Six blindmen and elephant

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

There was this short story we read in our primary school English textbook many decades ago. Lifted from ancient Hindu texts, it was about six blind men that heard about an elephant and approached it in order to understand it. They all groped at it. One of them touched the trunk and said, “This thing called elephant is just like a snake!” Another touched the ear and said, “An elephant is like a fan!” Yet another blindman touched the leg and said, “No, an elephant is like a tree!” A fourth blind man touched the body and he said, “This thing called elephant is just like a wall!” Another man grabbed the tail and said, “Aaah! An elephant is just like a rope!” The last blindman touched the tusk and said, “You are all wrong. The elephant is just like a spear!”

I thought about this story of the blindmen when I read many opinions in the mainstream and social media as government officials, security agencies, journalists, academics and others argued over the real meaning of the #EndBadGovernance protests that ended at the weekend [petered out was more like it] after ten days. I counted up to twenty different perspectives regarding the essence of the protests. None was completely right or completely wrong; it all depended on one’s location, role, stance, observation, interest or mischief vis a vis the protests. In other words, which part of the elephant he or she touched as a blindman.

We could glean the Tinubu Presidency’s perspective of the protests from the President’s national broadcast on the fourth day since its start. No doubt the president, who prides himself as a veteran of protests against military dictatorship and against the June 12 election annulment, was embarrassed to find himself and his Administration’s policies as the target of protests, after only one year in office. While he was personally proud of the near-anarchic June 12 protests, President Tinubu’s personal view of protests may have been modified by the EndSARS riots of 2020, when his businesses and expensive LASG property were targeted by rioters, followed by the embarrassing allegations and counter-allegations over what happened at Lekki toll gate. His essential message this time, as encapsulated in his broadcast, is, yes, things are tough, citizens have a right to protest, but they should do so peacefully and should exercise more patience because there is light at the end of the dark socio-economic tunnel.

State governors, who knew how desperate the socio-economic situation is because they spent most of the past year handing out palliatives, foresaw danger ahead of the protests and in their various ways they took steps to try to avert them. They made appeals; they mobilised clerics and elders; they employed party loyalty; empowered security agencies in their states and in some cases, they organised counter protests against the protests. In many states, the efforts failed miserably. National Assembly members escaped unscathed from these protests even though their scandalous lifestyles contributed to citizens’ anger against the government. Not to mention the tongues of their leaders, especially the Senate President, whose tongue is akin to a flame thrower in a petrol depot.

Policemen and security agents must have thought that this is all unfair to them. Which policeman in Nigeria, except perhaps the very top brass, is not suffering from the phenomenal increase in prices of food and all other goods in the markets? Yet, on top of fighting bandits, armed robbers, criminals and Yahoo boys, they are the ones that must put down these protests, risking their own lives and limbs, when many of the protesters are their neighbours or even children.

Soldiers are already privately chaffing that, in the past decade and a half, they have been dragged into police duties, grappling with Boko Haram, ISWAP, MASSOB, pipeline vandals, oil thieves, farmer-pastoralist warriors, kidnappers, secessionists and sea pirates. You now add protesters to the mix, with some of them waving Russian flags and asking soldiers to overthrow the elected civilian leaders and take over? Dragging soldiers into this mix when neither the government nor the public have any tolerance for mistakes, such as when an Army drone hit villagers at Tudun Biri and everyone was shouting blue murder?

APC leaders must have been torn apart by the turn of events. Its leaders at the national level immediately suspected that PDP, LP and NNPP forces were at work to undermine the Tinubu government. In states where opposition parties control the government however, APC leaders were not unhappy if protesters stormed Government Houses and partially blamed the state governments for the mess.  

On the other hand, PDP leaders must have seen the protests as a vindication of their regular criticism of the Tinubu Presidency’s socio-economic policies. Never mind that they themselves didn’t have a different template, because Alhaji Atiku Abubakar supported the removal of petrol subsidy and proposed to privatise the oil refineries. Having lost last year’s presidential election by a narrow margin, PDP strategists must now see a chance to drive a wedge between APC and voters in readiness for a 2027 rematch.

Although  Federal Government officials accused Labour Party of fueling the protests because its leader Mr. Peter Obi voiced support for it, the party and its once vociferous Obidient wing played no visible role in the protests. Their South Eastern support base was eerily quiet. They must be gloating, that it is the very areas that voted for APC and its candidate that are now protesting in the streets. Kwankwasiyya/NNPP leaders were at first happy since the protests were essentially against Federal Government’s macro-economic policies, and Kano State Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf even voiced support for them. But they reckoned wrongly, because their stronghold state went up in flames and they quickly began to sing a different tune.

These protests’ organisers were akin to the blindmen who touched the elephant’s trunk and thought it was a snake. They remained mostly underground and used the social media to mobilise for the protest. Their two most prominent demands were to bring down the cost of food and fuel, though some groups published a long list of demands that included bringing back the old national anthem and changing the constitution. Although the president has promised to dialogue with them, we are yet to see the protest leaders come forward for dialogue. It is doubtful if they will, because Nigeria Police is fond of framing twenty charges around a single offence.

Protest footmen and foot women were definitely galvanized by the harsh economic climate in the country, and they took to the streets in many cities even though they did not know who the protest organisers were, what were their real motives or even, what their full charter of demands was. While most of the marchers were probably innocent and well-meaning, criminals infiltrated their ranks in several Northern cities, looted shops and offices and engaged the police in running battles.

Lagos and the South West, long thought to be the hotbed of such protests, had a relatively easy time this time around. Most probably it learnt a bitter lesson from the EndSARS riots. In these matters people blame everyone but themselves; some sent out leaflets asking Igbos to leave Lagos, allegedly because they harbour an agenda to burn it down. Which is a baffling allegation, considering that Igbo traders own a substantial part of Lagos goods and wares. Other people alleged that South Westerners lay low because the President is their kinsman, with the counter charge that Northerners did not join the End SARS protest in 2020 because a Northerner was President, sidestepping the fact that SARS was never seen as a terror in the North, where it was much less visible than in Lagos.

What about that Russian flag that some protesters held aloft in some cities? Maybe it seeped in from Niger Republic, which in the past year wrested itself free from Franco-American military bases and rushed pell-mell into Russia’s embrace, together with its Alliance of Sahelian State neighbours Mali and Burkina Faso. Or maybe it was more sinister than that, as Nigerian soldiers see it, with Chief of Defence Staff General Chris Musa saying holding the Russian flag aloft is treasonable.

When the dust began to settle after the first two days of the protests, many Northerners began to wonder if they had not grabbed the most dangerous part of the elephant, i.e. the tusks. Most probably, the first, Kenya-inspired persons who mooted the protest idea were internet savvy NGO busy-bodies in Lagos. Yet, Northerners saw that the South East was totally quiet, the South West that championed most previous protests was largely quiet, there were only flickers of protest in the Niger Delta, while several Northern cities burnt, had several youngsters shot  and had to endure 24-hour curfews.

What happened? While some Northerners thought the region was taken for a ride, some Southerners turned round and accused the North of a power grab, that its citizens were irked by the “loss of power” in 2023 and wanted “to grab it back after only a year.” You see, the essential lesson of the old Hindu story of the blindmen  and the elephant is that  human beings have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience. They ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. In this ongoing argument in Nigeria about the motives and roles of different persons, parties, agencies and regions in the EndHunger protests, we are like the blindmen who touched different parts of an elephant. No  one is absolutely right and no one is absolutely wrong. Let us march forward and continue to argue, peacefully.