This first appeared on November 15, 2022

Uneasy calm pervades a land of latent but potent anger. Ended are the #EndSars protests. Left for our consumption is enormous food for thought.     

 Ironically, it cannot be confidently asserted that we have seen the end of it. No one knows if and when there will be another round of protests.

But we can and we must manage the post-protest period. And the way to do that is not to sectionalize or regionalize the discontent that led to the protests. This is what some of our political leaders have started to do.  

 But the pain felt in Nigeria knows no boundaries of religion, region or tribe. There is agony in the North and in the South, in the East and in the West, in a land that has been badly managed for decades. We should not be looking for “the way forward”, as we often say and do. We should be looking for the right direction, which may not be the way forward.

For if you have been travelling in the wrong direction, you should not be going forward. You should wisely make a U-turn.

 Peaceful protesters we saw at the beginning, bearing no sticks, no stones, no guns and no gasoline, bearing no intent to commit arson or theft. Then we began to see video clips on social media of thugs in what looked like government vehicles confronting peaceful demonstrators.

Could those vehicles have been hijacked by those who hijacked the protests? We began to witness destruction of life and property. How were peaceful and legitimate protests hijacked? Where was the Nigerian intelligence community?  

Activities of arsonists must be condemned. Massive destruction of property, mindless killing of human beings, looting, and all other acts of incivility visited on our land must be condemned. They can never be justified. But what led to this situation must neither be forgotten nor ignored.    

 Nigerians have been taken for granted for so long. We have been taken on a bumpy ride for decades. Maltreated, we have been on the receiving end of abuse of power. Treated with contempt, our legitimate concerns communicated to government provoke raw insolence on the part of representatives of government.

Impoverished and economically disabled, we see men and women we voted into office living in opulence. A politician completes his tenure as state governor, gets into the Senate through an electoral process that fails simple integrity tests, receives salaries and allowances as Senator, as well as scandalously insensitive severance package for having been governor. Who then are the real looters? 

The shabby treatment received by the average Nigerian from successive government is brutally exemplified by intimidation, extortion, torture and extra judicial killing by the Nigerian police, soldiers, and other agents of state in uniform. This can never be acceptable in a democratic polity. We have been at the receiving end of criminality disguised as politics. 

 

The #EndsSars protests represent a vehement contestation of the oft-peddled lie that Nigeria’s unity is “non-negotiable”. There is no unity in Nigeria as we speak. There are, instead, two countries Wole Soyinka once called “Country hide” and “Country seek” in his song “Unlimited Liability Company”.

There is a country of the oppressed, and there is a country of the oppressors. If the issues raised by protesters are simply glossed over, that would be a great disservice to this country.  

It would be a grave error to criminalize, intimidate and suppress dissenting voices. Good leadership qualities include intelligent management of opposition. As we condemn the destruction of life and property that came with the hijacked protests, we must equally condemn mismanagement of the protests as well as mismanagement of its aftermath.

There must be no attempt to conceal the truth behind the killings of peaceful protesters at the Lekki tollgate. Who were the men in uniform who fired gun shots at defenseless protesters?

The #EndSars protests queried a mistaken but recurrent assumption in this country that our men and women in uniform, especially in the army and police, can violate fundamental human rights with impunity, more specifically, that they are authorized to inflict punishment on an offender.

Our police and army are accusers who arrogate to themselves the status of judges. It has been happening for decades. I was already seeing the cruelty and brutality of the police and the army as a little boy at the inception of Military rule in 1966, during the war, and in the period after the war.

I witnessed decently dressed Nigerians being pulled out of their cars, flogged with horsewhip, and kicked like football into army or police vans. What crime did they commit? They did not give way to a military convoy.

 I was in secondary school when General Obasanjo, with Military fiat, decreed that soldiers be posted to every secondary school in Nigeria to maintain discipline. A Military coup is an act of indiscipline. But soldiers who acted outside discipline by taking over government at gunpoint wanted to instill discipline on Nigerians forgetting that you cannot give what you do not have.  

In protest against Obasanjo’s decision, Fela Anikulapo Kuti withdrew his children from government schools. Then I saw the gratuitous and sadistic brutality grotesquely misnamed a “War Against Indiscipline” by the Buhari and Idiagbon regime. The military ignored the wisdom of Plato’s Republic that discipline must be subject to wisdom so that it does not become brutality. All this crystallized in SARS.

 In an act of provocation, for the past few days, in the guise of enforcing a curfew, citizens of Nigeria in Oyigbo, Rivers State have been subjected to terrorism and killings by the army and the police while the Nigerian media has remained largely silent. 

 In another act of provocation, on Sunday, November 1, 2020, in Bere, Ibadan, soldiers arrested a young woman, made her sit on the ground as she was being flogged by a soldier for “indecent dressing”. The same soldiers forcibly cut the hair of some young men, and made them “pay for the haircut”.  

An official of the Oyo State Government has since said the soldiers were arrested. But that is insufficient. Their trial must be in public. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. These Soldiers, by the way, have Superior Officers and work for a government. There is something called vicarious responsibility.

 Indecent dressing is a moral issue. But definition or description of indecent dressing poses a challenge. There is no law in this country that criminalizes it. Neither is there any law that criminalizes any hair style.  

Even if there were such a law, there is no law that authorizes the police or the army to arrest and flog and shave. In a truly democratic polity, a violator of the law is apprehended and taken before the judiciary where his guilt must be proven. Then, and only then can sanctions be imposed by the judiciary, not by the accuser.

Unfortunately, for decades in this country, successive governments and their agents have been acting as if they were above the law.