Wages of Zanga Zanga

MAHMUD JEGA VIEW FROM THE GALLERY

The biggest casualty of the #EndBadGovernance protests in this country so far have been the lost lives. No one knows the number for sure; some reports said more than 20 while the police said about 13 lives were lost in several states, even after subtracting the policeman that Inspector General Kayode Egbetokun said was murdered, but who it turned out had “miraculously” survived. Why should anyone who is demanding cheaper food, cheaper fuel and better living conditions have to sacrifice his life?

Some of the deaths may have been accidental, but in most cases the victims fell to police bullets. Why did policemen have to use firearms against protesters? Sometimes it is to defend themselves from being disarmed and harmed, and other times to prevent arson and looting, a lot of which took place in several states. Young rioters stormed some food and provision stores and looted them, and were seen running in the streets with computer screens, solar panels, office chairs, bags of rice and gallons of vegetable oil.

Short of not starting them in the first place, there is almost no way to stop protests like these from turning into looting and arson sessions. There are just as many motives as there are protesters, and some of them had for long had their eyes on fancy food stores and supermarkets. In some cases it was pure vandalism; there was this video on the social media of a young protester who climbed up a traffic light and used an axe to hack at it. It wasn’t an apparent case of theft because if one steals traffic light, I doubt if there is a ready market for it, since only government installs traffic lights.

There was this very popular yoghurt and fura store in Kano that was ransacked and the protesters drank all the milk. Maybe they needed the energy to continue with the protests, but how will destroying a struggling small business help the case of making the economy better, food cheaper and unemployment less severe?

Almost unbelievable was the ransacking of Hajiya Mariya Sanusi Dantata’s food warehouse in Kano. This mother of Africa’s richest man has been feeding thousands of her not-so-well endowed neighbours with cooked food every day for over 30 years. If the warehouse had been located on a major street, in a commercial area or in the GRA, I would have been less surprised but it was deep inside a traditional neighbourhood, smack where the food is served everyday. The same neighbours who benefit from it looted it; a long line of young men and women could be seen ferrying away bags of rice and other items. Hajiya Mariya immediately said she forgave the looters and that they were only impatient because the food was headed for them anyway. Still, she must be inwardly disappointed that the people she had been feeding for decades could loot her stores. Would she resume feeding the ungrateful lots anytime soon?

One of the remarkable aspects of the Hajiya Mariya store looting was of an elderly man who was standing by as the looting was going on. A small boy had trouble ferrying away the bag of rice he stole, and he dropped it to the ground. The elderly man then asked other boys nearby to help the small boy to carry away the bag. Wonder of wonders. Is this what Northern Nigerian Muslim parents have since become, not participating directly in the looting perhaps because of their own old age and frail state, but helpfully assisting a small looter to carry a bag home?

With “Gen X” parents like these, it was no wonder that all the government and political leaders’ efforts to prevent the protests from taking off failed. In Abuja and in Lagos, from what I could see in the protest videos, the protesters were adults who seemed to know what they were doing. But in some of the Northern cities, underaged children swelled the ranks of the protesters. Where were their parents? Were they complicit, hoping that the kids will return home with some loot, or were they simply unable to reign them in, most probably because the socio-economic conditions in the country rendered them unable to discharge their own obligations as parents?

Maybe it is a chicken and egg problem, between unruly children and difficult socio-economic conditions. I once wrote a paper in the 1990s about the centrality of the cooking pot in the parental control of children. In any household where the cooking pot is not regularly active, parents lose control over their children and cannot tell them to come back home before sunset, as was the prevalent system in the North before recently. Come back home before sunset, when there is no food to eat?

Parents are the first vanguards of social control. Where they are disempowered, traditional rulers, teachers and clerics cannot replace them. Bureaucrats, who are in charge of dispensing state largesse, have been very bad role models, while security agents lack credibility in the eyes of citizens. As for political leaders, well, they created most of the problems in the first place, even though they also control the instruments to ameliorate the problems, if they want to.

Are the EndBadGovernance2024 protests which began in many parts of the country on Thursday last week, August 1, likely to continue this week and for ten days in a row, as the protesters pledged? The most dangerous dimension of it, I think, was the hardly noticed press conference by Chief of Defence Staff General Christopher Musa on Friday, in which he said the military will come to the aid of the police if they cannot contain the protests. Old timers like me recall the Federal Government’s white paper on the report of the Justice Uthman Mohammed Commission of Inquiry into the Ali Must Go riots of 1978. The commission recommended that soldiers should not be used to quell civil disturbances. Government rejected the recommendation and reminded the public of the Internal Security Drill, which provided that if protesters overwhelm the police, “Soldiers can be called in and they shoot to kill in accordance with their training.” Was that what General Musa was saying, using slightly more polite language because civilians are in power now, not soldiers?

If the protesters were to heed the president’s passionate plea and call it off earlier than scheduled, who is it who will make that decision? This protest is essentially headless. Although several, mostly unheard-of Civil Society groups have announced themselves as organisers of the protest, I doubt if any of them heeded Police Inspector General Kayode Egbetokun’s advise to go forth to Police Headquarters, register their names and addresses and provide their phone numbers, email addresses and social media contacts “for maintaining effective communication with the police” while the protest lasts.

Maintaining communication with prison cell was more like it. With the IG alleging that foreign mercenaries had sneaked into Nigeria to infiltrate the protests, who will go to a police station and have to answer questions about his connection to the Russian KGB, when some of the protesters suddenly held Russian flags high up? Who gave them those flags? You mean, Russia does not have enough trouble on its hands in Ukraine and in the Alliance of Sahelian States, to spare enough flags to waive on the streets of Nigeria?

How far is President Bola Tinubu’s Sunday morning broadcast likely to go in quenching the fire of the EndBadGovernance protests? A hot debate is already going on in social media space regarding the president’s speech. Some think he should have spoken before the protests began or immediately after they began, not four days later. More seriously, the president did not hit the nail on the head of the protesters’ main demands. Their demands were really a hotch potch, including a return to the old national anthem, increasing the new minimum wage to N300,000, placing all political office holders on the minimum wage, abolishing the Senate and sacking top officials who made gaffes, notably Senate President Godswill Akpabio who said he will be eating while the protesters are protesting, and FCT Minister Nyesom Wike who said he will not allow protests in the territory and who accused Senator Ireti Kingibe of sponsoring them, based on an old video clip of a Labour Party meeting.

In his speech, President Tinubu reeled off all the many socio-economic initiatives of his one-year-old Administration that might in the long run have a positive impact on Nigerians’ lives, but he stood firm on the removal of fuel subsidy, for which he is best known. He also offered to dialogue with the protesters. With whom will he dialogue, since its leadership is essentially faceless? Since our best national forum, National Assembly, has lost the moral authority to articulate the demands of citizens, the president might consider convening a Chinese-style People’s Political Consultative Conference, with the support of opposition leaders and elder statesmen. Not elected, not sovereign, not usurping the constitutional powers of any institution, but with enough moral authority to discuss the country’s problems, subject to constitutional no-go areas, such as dissolution of Nigeria. That, too, could spin out of control, but President Bola Tinubu has the constitutional authority and political skill to keep things in check.