…No stopping this time till demands are met –Sowore
…as analysts list lessons from the just ended protest
The organisers of the 10-day nationwide #EndBadGovernance protest which ended 10th August are gearing up for a fresh bout of protest to begin on 1st October 2024, the day of Nigeria’s 64th independence anniversary.
That is, unless all their demands are fully addressed by the President Bola Tinubu administration.
Human rights activist and Convener of the #RevolutionNow Movement, Omoyele Sowore, confirmed this in an interview on News Central TV on Saturday, the final day of the protest that started 1st August.
This is even as analysts and stakeholders have been listing lessons thrown up by the just ended protest with the aim to elicit due and proper responses to public sentiment, mitigate further occurrence, set social benchmarks for early warning systems, as well as guide other necessary checks and interventions going forward.
The protest came amidst severe economic hardship, high costs of goods and services, including food, and hunger in the country occasioned by the twin policies of petrol subsidy removal and naira float introduced by President Tinubu in the early days of his administration in 2023.
The protesters had presented a 15-point demand to President Tinubu’s administration seeking to tackle the country’s governance issues, according to Sahara Reporters.
“If our demands are not met within the specified timeframe, we will resume the protest on October 1, or potentially earlier, depending on the prevailing circumstances and variables,” Sowore said on News Central TV on Saturday.
Sowore, presidential candidate of the Africa Action Congress (AAC) in the 2023 election, warned that when the protest starts this time, there would be no stopping until the demands of the protesters are met.
“Already, that conversation is going on and more plans by the organisers will be announced to the general public,” he said.
Per Sahara Reporters, the demands of the protesters include for the Tinubu-led government to “scrap the 1999 Constitution and replace it with a People-made Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria through a Sovereign National Conference immediately followed by a National Referendum”; “Toss the Senate arm of the Nigerian Legislative System, keep the House of Representatives (HOR), and make lawmaking a part-time endeavour”; and “Pay Nigerian Workers a minimum wage of nothing less than N250,000 monthly”.
The protesters are also asking the government to “Invest heavily in education and give Nigerian students grants, not loans. Aggressively pursue free and compulsory education for children across Nigeria”; “Release Mazi Nnamdi Kanu unconditionally and demilitarize the South East. ALL #ENDSARS and political detainees must also be released and could compensated”; “Renationalize publicly owned enterprises sold to government officials and cronies”; “Reinstate a corruption-free subsidy regime to reduce hunger, starvation and multidimensional poverty”; “Probe past and present Nigerian leaders who have looted the treasury, recover their loot, and deposited it in a special account to fund education, healthcare, and infrastructure”, among others.
Analysts say though the protest has come to an end, at least for now, the lessons must not be missed by government and other interest groups in the country.
The lessons, according to them, include that times have become extremely hard, that most Nigerians are struggling to feed themselves and straining to afford the basic necessities of life and need all the support they can get, particularly from government.
They also advise that government move to mitigate the underlying reasons for the protests so as to forestall a recurrence. Government will also benefit from coming to terms with the evolving concept of leaderless protest, or phantom cell structure, a strategy in which small, independent groups or individuals coalesce mainly on social media and express their grievances without the familiar structure of a leading individual personality or a formal chain of command.
To buttress this point, they observe that a lot of the known names identified with the protests merely joined and amplified it; they didn’t start the march and couldn’t stop it.
They add that participants need to be careful and law enforcement vigilant as such protests are prone to the risk of being hijacked by miscreants, mischief makers and disgruntled groups and could quickly spiral out of control as happened in a number of locations.
They also indicate that diplomacy and empathy in communication, temperament and conduct by law enforcement in engaging with protesters could mitigate outcomes.
“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,” policy strategist, Waziri Adio, wrote in a back page column in ThisDay Newspaper on Sunday.
“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,” Adio said.
He, however, observed that the economy had been in decline before President Tinubu came to power, adding that while the President deserves applause for having the guts to take on the subsidy that most Nigerians had 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”.
Drawing lessons from the protest, Professor of Journalism, Farooq Kperogi, said there is now “a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria”. In other words, protests against unpopular government policies are no longer “conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos” as it used to be.
Kperogi said the response of security forces to protests has a way of determining how protests 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,” Kperogi said in an article in the Nigerian Tribune.
“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,” he said.
