The nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests.


One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria. In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy in the 1980s and 1990s.

These careerist agitators are now either in government, in bed with the government, or have suffered significant contraction of their symbolic and cultural capital. Most Gen Z Nigerians whose vim and vigor power the ongoing protests either don’t know them or know them but have no use for their guidance.

So, the conception, planning, and execution of the protests have neither a recognizable locale nor any identifiable dramatis personae. A lot of the known names identified with the protests merely joined and amplified it. They didn’t start the revolt and can’t stop it. It’s effectively a leaderless rebellion.

It started life as anguished, discordant murmurs on social media in response to the increasingly unendurable but relentlessly unabating neoliberal, IMF/World Bank-sanctioned economic and social terror of the Tinubu administration. Many of the young people who can’t feed now and whose future is being perpetually deferred have enough education to know that the delayed gratification the government promises them from removing subsidies and from devaluing the naira has never materialized anywhere in the world.

Everywhere in the world—from South America to the Pacific and from Asia to Africa—from the 1980s (when the IMF first forced Structural Adjustment Programs on developing countries) until now, there is not a single example of a country that has escaped irreversible devastation and decline as a result of subsidy removal, currency devaluation, destruction of social safety nets for the poor, abandonment of the welfare of citizens—all IMF policies that countries are forced to implement as conditions to secure World Bank loans.

The only countries that have developed outside the West are precisely the countries that have repulsed the IMF, that have strategically deployed subsidies to buoy their economies and uplift their people, and that have guarded their national currencies. Many young Nigerians now realize that the idea that the pains they are suffering are mere temporary birth pangs that will deliver a bouncing baby is a damned, soulless, conscienceless, self-centered lie. They’ve had enough.

So, they resolved to band together and fight peacefully. They chose to demand the restoration of petrol subsidies, among other demands, because they see that the people who took away petrol subsidies from them are themselves luxuriating in unimaginably opulent elite subsidies. Their cries quickly gained traction.

For the first time in a long time, northern and southern youth found common ground. Northern agitations for “zanga zanga” and southern push for #EndBadGovernance protests, though gestated independent of each other, somehow converged. It’s a unity forged in diversity and adversity.

The second lesson is a derivative of the first, and that is the unexampled collapse of the cultural, political, and social power of the Northern Nigerian Muslim clerical establishment. Northern Nigerian clerical elites, known as the ulama, had been constituted in the region’s moral imagination as the apotheosis of probity and the unquestioned source of moral and political guidance.

They have used this power, this priceless symbolic capital, to keep the masses perpetually in a state of suspended animation. They have programmed northern Nigerian masses to not resist, protest, rebel, much less revolt, against bad governance. They socialized them into accepting their economic suffering with equanimity. The only thing the clerical elites have conditioned the masses to be implacably roused and animated over is real or perceived slight against religion.

For example, amid the inexorably intensifying breakdown of security in the region during the Muhammadu Buhari administration, the clerical establishment also intensified fraudulent theological rationalizations for the rise of kidnappings and exculpated Buhari of responsibility for this. That was why Buhari got away with murder for eight years.

However, although there was a ground swell of anti-zanga zanga sermonizing among the region’s notable clerics in the aftermath of their meeting with officials of the Tinubu administration, northern Nigeria is erupting in communal convulsions. It is also instructive that protesters in Daura took their anger to Muhammadu Buhari’s doorsteps. No one is immune now. The genie has been let out of the bottle.

The #OccupyNigeria protests in 2012, which the North also actively participated in largely, some would say precisely, because of the religious and regional identity of Goodluck Jonathan, had the moral imprimatur of the clerical establishment.

This is the first major example in recent memory I am aware of in the North where the masses of the people not only bucked the impassioned counsel of their ulama but have openly labelled them as unreliable and mercenary charlatans not worthy of respect. This is a culturally seismic shift.

The third lesson is that the federal government is in more trouble than it realizes. It invited civil society leaders, traditional rulers, religious clerics, and certain audible voices in the protest movement in an effort to thwart the protest. It was inspired by the mistaken belief that these hitherto esteemed opinion molders had the capacity to use their conversational, symbolic, political, and cultural currencies to influence people to back out of the protest.

It didn’t work because the habitual order of things has shifted, and the government hasn’t come to terms with this reality. We call it decentering in humanities and social science scholarship. "Decentering" involves challenging and moving away from traditional centers of authority, meaning, or truth. It means a shift of focus from dominant cultures, narratives, or perspectives and the amplification of marginalized, peripheral, or alternative voices.

The government’s cluelessness about this social media-enabled decentering of traditional ways of seeing and knowing manifested in its mutually contradictory claims about who was sponsoring the protest—and in its counter-intuitive displays of persecution complex.

The State Security Service said it knew the “sponsors” of the protest, but the police asked the “sponsors” to identify themselves as a precondition for protection. High-profile government officials fingered foreign mercenaries as the organizers and funders of the protest. They all can’t wrap their heads around the possibility that distraught, depressed, and disgruntled young people, without prodding from anybody, can organize protests to ventilate their frustrations at foreign-inspired policies that kill their present and deny their future.

Unfortunately, the government’s response follows the same miserably familiar template: whine like over-indulged crybabies about fictive “sponsors,” induce or intimidate people thought to be behind the protests, deploy strong-arm tactics against protesters, and do nothing about the conditions that instigated the protest in the first place—until it happens again another time.

The fourth lesson is that there is a relationship between how security forces respond to protests and how they turn out. In such states as Edo, Osun, Oyo, and Ogun, the police were admirably polite and even-tempered.

I saw a video of the Edo State police commissioner addressing protesters in the kindest, most empathetic way I’ve ever seen any senior law enforcement officer addressing aggrieved people. The protesters reciprocated the police commissioner’s mild-mannered and conciliatory speech with chants of his praises. That warmed my heart. Tinubu can learn from that.

But in places where law enforcement officers treat protesters as enemies of the state and visit unprovoked violence on them, things easily escalate into violence and bloodshed. We saw that in Kaduna, Kano, Abuja, and many parts of the North.

It should be admitted, of course, that there are many criminal elements who cash in on protests to loot the properties of innocent people or destroy government properties. I saw heartrending videos of criminals stealing or destroying private and government properties in Kano and Abuja. Such outlaws deserve no mercy. It’s elements like that who justify the government’s apprehensions about protests always devolving into chaos and destruction.

Finally, although many people from the Southeast supported the protest, the region was the only place, as of the time of writing this column, where almost no protest took place. Was it the culmination of the ethnic baiting of the honchos of the Tinubu administration who said the protests were planned by the people of the region as a payback for their electoral loss in 2023? Whatever it is, it does not give a good account of our efforts at nation-building.

Well, President Tinubu has just one option left for him if he doesn’t want to govern in disabling tumult: address the nation in a solemn national broadcast, acknowledge the unprecedented hurt people are nursing, announce the restoration of petrol and electricity subsidies, and reverse the disastrous “floating” of the naira.

Tinubu’s loyalty should be to Nigeria, not the racist economic hitmen at the IMF and the World Bank.

https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2024/08/five-lessons-from-ongoing-hunger.html?m=1

The BIG DAWGS(SE) careless though as their stands on the protest has always been clear!
Let the north blame the yorubas for sabotaging their protest!


Lesson1:the NORTH or any other region cannot do it alone!
lesson2: the north and other regions should avoid standing on the fence whenever any region attempts to drive a false narrative for political gains.

And to that mod that has been hiding some of my comments to suppress the truth,Weldon sir

I see Nigeria dividing into 7 different countries.

This I have seen.

BATeria is not moved by the protest..

eteebanky1:

Your whoree of a Godforsaken Mother and useless father will never reap the fruits of their labours, Every single one of your family no go see better thing chop, they'll all labour in vain for that chronic Misleading thread you created. Your children shall suffer like it's the end of the world.

This is not my Ondo state, Yoruba land.

We'll never and we have never protest against Tinubu Government in Ondo state.

BAT till 2031 is 100% assured.

We, The Good people on Ondo state count ourselves out of this Igbo instigated protest against President BOLA AHMED Tinubu GCFR Government.

This one just drink pap think say e don chop belle full.
Wake up

Abi

God bless Nigeria

The trick is simple whenever any uprising want to take place in Nigeria just blame the igbos for it it will always works.

Farooq likes writing big grammar. Who is he talking to? Ordinary Nigerians or university professors? He will likely be a bad leader if given the opportunity to rule like those he constantly criticises because he has refused to subsidise his grammar to appeal to the common man on the street.

Oya na

The best lesson is the sad conversation btw a Northerner and a Yoruba man:

North: This tinubu is by far the most useless Fresident to walk the face of za earth. We must destabilize his presidency. He must go. We will protest and riot till he leaves office.

Yoruba man: The igbos are gaslighting the north. The igbos are tribalistic. The igbos must go.

North: Are you saying we are incapable of thinking for ourselves? Is that an insult? Are you useless? Are you cursed? Are you Yorubas trying to insult us??

Yoruba: Obi will never be President. Igbos must leave our region. We cannot allow igbos to come to our region.

North: undecided undecided undecided undecided

Yoruba: Igbos are wicked. They are tribalistic. Igbos are the problem. Igbos are petty. Igbos are this; igbos are that..

North: We are not igbos. Why do you keep mentioning igbos? We are talking about the useless President that has made life unbearable for everyone of us. He must go!!

Yoruba: You see Nnamdi Kanu, he must die in Prison. That man is a very wicked man. He must perish in hell.

North: But we kill your people. Why don’t you ever insult us? We killed your obas, we oppress you, we insult you, we do all these things to you. Why don’t you ever speak against us??

Yoruba: We know all you do, we see all you do but IPOB is evil. Obidients are the worse! Obi must never be President. Igbos must die. Igbos must go. Igbos must perish.

North: lipsrsealed lipsrsealed lipsrsealed undecided undecided undecided

Igbos: 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I refuse to be a coward!!!
Copied.

Oga getat!

My own 5 lessons

1) Hunger dey
2) Hunger bad
3) A hungry man is an angry man
4) U cannot starve me and tell me not to cry
5) Tinubu is not wise

I hardly take this guy serious anymore. You will think he's neutral until the next election comes and he will tell you "all politicians are bad" so let's go with Tinubu. Tribalism overides his intellectualism.

Not this time ..

That is why they are all running mad all over social media

Skooltynz:
The trick is simple whenever any uprising want to take place in Nigeria just blame the igbos for it it will always works.

If Tinubu can successfully get away with the subsidy removal, all past Presidents of Nigeria and top presidential candidates who campaigned to also remove subsidy, would accord him their respect for succeeding where they had failed.

The question is would he get away with it?

This is a straight battle between the economy of Nigeria and the people of Nigeria.

I pray Tinubu toes the line of your humble piece of advice that could advance his government and reconsolidate his footing in power.

Mm

Very accurate 💯

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Viare9:
S

G

Read what this young man wrote up there. Although it sounds a bit harsh, nevertheless this narrative gradually resonates in the minds of other Nigerians who are neither of these tribes.
Quite unfortunate if you ask me.

eteebanky1:
Your whoree of a Godforsaken Mother and useless father will never reap the fruits of their labours, Every single one of your family no go see better thing chop, they'll all labour in vain for that chronic Misleading thread you created. Your children shall suffer like it's the end of the world.

This is not my Ondo state, Yoruba land.

We'll never and we have never protest against Tinubu Government in Ondo state.

BAT till 2031 is 100% assured.

We, The Good people on Ondo state count ourselves out of this Igbo instigated protest against President BOLA AHMED Tinubu GCFR Government.

Without Igbos, a yoruba man will have nobody to blame for his failures. We can handle it

Lol

Nigeria Youths have learnt OCCUPY PROTEST

Just like the Arabs and Asians. All this traditional rulers are thieves (scammers), they're interested in getting money from the president to quell the protest .
All na format, various groups cashed out, all the tricks in the books collapsed like a pack of cards.
Nigerias large unemployed youths is a time bomb with immeasurable consequences.