As the chorus of calls to resign and ringing disenchantment filled the political and chattering spaces, President Muhammadu Buhari clings all the more desperately to his own sinking ship that had gone beyond salvage. Nigerians now live under martial sphere where ban, banish, brutalise, capture and censor are emerging as crude strategies to limit and kill voices of dissent against a deformed Buharigarchy, which is nothing, but a byword for gross incompetence. Democracy is now an institution that is ritually padded to disappoint Nigerians and spread anxiety across the land.
Today, the administration of President Mohammadu Buhari has brought stultifying stagnation to ordinary Nigerians by design. Five years on, he could not find solution to Nigeria’s existential anxieties.
Mass disapproval of his refusal to sack his service chiefs does not inspire him to seek an alternative path, rather, he seems to be enjoying his role as a Dracula feasting daily on the bloodbath in the North. Sacking the service chiefs would be the best Christmas gift to all Nigerians. Mr. President, please tell them to go! Soro Soke!
Over five years after the election of our now tyranny-captive leader, President Muhammadu Buhari, lights are going out all over Nigeria. We are moving from full democracy to a totally flawed democracy where President Buhari apparently understands the domestic political benefits of unhinged despotism as a tool to crush the persistent geopolitical tensions besetting Nigeria.
We now live under extreme ethnic polarization, morale meltdown in the military, marginalization of other tribes, primitive thinking, foolish Fulani hegemonism, ethical void, northernisation of armed forces across Nigeria, economic depression, social anomie, brutal suppression of protest culture and morbid phenomena of paranoia.
President Muhammadu Buhari has re-imagined autocracy, and at the same time, weaponised the democratic process and set himself up as a man fighting a civil war with Nigerians. The untethering of his once concealed fang against urban and suburban activists, agitators, rights advocates and human rights campaigners is emerging as a self-legitimating pretext to shred rule of law while re-introducing military absolutism into our liberal politics.
How can Nigerians remain suppliant in the face of chronic insecurity, kidnapping, banditry, poverty, the demonization of popular protests, starvation, stupidity, incompetent leadership, tyranny, herdsmen genocide and police impunity?
We are witnessing a new narrative of the Nigerian struggle – struggle for good governance. Struggle for democratic tolerance without any resort to brutal suppression and murder of agitating voices. As at yet, nothing nuanced or disguised, for the past five years, Buhari has been holding the sectional flag of anti-South. Frankly, he has not disappoint his base through political surrender to the Southern Nigerian clamour for restructuring. Rather, he has been wielding the executive gavel of largely unfettered unitary power that favours the North.
However, it has to be said, probably in a sermonetic language, that executive political power must be measured not by the echo of Police/Army brutality under his watch, but by the dividend of good governance, equity, security, peace and prosperity for all Nigerians. What is daily unfolding is disaster in motion: Olu Falae’s farm set ablaze by herdsmen, Olufon of Ifon, Oba Adegoke Israel Adeusi killed, 67 Zabarnari farmers massacred, Sultan of Sokoto’s courageous lambasting defiance that ‘the North is the worse place to live in Nigeria’, the Global Terrorism Index branding of Nigeria as the world’s third most terrorized nation and the hundred million forgotten “hoodlums” – the victims of massive political, social and economic neglect who recently stormed the barricades of the rich and our pampered elites.
And by sheer force of existential gravity, Nigeria has entered into the ferment of protest. We are in that defining moment where endless protests have to guide democratic deliberation under this government. What is animating Nigerians to protest is self-evident. President Buhari’s repetitive failure to address insecurity is a product of self-flagellating hubris. The president and his cabinet are aberrant deviants and the only way to sanitise this regime is through massive and sustained civil protests. Nigeria needs to enter into the rough and tumble world of protests until we force a stop to all the madness in our polity.
#EndSARS, though limited in scope, was a timely intervention to many of our unanswered questions. Like all great movements, #EndSARS started underground. The movement drew the sons and daughters of the rich, the poor and other tired Nigerians together to speak in one defiant voice for an acceleration of a new order.
The popular youth-guided movement was meant to wake up Nigerians from national amnesia and usher in true economic, social, political and cultural regeneration. The ‘woke’ culture as dreamed by the Obamas is here!!! However, going by the voices of Northern Governors and our Inspector General of Police, Mr. Mohammed Adamu, protests is demonised as the harbinger of chaos, confusion and violence. Really? If protest will bring in chaos and violence, has twenty one years of unbroken democracy not delivered Nigeria into the deeper end of chaotic charade and violence never seen in our peacetime? Are we not paying dearly with our blood for Buhari’s incompetence? Should we, as a nation, continue to hibernate perpetually in the daily darkness of bloodbath, confusion, death, decay and stagnation?
Five years on, we are ranked as the poverty capital of the world. We now live in a “madosphere” where Malam Garba Shehu, the media spokesman of President Muhammadu Buhari, blamed the dead farmers in Borno for not obtaining clearance before going to their farms! The fear of being called a stupid idiot should haunt Malam Shehu than the fear of losing his job.
In the face of a government that is careening dangerously to self-destruction, are we to be cautious in our criticism or be louder in our outrage? Are we dealing with a presidency that is blind, deaf and dumb that it could not find its way? If President Muhammadu Buhari is blindsided by the fact that he is a lame duck president presiding over a failed state, he should understand that the protest that would end Fulani’s generational oppression, tyranny, misrule, incompetence, despotism and autocracy may be on the way. The protest must go on! Soro Soke!
Yesterday’s hazardous, uncoordinated and analogue protest culture has today being taken over by digital soldiers. Today, the protest space is being managed by frenetic influencer-agitators and harshtag engorged techies with fat bank balances. Today, the fight has been taken over by ‘woke’ conscious and Soro Soke souls like Omoyele Sowore, Juwon Sanya-Olu, Deji Adeyanju, Seun Kuti, Faltz, Aisha Yesufu, Agba Jalingo, Nollywood actors, lefty middleclass, Vlogers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, diaspora power, Pop music artistes, lawyers and many other conscientious Gen Xers who live with the everyday hard-borne reality of a failed nation under Buhari’s watch. What drew them like magnet to the #Endsars protest was its objective of non-violence.
#Endsars has turned out to be hugely redemptive. But that redemptive process is today construed as constituting “subversion”, “treason”, “insurrection” and an attempt to cause a forceful “overthrow” of a lawfully elected government. In a spin of breathtaking stupidity, protest is corrupted as meaning to represent an arm struggle. And the enemy of democratic freedom entertaining this asinine belief is none other than Mr. Mohammed Adamu, the IGP, who, drunk on hubris, now aims to circle the wagon around himself and create an echo chamber where we are no longer allowed to protest, agitate, refute and fight with our placards all the shenanigans overwhelming this nation. I say again, the protest must go on! Soro Soke!
What is emerging is that Buhari has taken the needle of tyranny past the red zone. His paranoia and return to autocracy at the sound of opposition is nothing but a thoughtless disdain of liberal freedoms that come with democratic values.
Peaceful protest is a by-product of democracy. It is the inalienable right of Nigerians. It is written in our constitution. Mr. Mohammed Adamu’s call on “well-meaning Nigerians to join hands with the police to prevent recurrence of violent protest” is in order. But his call “on well-meaning Nigerians to prevail on groups said to be planning the new rounds of protests to drop the idea” amounts to threat, illegality, demonization and shameful citizen demobilisation. The protest has to go on! Soro Soke!
#Endsars aftermath in Nigeria was straight from the guidebook of a totalitarian and fascist regime – the seizure of passports, freezing of accounts, hounding, intimidation, threats, banning and other censors. These actions are the truest proof that Adamu is not ready to learn any lesson from the destruction that befell the Police from the hands of protest hijackers. He wants to preserve the Police in its impurity of lawlessness, brutality and extortionism. In readiness for future peaceful protests, Adamu has been greenlighting badged up Police officers to commit gross human right abuses on defenceless Nigerians if and when such protests are organised.
His boss, President Muhammadu Buhari was a serial protester and it would be outrageously hypocritical of the IGP to deny Nigerians that oxygen of relief that only protest could give. Police are meant to protect protesters not set on them like hounds and hyenas.
If peaceful social movement is arrested, it would be a matter of time before its next phase (social unrest) emerges!!! The #Endsars movement is crying to be reclaimed by those who subscribe to it, otherwise it will morph into a revolutionary movement. Peaceful protest for good governance must go on! Soro Soke!
President Muhammadu Buhari, had, for too long, whether in Khaki or as a deluded, converted democrat, been drunk on his own hubris which had blinded him to the misery he so often inflicted through apathy, intolerance, sectionalism, incompetence and deliberate impunity. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over ‘til is over.” The protest for a restructured governance must go on! Moti Soro Soke!
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