Taking Right Lessons from the Hunger Protests

Postscript by Waziri Adio

In a way, the #EndBadGovernance or #EndHunger protests have not panned out exactly the way the organisers had planned. A few cities—notably Abuja, Lagos, Bauchi, Maiduguri, Kano and Kaduna—were grounded for a few days, and the president was dragged into making a national broadcast. But weariness and complications crept in, most citizens expectedly hurried back to their normal businesses, and the protests petered out.

Having weathered this storm—without sustaining more than a mere scratch—the President Bola Tinubu administration could be led to think that its containment strategy worked well, that it has developed a good template for handling future iterations, and that all is well and good. That will be a wrong lesson to take from these protests. As long as the underlying reasons for the protests remain or even worsen, all cannot be said to be well and good. The country will remain a tinderbox, and be vulnerable to the slightest spark.

A few complications helped the government in taking the heat out of the hunger protests. The most obvious one is that the protests were quickly infiltrated or hijacked by those whose agendas went beyond the cost-of-living crisis: those calling for a coup and for regime change; those trying to relitigate the outcome of the 2023 elections or positioning ahead of 2027; those calling for the president to resign and be replaced by one of his competitors in the last election; and those flying Russian flags and asking Vladmir Putin to intervene in Nigeria. Then, there was the looting of public and private property, and there was the fact that the protests were more pronounced in certain parts than others.

It became clear these other dimensions were clearly well-orchestrated and that some bad-faith actors were pulling the strings behind the scene. Not a few had to reconsider their stance and avoid becoming mere pawns in the high-wire political chess game they didn’t sign up for. This twist created a dilemma for even some of the leaders of the protests, divided the larger populace, and weakened support for the cause. Unwittingly, these became a boon to the government.

However, it will be a mistake for the president and his team to think they will always be presented with such a luck. The right approach will be for them to understand why many Nigerians were willing to participate in or to support the call for street protests that started on social media, how this administration contributed to that willingness from even among some ardent supporters of the president, and where and how the government needs to make quick course correction.

The simple truth is that even when most Nigerians have had it rough for a while, their suffering has been of a higher concentration in the past year or so.  Times have become extremely hard—most Nigerians are struggling to feed themselves and straining to afford other key necessities of life. There is hunger mixed with angst in the land. The angst is so thick you can slice it.  

So, this is not the time for the administration to congratulate itself on successfully sitting out the first major confrontation with the masses. The urge to declare victory may be tempting, but it will be clearly wrongheaded. If the status quo subsists, it is just of a matter when, not if, the next and the next confrontations will happen, and there is no guarantee that things will not turn out in a totally different way. The administration will help itself and the country by taking this slight brush as a wake-up call, and as a major opportunity for rigorous introspection and for a step-change.

As said earlier, things were not particularly rosy when the president assumed office on May 29^th, 2023. Headline inflation was 22.41% while food inflation was 24.84% as at May 2023. Inflation rate above 20% is a danger sign that should keep policymakers constantly awake and worried. Nigeria crossed the 20% barrier in August 2022 when headline inflation hit 20.52%, and has kept a steady climb since.

But things have got rapidly and remarkably worse in the 14 months of the current administration. As at June this year, headline inflation had jumped to 34.2% and food inflation had soared to 40.87%, up from 22.41% and 24.84% respectively when the president assumed office. And by the way, the inflation rates are aggregate figures, and as such are not fully representative of the extent of the hit that Nigerians have taken in their pockets and in their savings. Prices of some commonly used or consumed food items have tripled or even quadrupled. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the prices of brown beans surged by 252% and tomatoes by 320% between June 2023 and June 2024. The corresponding months of the two years indicate this is not about seasonality. A country with such rapid hikes in food prices is just an orange-pip-spit away from trouble.  

To be sure, there are different drivers of the current high prices in the country. But the major culprits are the after-effects of the signature reforms of the Tinubu administration: removal of petrol subsidy and floating of the Naira. Both reforms are necessary and should have been implemented long ago, as I have submitted here on many occasions. For instance, Nigeria splurged $10 billion on petrol subsidy alone in 2022, a year when debt service consumed more than 80% of Federal Government’s retained revenue. The country was simply burning the money it didn’t have and was hurtling towards a thinly-disguised ditch. So, petrol subsidy was unsustainable and an unwise way of allocating scarce resources. It needed to go.

However, while the president still deserves applause for having the guts to take on the subsidy that most Nigerians have become passionately wedded to, he cannot be absolved of the charge that he undertook this significant reform without adequate thoughts and provisions for those that would be disproportionately affected it, especially the poor. It is well documented that petrol subsidy removal would lead to a hike in the costs of transportation and food, two things that the poor spend almost all of their incomes on. More than a year after what has come off more like an impulsive than a considered policy action, we are still discussing how to cushion the effects of subsidy removal on the poor, and petrol subsidy, clearly, has crept back because of the next thing the government did.

On 14^th June 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), with a clear nod from above, introduced another major shock: the floating of the Naira. This can be termed the most egregious step taken by the administration so far. The gap between the official and parallel exchange rates has narrowed and forex-denominated revenue of the government has swollen to the extent that exchange gain is now the third highest component of revenue shared by FAAC (after statutory revenue and VAT). But Naira has experienced a massive plunge, losing 53% at the parallel market and 71% at the official window. In an economy that imports a lot, businesses and individuals are reeling from the double and persistent whammy of price hikes and instability.

One of the things that the president and his team say so often these days is that the pains from the reforms are unavoidable. No, that is not exactly accurate. Yes, reforms come with pains, and delayed adjustments are accompanied by a higher order of anguish. But there is nothing inevitable about the quantum or the calibration of the misery inflicted through the reforms, especially the forex reform. One, floating the Naira was totally ill-advised. The CBN could have gradually devalued the Naira to what is now considered the fair value of our national currency. With that a dollar would still be below N1000 by now.

Two, floating the Naira without first securing adequate supply of forex to meet pent-up demands and muster enough firepower against speculators is a recipe for the rapid depreciation that we are living through. And three, floating the Naira shortly after removing petrol subsidy amounts not only to introducing double shocks simultaneously on a long-suffering people but also to ignoring that there is a limit to the amount of pain the human body can tolerate. Pacing or sequencing is a key element in reform management. But it seems the reform team, if there was any, missed that memo.

So, it will be important for the Tinubu administration to acknowledge that it tried to do the right thing but in the wrong way or in the wrong order. It needs to own its mistake, make reasonable adjustments, and ensure that future actions are more carefully considered and undertaken with clear and robust strategies and plans. In terms of needed adjustments, it might be necessary, for example, to move from a free float of the Naira to a managed float. It is also worth considering freezing the forex rate used for imports or adjusting it on a quarterly basis. That will make for better planning and less fluctuation.   

There are some areas where the government needs to take a hard look at itself. The first is its speed of response. Measures to cushion the effects of petrol subsidy removal should have been frontloaded or fast-tracked. There was a vacuous debate about the social register because some governors want to control the paltry sums meant the poorest households. In July, the Federal Government announced some consequential actions against soaring food prices. Those were good, emergency and time-barred moves that could have come at least three to six months earlier. Precious time had been wasted by key government officials in looking for scapegoats for high food prices. It is important not just to act, but also to act on time.

The second is the need for the government to actively model the time we live in and take the lead in demonstrating the sacrifice that it is asking of or imposing on the citizens. Neither the pattern of budgetary allocations nor the way public officials carry themselves suggests that Nigeria is passing through a tough period. With the business-as-usual approach to budgeting in the main appropriation, with the mind-boggling extravagance in the budgets of the government-owned entities, and with the talks about new presidential jets, the government either doesn’t get it or doesn’t care or is just plain insensitive. You can’t be inflicting pains on your citizens and be coasting around in obscene convoys, be prioritising new cars and new buildings, be fielding huge delegations to international meetings and be running a bloated, and mostly lacklustre, cabinet.

Third, the president needs to adopt a more inclusive, less alienating and more practical approach. He seems too eager to reward his Lagos loyalists with key appointments, without due sensitivity to the need for national spread. He is alienating key individuals and major sections of the country. Ruling a country, as with politics, is a game of addition, not subtraction. It is strange that this seems lost on someone regarded as a master political strategist. The triumphalist edge to his politics overlooks the point about the harm that a growing army of the alienated can do, especially in moments of real or concocted crisis.

President Tinubu, unexpectedly, has enjoyed a long honeymoon. But all honeymoons are like weekends: they don’t last forever. It is safe to assume that with the protests, Tinubu’s extended honeymoon has lapsed or is about to. He should brace himself for more confrontations. The right lesson for him to take from the protests this time will not be how to continue to win against those who confront or oppose him. But about the need to significantly address the underlying conditions that can make it easy for the genuinely hurting masses and various interested parties to join forces.