, more or less a Russian roulette, on and with the lives of these young people. Uba Sani, the governor of Kaduna State, was quick to see the connection between the activities of the protesting youths and the plans of opposition politicians in the state to destabilise his administration with the ultimate objective to discredit the central government in Abuja.
This may sound like an easy excuse and the typical response of a politician, coming from an incumbent governor who is at odds with his predecessor. But it does not require any special knowledge of the underhand tactics of the political class to know that these things happen. In fact, it is the modus operandi of our politicians, including those currently in charge of national affairs. They seize every opportunity to turn the screw on their opponents. Yet, there are objective grounds for Nigerians to complain about the unbearably rising cost of living and protest against the excesses of our rulers at this present time. It just so happens that some people, indeed politicians and others dissatisfied with the present holders of power, have opportunistically keyed into the economic and social challenges of the moment to stir up insurrection and ethnic division in a bid to encourage civil disobedience geared towards regime change.
Now the promoters of the protest have lost control to mere hoodlums and underage street urchins that are themselves victims of the corruption-driven choices made by their own regional leaders, all we are hearing are calls for the suspension of the protest. A futile effort. The protesters in Lagos and Abuja do not have much say in the issues at stake. They are totally out of their depth and can now only be onlookers and bystanders in the communal feast they invited others to. The mostly uninformed bands of weapon-wielding protesters that go about looting homes, offices and businesses, even as they pillage street lights, mindlessly and unexplainably destroy other public facilities like roads and culverts, etc, are accountable to nobody and submit to nothing but the street logic of violence.
They have turned what was promoted as acts of civil engagement and expressions of civic right into an occasion, at once, for juvenile delinquency and infantile excitement. They are calling for the return of the military and flying the national flag of Russia in a blatant but ignorant display of treasonable felony. While many of the initial supporters of the protesters are now dissociating themselves from their conduct, they double-mouthedly claim also that it’s the right of the protesters to conduct themselves as they have. It was this seamless endorsement of anything remotely anti-government that has brought us to this point of reckless misconduct by fringe elements.
Some commentators have also tried to excuse the protesters by telling their supposedly clueless readers/listeners that the flags on display, but for the mix-up in colours, belong to the Nigerian military. This, for these apologists, agrees with the protesters call for the return of the military. Possible but not likely in this case. A more ominous but astute reading of the signs points in the direction of possible foreign involvement in and infiltration of the protesters rank. Protesters who cannot differentiate the colours of the Nigerian Army and Russian flags cannot understand the finer nuances of the protests they were promoting. The protest is a fiasco that embodies sinister moves by hostile agents, Nigerian and foreign.
The South-East has been relatively silent. Which is not the same thing as saying it is unaffected by what is happening as some would pretend, people who would otherwise want to see the hijack of the protest in the North escalate into an ethnic fight between the North and the West just to vindicate their partisan, bile-filled stand. The misguided protesters of the North are no more victims of faceless malcontents than are the promoters of the separatist Lagospedia blog that was championing ethnic hate and bigotry against the Igbo. They are all unacceptable and unwanted polluters of our republic of the future and should be respectively condemned and exposed for the dangerous felons and bigots that they are.
They should be smoked out and prosecuted for their activities against Nigerians and the Nigerian state. But in doing this, we also must not forget those who started us off on this path of ethnic baiting through the violent rhetoric they deployed in the run-up to last year’s election and their calls for military intervention after the election was won and lost. It is the backlash from their profiling and attacks of others that we are confronting today in the action of despicable sites like Lagospedia.
Vanguard
