REUBEN'S VIEWS
Nigerians are playing with COVID-19, and in so doing, they are playing with fire and death. Why are we so blest and yet so suicidal? When the index case of the virus was announced on February 27, 2020, and the government proceeded to adopt lockdown measures at both national and sub-national levels, the people were gripped by fear and anxiety. COVID-19 was something strange that they could not deal with. The fact that it turned out to be a global pandemic, spreading like wildfire, burning down lives and hopes, made the situation more frightening. When government, following the pattern observed elsewhere decided to ease the lockdown, and businesses were allowed to re-open in order to save the economy from total collapse, Nigerians heaved a sigh of relief and began to run their lives in spite of the virus. They respected the non-pharmaceutical interventions which government prescribed for a while, but in due course all the masks disappeared. Even the isolation centres that were set up in different parts of the country became inactive. Many of those isolation centres were shut down and the healthcare workers were re-assigned.
We began to hear less and less of those phrases that defined the pandemic at its peak: contact tracing, physical distancing, social distancing, use of sanitizer. When the lockdown was eased, the Presidential Task Force and the state governments rolled out a number of prescriptions. Religious bodies were required to reduce their gatherings to half the capacity of the hall in which their events took place. The register of those who attended such gatherings was expected to be kept so that in the event of an outbreak of infections, it would be possible to trace contacts and contain any form of community spread. I love going to the market to buy vegetables, sea food and other items. Over the years, this has provided me the opportunity to mix and mingle with the real people of Nigeria. A typical Nigerian market has a life of its own.
As the pandemic raged, there were local government officials manning the entry points to the markets. I recall being sent back to the car more than twice, with a very polite reminder that without a mask, I could not be allowed entry. I dutifully obeyed with apologies, or I promptly fished out my mask and wore it, following which I would stretch out my hand for a shower of sanitizer. Supermarkets insisted on the same protocol, but that didn’t impress me, because once you got into the store, you could see all manner of reckless persons yanking off their masks. Because there were no sanctions and Nigerian leaders who made the rules did not show the example, the people themselves gradually began to conclude that COVID-19 is a scam, some form of “play-play” (that is a Nigerian term) with which Nigerian politicians siphon money from the state treasury. They could see politicians organizing rallies at which they disregarded COVID-19 protocols. They could see government officials walking about as if they had a form of divine immunity. The religious leaders did not help matters. Some of them pointedly told the people that there is nothing called Coronavirus, and that a Christian is covered by the blood of Jesus. For some reason, the prevalence rates in Africa was quite low, except perhaps in the colder parts of the continent (the Cape Province and Gauteng in South Africa and in the countries of North Africa). Every one relaxed. Corona Virus became classified as a rich man’s affliction, from which the poor were allegedly protected.
I recall attending a small family get-together at the time when everyone was almost forgetting about the virus. I arrived at the event wearing a mask. Really modest gathering, to honour a friend who had recorded yet another significant milestone in his life. The moment my friend welcomed me into his compound, he kept telling me to remove my mask. I refused. I wasn’t prepared to take any risks. He then asked me to look around if I could see anyone wearing a mask. Indeed, nobody else wore a mask. The jollification was in full swing. I looked around. There was this woman gyrating like a cone on the dancing floor, thrusting her chest and derriere in a tantalizing, mermaid-like, manner, enough to distract a man of gentlemanly manners. I got carried away for a moment as I fixed my gaze on her wondrous assets.
“Dr, I say remove this mask. You can’t be the only one wearing a mask at this gathering. People will laugh at you.”
“No. I will keep it on. Coronavirus is real. It has not gone yet. Have you not been following what is going in the United States and Europe? We even hear that the situation could get worse before the end of the year.”
“That is in those places. They are the ones who know what sin they have committed that God is punishing them for. In this our own town, there is no Corona here. Evil is not our portion in the name of Jesus!”
“There is Corona in this your town my brother. Every day on Arise TV, we track the Corona virus trend, and offer analysis. I know what I am talking about.”
“That is television. You people must have something to say every morning. Even if nothing exists, you will create it and use sweet mouth to convince people. I beg, come and sit down and eat and drink. Let me see whether you will drink through the face mask. Mr. Co-ro-na!”
When it was time to take pictures with my friend and his family, and I showed up in front of the camera, still with a face mask, he was the one who personally removed my mask with his hands. “My friend, respect yourself, you want to take pictures with me, you are wearing a mask. How would I convince anybody that you travelled all the way from Lagos to honour me?” It was the last community, family-oriented event that I attended in the year 2020. As if I knew…!
As the year drew to a close, we began to hear reports of a second variant of the virus, that is deadlier, more dangerous and 70% more transmissible than the original virus named COVID-19. The mutant variant was reportedly sighted in the United Kingdom where a Third Wave had already forced the authorities to impose a tiered system of lockdown on the entire country. The same variant was also sighted in South Africa and in due course in other countries of the world: 33 as at the last count. Many countries began to shut their borders again as the virus remained capricious. Meanwhile, the emergence of a new variant of it, abbreviated the joy that the world had experienced with the emergence of vaccine candidates with impressive safety, efficacy and immunogenicity profiles which had already been granted emergency authorization and deployed across the world. Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Astra-Zeneca-Oxford and the vaccines they came up with raised hopes that humanity would at last beat the virus. In the US, UK, Canada, UAE, Russia, China and across Europe, clinical trials and vaccinations were in progress. Scientists worked round the clock to reduce and checkmate the terror of the virus. There were hiccups and concerns, but it was instructive to see the amount of devotion that the war against coronavirus generated across boundaries.
Nigerian authorities would eventually wake up. They began to warn afresh about the need to #take-responsibility. The Presidential Task Force and the National Centre for Disease Control announced that the infection rate in Nigeria was going up. They further disclosed that the new variant that was reported in the UK in September had actually been identified at a Genomics Laboratory at Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria, in a research led by Professor Christian Happi and his team. If the UK had probably not raised the alarm, Nigeria would not have drawn attention to this fact. By the last week of the year 2020, the country was already recording over 1, 031 infections per day, and that grew steadily to 1, 074 cases per day. Still, the people couldn’t be bothered. They defied government counsel and continued to hold all kinds of parties: weddings, funerals, house-warmings, naming ceremonies. The counsel that people should stay away from large gatherings during the Yuletide and New Year season was ignored. Lagos and other state governments re-imposed curfews and threatened that there would be sanctions. Lagos declared what it called “Operation No Tolerance”. Government could well have been talking to the deaf.
The people rang in the New Year on their own terms. They trooped to the beaches in large numbers. One video showed a sea of heads at a beach in Lagos! Entertainment spots were filled up. End of the year parties were held. On cross-over night, the churches welcomed end-of-year revelers who brazenly advertised their violation of the law. We stepped into the year 2021, against the background of fears that the numbers will rise and there may be chaos lurking around the corner. When reminded of their own folly, the average Nigerian would tell you that COVID-19 had disappeared with the year 2020! When told that in one week alone, 20 doctors died and that more celebrity deaths were recorded, the people ignored the message. To have a community where the people do not care whether they die or not is a classic representation of Nigeria’s descent into anomie.
In one word, Nigerians refused to take responsibility. The government failed to enforce its own rules. I used to urge the Nigerian government to pay more attention to public communication and adjust its strategies. At this point, I am beginning to doubt my own prescription. It may now be difficult to convince anyone that strategic communication is the problem. One year after the virus, I do not think that there is anyone in the world who has not heard of COVID-19. People in the rural areas have relatives and friends living in the cities. Both rural and urban residents know at least one person living in Europe or North America and Asia. The No. 1 topic in the media has remained the scourge of COVID-19. We are paying the price for the lack of trust between government and the people. Why should Nigerians trust the same political leaders who kept COVID-19 palliatives for themselves and used them as birthday gifts? One of the most enduring images of 2020 was that of poor Nigerians forcing warehouses and the homes of politicians open to liberate COVID-19 palliative materials. Thus, when government officials talk about saving the people, nobody takes them seriously. The people would rather resort to self-help.
In Nigeria, this has proven to be costly. The vacuum created by the government has been filled by merchants of faith, spell-binders and mercenaries engaged in a “Plandemic war” – a war of misinformation by anti-vaxxers. Their main arena is the social media and the pulpit where they spew conspiracy theories about how COVID-19 is an artificial creation by Big Pharma and a greedy, cross-border capitalist elite, or as they argue, unconscionably, a ploy to create a World Government under the control of the Illuminati. There are now about 31 million people following anti-Vaccine groups on Facebook and YouTube. The church is part of this anti-Corona movement. Pentecostal Pastors are particularly notorious. They hide under divine immunity to mislead their congregation and impose their own alternative facts. There is a video in circulation for example of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome where he tells his captive audience: “Let me show you something. A calendar.” And then he goes on to indoctrinate the people relying on a calendar nobody else has seen.
It must be possible for the Congregation to interrogate pastors and ask cogent questions. No Pastor should be allowed the affectation of Solomonic imperialism that we now see in Nigerian churches. It is even more disturbing that some politicians have joined the trend. There is this other video showing Senator Dino Melaye speaking evangelically about COVID-19 and the vaccine. He asked people pointedly not to take any vaccine. I thought the man in the video was a body double. But he looked like Melaye quite alright. I was alarmed. Melaye was not dancing, singing, or making comedy, for which he is well known. He was dead serious. That is the reality of our situation. I won’t be shocked if my carpenter suddenly shows up tomorrow as the Anthony Fauci of Nigeria and he gets a sizeable followership!
It is the failure of government and the crisis of leadership that is at play. Towards the end of 2020, we had the untidy situation whereby the Presidential Task Force openly blamed state governments for failing to sustain the interventionist pathways funded by the Federal Government and the Organised Private Sector under the auspices of CA-COVID and the Central Bank of Nigeria. The states were asked to reopen the isolation centres. But how many of those isolation centres and laboratories are still functioning or in good shape? They have probably been looted. The Federal Government also asked the states to suspend the re-opening of schools till January 18, 2021. Some of the states are insisting they would re-open schools anyway. One state government’s spokesperson reportedly said they would listen only to the Governor of their State. So is this about ego then? What does this tell us? Lack of synergy. The Federal Government says we should expect vaccines by the end of January. How? Which vaccines? Are we on any waiting list? Have we made orders? Is there an operational plan in place? We are in January already. Nigeria needs to learn how other countries like Greece, for example, manage these things. And then the other day, the Federal Government published a list of 100 passport numbers, travellers who failed to observe the 7-day post arrival, mandatory PCR test. Of what use are those passport numbers? Is it not better to name the owners of the passports? Nigeria needs to get its acts together. We are far behind. We need new thinking.
My favourite end-of-the-year quote, which I have shared with many others, is the following passage from Chapter 3 of the inimitable Chinua Achebe’s Things Falls Apart, a novel of monumental, evergreen relevance, translated into over 50 languages, a product of pure genius, a milestone in world literature. Achebe wrote:
“...The year that Okonkwo took eight hundred seed yams from Nwakibie was the worst year in living memory. Nothing happened at its proper time; it was either too early or too late. It seemed as if the world had gone mad. The first rains were late and when they came, lasted only a brief moment ... The drought continued for eight market weeks and the yams were killed. The year had gone mad. When the rains finally returned, they fell as it had never fallen before. Trees were uprooted and deep gorges appeared everywhere.
That year, the harvest was sad, like a funeral and many farmers wept as they dug up the miserable and rotting yams. One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself. Okonkwo remembered that tragic year with a cold shiver throughout the rest of his life. It always surprised him when he thought about it later that he did not sink under the load of despair. He knew he was a fierce fighter, but that year had been enough to break the heart of a lion. Since I survived that year," he always said, "I shall survive anything."
Chinua Acbebe, the master story-teller wrote Things Fall Apart in 1957. He was just 27. Today, his words ring true. His narrative summarizes what we have been through in the year 2020. Writers are prophets. They see ahead. They map the trajectory of human experience even before it happens. The year 2020, better known as the year that was, indeed went mad. In terms of harvest, there was very little to talk about. Not yams sprouting from farmlands, but the negation of everything by a pathogen known as COVID-19 which left our world in dire straits. The last time the world witnessed a similar tragedy was in 1918-1920. That was the Spanish Flu. It lasted for two years and left a devastating imprint. We are sadly back to that past 100 years later. Across the world, from Europe to Antarctica, over one million people have died. Over 81 million persons have been infected. Many more will die, as the virus mutates and demonstrates a capacity equivalent to evil in extreme proportions. Indeed as the sage wrote, If we survive this, “we shall survive anything”. The year 2020 is the perfect “annus horribilis.” It is not a year “on which we shall look back with undiluted pleasure”.
It was the year that everything failed. Marriages collapsed. Businesses failed. The world’s demand and supply chain was disrupted. Man was humbled and humanity tried to catch up with an existential accident. The limits of science was tested. The idea of community was redefined, as human beings were forced to stay in their own natural enclaves, and avoid each other. This was the spectacular year when even grandparents were advised to stay away from their own children. Hospitals were overstretched. The entire world became an isolation centre. The words: physical distancing, social distancing, masks, hygiene, guidelines, protocols, task force, leadership, yes, leadership, and responsibility became the most famous words of the year.
The cemetery is a public place. It became even more popular in the year 2020. It was indeed an unusual year of paradoxes. Hi-Tech owners and investors made big money, so did Big-Pharmaceutical companies and so did the undertakers and funeral homes who made a fortune from the harvest of deaths. In our country, Nigeria, there was another kind of harvest, which added to the people’s misery and pain. Kidnappings. Banditry. The failure of the Naira. The collapse of the oil and gas sector. The madness of the people who in the face of COVID-19 chose to be skeptical, saved ironically by the fact that the disease was not as terrible as it was in other continents. The economy of course failed also. Nigeria slipped into a second recession in five years. Many lost their jobs. It was a sad year in all sectors, more or less. And it was the year when Nigerian youths rebelled against police brutality and bad governance.
We lament but we must also look at the other side of the picture: What lessons have we learnt and how can those lessons help us in the years to come? As the year 2020 ends, we are looking forward to a New Year. And somehow, everyone thinks that in 2021 COVID-19 will disappear. But not quite. The year 2021 looks very much like the year of the Vaccine and the politics of vaccination. Getting the people to take the vaccine is likely to be a big challenge. Going forward, I recall a few lessons that we may have learnt.
Number One: Could anyone have ever imagined that we would give up some of our usual habits as human beings? All of a sudden the year 2020, showed us that if we do not shake hands, hug each other, exchange intimate social affections, we would not die. I do not, as the year ends, remember the last time I hugged anyone or shook hands with a friend. A handshake was once a symbol and expression of brotherhood. The year of the virus made that impossible as we all had to mask up, and observe physical and social distancing. Here we are at the end of the year and so much has changed in terms of how we relate to other people. Someone was telling me the other day that we are now in the Harmattan season, or put more correctly, the flu season. But you try and sneeze at this time. Or cough. Every sneeze or cough is considered a sign of Corona Virus. I know persons who go about with a can of aerosol spray in their bags. You sneeze. You get sprayed for constituting yourself into a threat to public health. A lady that I know, will spray Aerosol on you from head to toe and tell you: “ma ko bami jare!” Before the year 2020, it was normal to sneeze and cough. People will tell you: “God bless you.” Now, that has become a crime. Nobody asks God to bless you. They look at you with what Nigerians call “corner-eye”.
Number Two: Nigerians love parties. But in the year 2020, it became a crime also to attend parties, wear aso ebi, and party all day long. I have bags of traditional party attires, agbada and all sorts, but this year, I have not opened any of those bags. There was no need going everywhere. We were told to keep safe and stay at home. Can anyone ever imagine that a year would pass like that without all the communal parties? Some people defied the protocols, year 2020 was not like any other year. But some of us obeyed the government. It was quite clear at some point that even persons who followed the directive that everyone should #take-responsibility were not spared by the virus. The high and mighty died. The most talented in our community died. COVID-19 was so egalitarian, it did not respect anybody or national boundaries.
Number Three: One of my teachers, many years ago, in a 400 level course titled “Theatre and Mankind” told us that man considers himself the most wondrous being on earth and regards himself as Master of the Universe, but repeatedly, man realizes that he is really not as important as he projects himself to be. Again and again, nature humbles him. The environment reminds him that he is not a Master but a gnat. The more this happens, the more man struggles to master the Cosmos and it is in that eternal struggle that we find the substance of epistemology and wisdom, and human drama. This is the story of our lives, and it was played out, poignantly, in the year 2020. In that year, that now ends, we were confronted with the uncertainty and the vulnerability of our lives. We are now at a point where scientists are saying they have found a vaccine. The drama of 2020 was that of man’s conflict with a pathogen, and as we were taught, this is just the beginning of another end. Man’s place in creation is that of Sisyphus and Atlas. If anyone believes that our struggle is over, he or she misses the point.
Number Four: It was a year we were told to stay away from one another and that taught us a lesson about how interconnected and interdependent we all are in a real sense. And of course the freedoms that we often take for granted became more precious than we ever considered. We were asked to stay at home, lock down, and avoid others. Even students could not go to school. We were required to bear responsibility for the health and well-being of others. It was a big issue that we all needed each other to survive, and if you were infected, you were told not to risk the possibility of infecting the other person. That was a big lesson in human solidarity. But it was tough. In times of pain and despair, the natural instinct is for people to reach out to each other, stick together as family, and seek help. In the year 2020, we were told to change the way we have always lived so we could remain alive. In Africa and Nigeria, the people took that for granted, but now that there is a second wave, we can only hope that the people will learn and not submit to conspiracy theories or the thinking that Corona virus is a big man’s disease which it is not.
Number Five: And still on how connected we are as human beings and how Corona Virus advances the struggle for equality, it became clear in the year 2020, that health is wealth, and that a failed healthcare system such as exists in many African countries would affect everyone. The African rich class had this habit of running abroad each time they fell ill; headache, ear-ache, indigestion, diarrhoea, even malaria. But in 2020, that became a suicidal option. Our leaders were taught the lesson that they have a responsibility to develop and strengthen the health systems in their own countries. For reasons not yet fully analysed, the African continent did not experience a corona virus blow out. This was the surprising miracle of the year considering the behaviour of the people, the misconduct of African governments and the reign of superstition from Tanzania to Burundi, Ghana and Nigeria.
Number Six: The free market system flourished ironically and China, where the virus sprouted from became the biggest economic beneficiary. Vaccine nationalism flourished counterpoised by vaccine hesitancy, two instructive phrases of the moment. We are confronted, in the face of the Virus, with the urgent need for new global narratives.
Number Seven: Leadership. The year 2020 showed that leadership matters. We saw through the year, good and bad leaders in terms of how they managed the COVID-19 challenge. Good leaders help society. Bad leaders punish and frustrate the people.
Number Eight: Our world of work has changed forever. Before the disaster that was 2020 happened, we all enjoyed the thrill of the daily commute to and from our work places. Even when we spent hours on traffic-congested roads, we loved it. In 2020, we were told to stay at home and work from home. And just like that: the world of work changed forever, with analysts telling us that human beings tend to be more productive when they work in isolation, from home. Tech companies have gained a lot. Stock markets have appreciated. Corona Virus may have robbed us of aspects of our lives, but it has also shown us new possibilities. What does tomorrow hold, then?
I have no idea. I am not too sure anyone can answer that question. What we know is that human beings are capable of new discoveries in the face of pain, suffering and tragedy. And so it has been with the year 2020. So, what do we hold on to? Hope, I guess, the oxygen of human existence.
Sam Nda-Isaiah, our friend and colleague who died the other day, aged 58, will certainly be remembered as one of the major contributors to the practice and promotion of the journalism profession in Nigeria, in the last moments of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st Century, with his craft, writings, enterprise and involvement in the politics of the trade. His death was sudden and shocking. A few days earlier, he had been actively involved in the activities of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), precisely at the change of guards ceremony which led to the emergence of a new executive in charge of the association. The communique issued at the end of that NPAN meeting talked about the need for the Nigerian government to take allegations of a second wave of the COVID-19 more seriously, and begin to make arrangements for the procurement, the distribution of vaccines in Nigeria and the inoculation of our over 200 million vulnerable population.
Days later, it was reported that Sam Nda-Isaiah had succumbed to COVID-19, and had gone the way of ancestors. Some close associates insist that his death had nothing to do with COVID-19. Whatever it was, his death is an affirmation of the ugliness of the year 2020, an annus horribilis, in which lives were cut short by a virulent, mutating and vicious pathogen called COVID-19 and other afflictions. It is true that many survived, but millions died. The world was taken back to a century earlier: the Spanish Flu of 1918 – 1920, a bad case of history repeating itself as a tragedy. Sam’s death was most painful because he was a man full of life, energy, ideas, passion and promise. In the same week that he died he attended the NPAN meeting, chaired a Board meeting at his company’s headquarters and was in the middle of the formation of new projects. And he died…If death had wanted money we could have given him, if death wanted Kolanuts, we could have littered his path with the biggest Kolanuts from great grandfather’s barn, but death, the greedy, grim reaper rejected both money and kolanuts and took our beloved most worthy brother instead…and now we mourn. We mourn.
Sam Nda-Isaiah was a shining light in our community, that is the literary and intellectual eco-system. He was the publisher of the Leadership newspapers, an influential newspaper, which literally grew from grass to grace. It was a great pleasure and a delight indeed to have been able to relate with, and engage Sam Nda-Isaiah in the course of my assignment as President Goodluck Jonathan’s media adviser and spokesman. But I knew Sam Nda-Isaiah, long before then. I met him through his writings before I met him in person. Writers are often led by their own words and thoughts: they unlock doors which may be forever invisible with their turns of phrase; they connect with souls that they may never even meet in physical spaces. Their words can cause revolutions across minds, across generations and yet their only touch with that vast space are the words that they spoke or wrote.
Sam Nda-Isaiah first came into major public reckoning as a columnist, and editorial board member with the Daily Trust newspaper, whose founder is now the President of the NPAN, and whose inauguration he attended as one of his last minute activities. To say that he wrote brilliant columns is to create a new cliché. Of course, he did. Sam Nda-Isaiah’s columns titled “Last Word” and “Ear Shot” were a compelling read. They brought him to national attention. Sam Nda-Isaiah’s career path was all the more interesting and remarkable because he was originally a Pharmacist. He studied Pharmacy at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. For a while, he worked as a Pharmacist, during his National Youth Service Year at the Ekiti General Hospital, and later at the Kano Specialist Hospital, the General Hospital, Minna, and at Pfizer Products Limited. Journalism would eventually become his calling and the defining vocation of his life.
Persons who are privy to his background would not be surprised. His father, Clement Nda-Isaiah was a journalist in the 70s. He was at a point, Sports Editor at the New Nigerian newspaper. As a secondary school student, Sam Nda-Isaiah was often dropped off to join his father at the New Nigerian newspaper premises after closing from school. Any surprise then that the son of a journalist who went to study Pharmacy eventually ended up as a journalist, publisher and media entrepreneur? At the Obafemi Awolowo University, his interest in journalism and public affairs was notable. He was Editor of The Pharmacist, a departmental magazine. He later sustained his interest in public affairs by writing for the Daily Trust, the platform that brought him into public reckoning.
His most compelling outing in this regard was his publication in 2004 of his collection of writings in the Daily Trust. The Book was titled Nigeria: Full Disclosure: Selected Writings on Governance, Democracy and Statecraft, May 1999 – March 2004 by Sam Nda-Isaiah. It effectively put a fence around his public commentaries up to that point, but it was also a major event on the cultural calendar. Sam was able to attract the high and mighty in society to the book presentation. From the event, he reportedly made a sum of 17 million Naira, which became the seed money for the rejuvenation of his own newspaper, Leadership, which he had founded in 2001. Leadership newspaper then, was a very modest, subscription-only, effort, not more than a few pages of straggly newsprint, but a popular offering all the same because it was an outright, left-wing anti-Obasanjo newspaper. Day after day, one edition after another, Sam Nda-Isaiah’s newspaper drew blood literally as it highlighted the shortcomings of the Obasanjo administration across Ministries, Departments and Agencies and the policy spectrum. The newspaper pandered to popular sentiments. The launch of the book in 2004 and the gain of N17 million gave the newspaper project a new bump and verve. In those days, N17 million was a lot of money. Many other columnists would follow in Sam Nda-Isaiah’s footsteps and publish collections of their writings. It was political season and you could make as much money as possible if you had the right connections. In Sam Nda-Isaiah’s case, that singular event, that is the publication of a selection of his writings promoted him and gave him the platform that he needed to scale up. In 2004, his project, the Leadership newspaper grew into a big enterprise and a major contribution to popular culture, journalism and ideas. In terms of focus and mission statement, the reader was told: “We shall stand up for good governance. We shall defend the interests of the Nigerian state even against its leaders and we shall raise our pen at all times in defence of what is right. These are the values by which we intend to be assessed.”
Sam Nda-Isaiah built the paper with the force of his own industry, ideas, and connections within the Northern establishment. He was a fearless, aggressive and say-it-as-it-is writer. He took on everyone and any one. He paid close attention to the governance process and did not spare any fool in the corridors of power. Everything in the Leadership newspaper was purposeful. In the past, we used to complain about a tradition of newspapering in the North which supported the Islamic religion and the Northern aristocracy, and hence offered, perhaps with the notable exception in this regard of Citizen magazine, a tendentious form of journalism which played the usual Nigerian game. Leadership newspaper was slightly different in its early beginnings.. It was avant-garde and the market responded accordingly as the newspaper attracted attention and respect. Sam Nda-Isaiah recruited some of the best hands in the business, including Azu Ishiekwene, a former editor of The Punch newspaper and a gifted master of the prose who helped to further raise the newspaper’s quality of delivery across board. In later years, however, I observed that the newspaper became somewhat tainted with Sam’s partisan politics. But that is another story.
Newspapering was Sam’s passion nonetheless. He would later branch out into other businesses and investments: manufacturing, telecommunications, hospitality, agriculture, and real estate. There was this upscale eatery close to where I lived in Asokoro, Abuja. Banana Republic. I was shocked to discover that it was owned by Sam. I couldn’t make the connection between Sam Nda-Isaiah, the writer/publisher and Sam, the curator of a pepper soup, suya and Chinese/African swallow joint. His energy was boundless. His appetite was large. His talent was huge. He was a prototypical renaissance character. He was either Chairman or member of many boards, and over the years, he built the Leadership newspaper into a group of companies. He pursued entrepreneurship and leadership opportunities with great enthusiasm, and with equal if not bigger appetite, he pursued knowledge, acquiring multiple academic degrees. Media ownership is a form of power, and with that power comes influence, privileges and attention. Sam Nda-Isaiah did not shy away from the latter. He took an active interest in community leadership. He was not only involved in the politics of the newspaper industry, he also took chieftaincy titles.
In 2011, he was honoured with the title of Kakaki Nupe. In 2012, he became the Aare Baaroyin of Akure. In 2013, he was made the Uguwmba Ndigbo by the Igbo community in Abuja. He was also Jakadan Potiskum. Sam was a bridge-builder. He had friends across the country and all aisles. In 2015, he ran for the Presidency of Nigeria during the primaries on the platform of the All Progressives Congress. He lost to General Muhammadu Buhari who later went on to win the 2015 Presidential election in one of the most historic elections in Nigeria. Incidentally, way back in 2003, he was the head of General Buhari’s Presidential publicity campaign committee. I hold the view that Sam’s partisan politics affected and conditioned his political views and relationships. It would be wrong however to question his engagement with the country of his birth at the level of both ideas and action. It was a choice he made which should be respected. In 2015, this was his campaign slogan: “It is Time for Big Ideas.” Indeed Nigeria needs “Big ideas.” New ideas. A new way of thinking and being.
As Presidential spokesperson and Media Adviser, I had cause to visit his office, and invite him to meetings with the President at the Villa. President Goodluck Jonathan always told me that he was his friend. This was regularly confirmed by other members of the President’s team. Occasionally, the President would ask after him, and if we had any meetings with editors at the Villa, at House 7 especially, he was always one of those media chiefs who would stay behind and have a one on one with the President. But that never stopped Sam Nda-Isaiah from criticizing the Jonathan administration. Each time he attacked the government either in the Features pages of his newspaper or through one notorious editorial cartoon called “Ghana Must Go”, people who knew that he had direct access to President Jonathan would ask: “Is this man still our friend? Is he our friend?” People in the corridors of power often make the mistake of thinking that they could make friends out of journalists. Nigerian journalists are like Nigerian policemen. They don’t really have friends. They are governed by the pressure of the breaking news. What you don’t want a third party to hear, don’t confide in a journalist. If it is newsworthy, they will tell the story. They will analyze it. They will tell the public, and defend the people’s right to know. The same journalists however will go to every length to protect you if you are their primary source. Every good journalist knows the basic rule: you are only as good as your sources and you are not obliged to unmask them.
Sam Nda-Isaiah knew how to walk this proverbial tightrope of journalism. The only problem was that for the most part, he was capable of looking his own friends straight in the eye while poking his pen in their eyes with a smile and an overdose of politeness. He loved his country though. He was passionate about Nigeria. He wanted the best for this troubled society and its people. He was a patriot. He was internationally acclaimed for his accomplishments. What remains is how to sustain his legacy. Many other lives drew oxygen from his, and now that he is no more, the best way to preserve his memory is to ensure that his various contributions are kept alive – “For God and country”.
“What is going on?”
“Where?”
“Where else? Nigeria of course.”
“What has happened again?”
“What has not happened? The other week, we were all lamenting that 43 farmers were slaughtered in Zabarmari, in Borno State, and now the whole world is being told that hundreds of school boys have been kidnapped from their school - a Government Science Secondary School in Kankara, Katsina State.”
“And you are surprised?”
“What do you mean I am surprised? I am not surprised. I am shocked and angry.”
“But when Northern Governors, traditional rulers and the Sultan of Sokoto warned that the situation in the North had become very desperate and dangerous, what was the response from those whose job it is to ensure the safety of lives and property?”
“I stopped listening to official statements on security challenges long ago. In fact, I am looking at the government with one-corner eye, as we say”
“You have to listen, because they are the ones in charge of our lives and our country. If the people do not feel safe, and are truly not safe, what you will get is this current reign of chaos and anomie. They told you that they are on top of the situation, in charge and that Boko Haram will certainly be defeated, no matter how regrettable the current situation may be. You can ask questions if you are in doubt.”
“I don’t know what you listen to, what I hear is that the security agencies do not have the kind of equipment that they need to enable them deal a decisive blow to the Boko Haram, because some powerful countries have refused Nigeria access to heavy-weight platforms.”
‘Do you need heavyweight military or police equipment to make Nigerian schools safe? Or to make it possible for people to travel from one part of the country to the other without being attacked by bandits, terrorists and criminals? This is Christmas season. In this same Lagos, many years ago, by now, the middle of the month, lagos would be half-empty. People from the North, the East, the South South would all have closed shop, leave Lagos and travel home to celebrate Christmas in their ancestral homes. There would be no traffic gridlock in the city till the second week of January in the new year. But for some time now, Christmas in Lagos has changed. People don’t leave town. They say it is too risky because of Nigeria’s security problems.”
“I am not a security expert. I can’t offer you a professional opinion. But I have heard such phrases as “security architecture”; “we will rejig”, “we will remodel” to know that something is wrong somewhere. We don’t even know the exact number of children kidnapped in Kankara. Can you imagine school boys sleeping in their hostels at night, only to be attacked by terrorists running into hundreds? Young, small boys?”
“Chibok, Dapchi, Buni Yadi, and now Kankara…what, where or who is the next target? The criminals laid siege on defenceless schoolboys for two hours. There was no rapid response.”
“To be fair, I understand that the police and the military eventually identified the hide-out of the terrorists and there was an exchange of gunfire, which led to the rescue of some of the boys.”
“How many boys did anybody rescue?”
“You know how we are with figures in this country? Take the killings in Zabarmari. We have been told different figures. In one account, 78. In another, 67. There is also 43. Why is it so difficult to know who is alive or dead, in any community in Nigeria?”
“Simple. Too simple. In Nigeria, we don’t know how many are dead or are living. We don’t even know how many we are. People live and die. Life rolls on.”
“Point of correction. The National Population Commission says we are 206 million.”
“I can bet that even the person who made that announcement does not believe himself either. We treat human beings as if their lives do not matter. The Governor of Katsina State says there are 839 students in the Government Science Secondary School in Kankara. Following the President’s directive that a proper audit should be carried out, the Governor announced that 333 students were still missing. But I understand Presidential Spokesperson Garba Shehu told BBC Hausa that only 10 students are missing. And that led to even more speculations.”
“Well, these things happen often. Garba Shehu spoke in Hausa. Whoever is quoting him may not understand Hausa. We should wait for him to translate what he said into English. You know he had to do that not too long ago”
“Is he the only one that speaks Hausa in Nigeria? Whatever it is, the people deserve to know what exactly happened. The parents of the missing students want their children back home. No Nigerian, boy, girl, man or woman should ever be kidnapped or subjected to any form of indignity or abuse”
“I understand the Governor of Katsina State is already negotiating with the terrorists. They have reportedly made contact and they are asking for ransom, and they are talking.”
“Fake news. Don’t peddle fake news. Have you forgotten that when the children were first abducted, we were told that the kidnappers are cowards?”
“This is not fake news oh. You know the Katsina Governor used to have some kind of understanding with the insurgents. I think they understand each other.”
“An understanding with criminals and cowards? Who does that?”
“These ones are not cowards oh. People who go from community to community either on foot or on motorbikes causing mayhem, kidnapping persons, raping, maiming and slaughtering human beings, you call those ones cowards? In fact, in the last few weeks, they have been on rampage in Katsina and other parts of the North, and for me that is a demonstration of courage, chutzpah-style. Two days before the incident in Kankara, a village head and 20 other civilians were kidnapped in Gamji Village, Sabuwal Local Government in Katsina State. The attack on the Government Science Secondary School happened barely 24 hours after President Muhammadu Buhari arrived in the state for a week-long private visit. By Sunday, there were further attacks in Jibia Local Government. The same day, terrorists also struck in two villages in Niger State.”
“My heart bleeds for the North”.
“My heart bleeds for Nigeria, because we are all in this together. I can’t blame the Governor of Katsina State if he is negotiating with the terrorists. If that is what will bring back the boys, so be it.”
“Do you think the President himself should negotiate with the terrorists? Those people may not listen to just a Governor.”
“When the President refused to discuss with the elected representatives of the people, you think he should now go and sit down with common criminals? Lend yourself some sense, my friend.”
“Okay may be the President should visit the families of the affected school boys then?”
“Is that why the President is in Katsina? The President is in his village on a private visit, not to start going from one village or the other greeting people.”
“We are talking about human lives. The lives of precious citizens. I just want the President to show empathy. Nigerians are very impatient. Now they are saying instead of showing more interest in the Kankara Boys, he is busy visiting cows in his farm.”
“Don’t be cheeky.”
“It is not me oh. It is what people are saying.”
“Watch your mouth. The President is a farmer. He has every right to visit his farm.”
“This is the problem with having a conversation with you. I am saying the President should take charge and show empathy, you are twisting the conversation and trying to defend the President. Look, I am a citizen. I have the right to tell the President what I expect from him. If you are afraid to say the truth, I am not. Put yourself in the shoes of the parents of the victims of Chibok, Dapchi, Buni Yadi and now Kankara. Is it easy?”
“Still, we have to respect the fact that every President has his own style”
“What style? Is it part of Presidential style for government agents to tear-gas and humiliate the mothers of the boys of Kankara Government Science Secondary School who took to the streets on Sunday to plead with government to help rescue their children. They were rudely dispersed.”
“The last time I checked, the Nigeria Police had warned against any form of protest in any part of the country.”
“You mean women whose children have been abducted, some of them may have up to three children in that school, have no right to wail and call for help? What is wrong with you, though?”
“I am trying to let you see how people in government look at some of these issues. But you are bent on dictating what you think. And who told you the people who dispersed the protesting mothers were policemen? They could be hoodlums who have been very active these days.”
“Yes, like the hoodlums who attacked peaceful anti-SARS protesters. Hired hoodlums, tear-gassing the nation.”
“Can you prove that they were hired? By whom? Where? How?”
“Yes, by government. The same government that will not hire hoodlums or mercenaries to go and fight Boko Haram is busy hiring hoodlums to fight innocent, peace-loving citizens.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“I am a citizen. I can say what I like. The office of the citizen is the most important office in the land.”
“The people you call hired hoodlums, are they not citizens also? Beware of self-delusion.”
“So, those thugs who disrupted a meeting of the Coalition of Northern Groups, scattered the whole place and chased out the members, you call those ones citizens too? The Coalition of Northern Groups was holding a peaceful meeting in Abuja yesterday: a meeting to discuss the security situation in the North, in the light of recent events.”
“Oh, you know their agenda. You are planning with them to heckle and embarrass the President of Nigeria. They want to go and picket the President’s country home.”
“I wasn’t at the meeting. But I saw photographs of how their meeting was disrupted. People cannot meet freely again? Is it that bad? I won’t be surprised if one of these days, hoodlums begin to attack media houses. What am I even saying? During the #EndSARS protests, some media houses were attacked. There is an attempt to silence the people’s voices.”
“It depends on how you see it. Everything in life is a matter of perspective. Government is fighting fake news. Stop looking at photo-shopped photos!”
“Certain perspectives are just not right, like some of the things you have been saying. Is it a good thing that children cannot feel safe in their schools anymore?”
“I never said anything like that. I do not support any assault on the integrity of the country’s education system. I am just worried that after the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, Nigeria in collaboration with the UN Global Education Initiative launched a programme to protect schools from armed attacks, address the educational needs of children in Internally Displaced Persons camps (IDPs), and support education. The programme started in pilot states in the North. In 2018, Nigeria ratified the UN Safe Schools Declaration. But today, Nigerian schools remain unsafe.”
“May be in the North. In the South, the schools are fairly okay”
“You don’t get it. Students are being killed, or recruited as frontline soldiers by terrorists, or turned into orphans, displaced, disoriented in parts of the North, but are the schools in the South safer? What is safe about schools where teachers are poorly paid or not paid at all, owed months of salary arrears and treated like dregs of the society? What is safe about a university system that has been shut down for more than eight months, with every activity in a suspended state, simply because government and university teachers can not agree on so many issues? We may be talking about security and the need for action and empathy, but we should also worry about the future of our children, and our own future as well.”
“Our own future is here already. Isn’t that what the EndSARS protest is all about? The children whose tomorrow adults like to talk about have issued a verdict: the older generation played with that tomorrow and messed it up.”
“When they too get older, they will see that life is a Mobius Strip”.
“What is that?
“Never mind”
“I hope you are keeping safe sha. I hear COVID-19 is back.”
“It never went anywhere. Really bad. You can’t cough or sneeze anymore these days, without people putting a crown on it.”
“There is even a new strain of the virus in circulation, a deadly strain, according to scientists. Infections are spreading”
“It is better to keep safe, and avoid a really dirty December.”
The Nigerian government deregulated the downstream petroleum sector with effect from March 19, 2020. The key argument was that the fuel subsidy regime which gulps billions of Naira annually, had become unrealistic and unsustainable. One or two months later, with the impact of COVID-19 biting hard, disruptions in the global demand and supply chain turning everything askew and the corresponding effect of these factors on government revenue which had dipped terribly, government pointed to additional justifications for its action. It was further argued that the subsidy regime benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. The effect, as explained is that the pump price of fuel will now be determined by market forces. In other words, since petroleum products are refined from crude oil, the price of the crude for refining will determine eventual cost at the fuel station. Prices thus responding to market forces could and would go up and down. Government spokespersons further assured the public that the Federal Government through the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) would under the new arrangement continue to interface with the markets to prevent arbitrary price fixing, and protect the interest of consumers.
This was the second time in eight years that Nigeria would focus on the deregulation of the downstream sector. The same arguments, at different times, under different administrations, and with different reactions and outcomes. In 2012, under the Jonathan administration, the deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector was stoutly resisted by the opposition, organized Labour and civil society groups. The administration was compelled to review the pump price of fuel downwards, but the protests marked the beginning of a long-term, gradual erosion of emotional connection with the people, which was capitalized upon and exploited by the then emerging coalition of opposition groups. The Jonathan administration introduced the SURE-P Programme. It also provided palliatives in form of mass transit buses which were publicly handed over to Road Transport Workers. In 2020, the Buhari administration returned to the same objective. There were no widespread protests, perhaps because of the advantage of timing.
The entire nation inexorably slipped into a lockdown due to COVID-19. Even if anyone wanted to protest, it was not the right time to do so. The world was in the grips of debilitating fear. COVID-19 was an entirely new global, public health proposition, the type that no one had seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920. The country’s budget had to be reviewed about twice as the spot price of crude oil to which the nation’s budget is benchmarked, jumped up and down like a yo-yo. The people were skeptical, but they were more or less helpless. The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) filled the gap on behalf of workers, not ordinary Nigerians, as one of its spokespersons boldly asserted. The NLC nonetheless raised the same vexed questions about the need to get Nigeria’s four refineries working, to eliminate the embarrassing cost of fuel importation. We would learn in due course that these same four refineries operate at a loss. Labour also told the Federal Government that it was insensitive to impose a lockdown on the people, increase electricity tariffs and at the same time, submit the pump price of fuel to neo-liberal market forces which tend to promote capital, not the human interest. The Nigeria Labour Congress was not saying anything new, or original. It was Joe Ajaero, its Deputy President’s public declaration, at the time, that the Congress does not fight for every Tom, Dick and Harry but its own members and their families, that I found instructive as a new introduction to the selfish dynamics of Labour politics in Nigeria.
It is part of the responsibility of government to listen to the people, to collate and process feedback, and respond to public opinion as a key factor in the governance process. The Buhari administration may have used the COVID-19 situation to play the victim: the country was busy looking for loans, COVID support, to provide much needed support for small and medium scale enterprises, the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged (food palliatives, job schemes in 774 local governments), and set up in the short to medium term, concrete monetary measures (re: the Central Bank of Nigeria’s N100 billion package) and an economic sustainability plan (worth N2.3 trillion) that can sustain the country. But the government also made promises with regard to the impact of deregulation and the requests made by Organized Labour.
“Fuel subsidy is gone forever in Nigeria”, so said Mallam Mele Kyari, the insider, union-leader, turned Group Managing Director of the NPPC. How much subsidy that was? Nobody has ever told us the truth! The Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipre Sylva, would later add that “We are not just deregulating, we are also giving you an alternative to make it easier for the average Nigerian.” What alternative did they both promise? The big issue was the high cost of petrol. Minister of State Timipre Sylva told Nigerians that Nigeria was working on the provision of an alternative in the form of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), deployed as Auto-Gas. In addition, Nigerians were told that 32, 000 micro distribution centres will be set up for LPG. Refineries will also be rehabilitated, and modular refineries will be provided. The resort to Auto gas is part of the NNPC’s Gas Development Policy. Nigeria, with over 260 trillion cubic feet of gas, is generally regarded as a gas country, more than a crude oil country. Timipre Sylva boasted that the deployment of AutoLNG, AutoCNG and Auto LPG would be cheaper as an alternative to fossil fuel. Nigerians would not pay more than N97 per litre to fuel their vehicles. The NLC which continued to negotiate with government was promised 133 AutoCNG buses in demonstration of government’s sincerity that AutoGas, the new buzzword, holds the key to the future. Both the NNPC GMD, Mele Kyari and the Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipre Sylva were convinced that the introduction of AutoLPG, AutoCNG and AutoLNG, would be “a game-changer” for Nigeria and put to rest all fears about deregulation as proposed.
This background is useful to enable us place what has now happened in context. In the month of November, the Federal Government disclosed that it had signed an agreement to build a rail line to Maradi in the neighbouring Republic of Niger, to enable Nigeria evacuate petrol from a refinery in that country that has a production capacity of 20, 000 barrels per day. Nigeria has four refineries, with a combined refining capacity of about 445, 000 barrels per day. Why should Nigeria be more interested in a refinery in Niger when it should be seen to be fixing its own? The additional talk about a rail line to Niger, stopping just at the border, only had the effect of raising more suspicions. Nigeria’s four refineries operate at a loss, maintained as they are at public expense. Without a doubt, resolving the energy crisis in Nigeria remains a perennial headache for successive Nigerian governments.
Nonetheless, the Buhari government may have managed to crawl out of the woods in the past few weeks. But a lot will depend on how it manages the pathways ahead. This is what I mean: In November, the President commissioned a modular refinery in Ibigwe, Imo State, the Waltersmith modular refinery, with a capacity of 5, 000 barrels per day, expandable to 50, 000 bpd. Other modular refineries are reportedly in the pipeline. This is in addition to the much-touted 650,000 bpd, Dangote Refinery, expected to be delivered by 2021. This is in line with the presumption that improved local refining capacity will help reduce the pump price of fuel. It may also assuage the feeling of hurt associated with the thinking that rather than look towards Niger, considered by many a satellite state of Nigeria, it is better for Nigeria to look inwards and develop its own resources. Perhaps, the more notable effort in this direction is the launch by President Muhammadu Buhari on December 1, of the National Gas Expansion Programme (NGEP) at the Lugbe Dispensing Station in Abuja.
Officially, the year 2020, is designated as “the Year of Gas”, the year when Nigeria declared its intention to move faster to claim its bona fide as a gas country. I believe that it was in this context that Timipre Sylva, Minister of State for Petroleum and the GMD NNPC, Kyari, offered Auto-gas as an alternative to petrol after deregulation. On December 1, President Buhari signalled the country’s determination to move along on that lane. The plan is as follows: (1) the Department of Petroleum Resources has instructed about 9, 000 filling stations across the country to start the installation of facilities for gas products as an alternative to petrol; (2) the government is committed to the conversion of one million vehicles from petrol to Auto-gas by the end of 2021; (3) government vehicles are already being converted from petrol to gas; (4) the projection is that the average Nigerian motorist will have access to fuel at a much cheaper rate. Auto-gas will be no more than N97 per litre. Petrol is currently N168 per litre; (5) at the official launch in Lugbe, Abuja, the NLC received five buses converted to run on Auto-gas. The total that was agreed upon at a September meeting was 133 CNG buses. Femi Adesina, Presidential spokesman has written an op-ed to argue that these developments provide an opportunity to think of the situation in the country as half-full, rather than half-empty. He sees a fulfilment of legacy ahead. What do I think?
I think that the Auto-gas plan is a very good policy. Mele Kyari, NNPC GMD and Timipre Sylva, Minister of State for Petroleum, with their boss, Buhari providing necessary leadership, should be commended for moving the needle in this direction. In the most recent past, poor co-ordination and lack of synergy in the oil and gas sector, frustrated every meaningful effort, as birds of passage fought over territory and influence. There have been experimental attempts in Nigeria to promote a gas policy. Even the idea of auto-gas as alternative fuel is not new (in Edo State, a few years ago, there were experimental efforts), but perhaps in terms of articulation, this is the loudest effort made so far. The resort to Auto-Gas will provide cheaper fuel. It will curb carbon emission in line with global environmental expectations and Nigeria’s commitment to the Paris Climate Change Agreement (2015) and the insistence of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on a limit of no more than 1.5-degree centigrade greenhouse emission. The move towards alternative automotive fuel also signals concrete policy action on the part of the Nigerian government, a commitment that Nigerian Presidents have expressed at every UN Plenary session in the last decade. Nigeria has 263 trillion cubic feet of gas in proven reserves. The country is among the top ten gas countries in the world but per capita consumption of gas in Nigeria is one of the lowest, even within the West African sub-region. The Nigeria Gas Programme is meant to boost the domestic utilization of gas in the country. Gas is clean, cheap, flexible, affordable and practical. It has a faster combustion rate than petrol. The Federal Government tells us that it will create about two million jobs, save cost of transportation, reduce engine noise, protect our environment, expand the country’s energy mix, and reduce our dependence on foreign exports once there is a stable energy market at home in Nigeria. This is possible, with the right political will.
There are more than 70 countries in the world where Auto-gas is either preferred or is part of the energy mix, with Turkey, South Korea, Poland, Italy and Australia as the most dominant. This is so despite the fact that vehicle manufacturers seem to be more focused on the development of electronic vehicles (EVs). Yesterday, the United Kingdom opened its first major all-electric auto service station as demand increases for environmentally friendly vehicles to reach about 30 million on the road by 2040. Nigeria, beginning with Auto-gas-propelled vehicles is definitely on the right track. It can only be hoped that vehicle manufacturers will devote as much attention to Auto Gas vehicles as they do to EVs.
The residual issue for now in Nigeria is the cost of conversion from petrol to gas. Many vehicles manufactured in the last decade can be easily converted from petrol to gas or re-designed to operate in a dual-fuel mode. Nigerians are already grumbling about the cost of petrol. When they were initially told last week, that conversion from petrol to gas will cost as much as N250, 000 per vehicle, that caused a lot of panic. The Technical Adviser who made that announcement has since retracted the statement. What government plans to do, we have been told subsequently, is to convert one million vehicles free of charge between now and 2021 December. Sounds nice, but what will be the criteria for choosing the beneficiaries? The size of the car? The beauty of the owner’s face? Ethnicity? Religion? Political party affiliation? If the Federal Government of Nigeria plans to convert one million vehicles to Auto-gas in one year, it would have to come up with a sharing formula that is in accord with the country’s Federal Character formula! That is one problem to worry about. The Federal Government has also promised a financing scheme of N250 billion in the form of stimulus and intervention facility to promote gas penetration. Excellent idea, but how will the money be shared? And by the way, how much exactly is a conversion kit, for the benefit of Nigerians who may not be covered by the government’s one million charity scheme? Electricity DISCOs are complaining that they don’t get gas to power turbines. What is the guarantee that there will be regular gas supply to power the Auto-gas development scheme? Gas supply in Nigeria is a big problem and that is another topic entirely.
My final take: Good policy, poor communication so far, and that requires a little more work. I also think government needs to work harder on the inter-related Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).
On Saturday, November 28, about 43 farmers who had gone to their farms during the current harvest season were attacked by Boko Haram terrorists. They were tied up; their hands behind their backs, one after the other their throats were slit. The United Nations puts the number of casualties at 110, not 43. Amnesty International says over 10 women and others are missing. The people of Zabarmari were so outraged they refused to bury the dead. They asked that the Governor of Borno State, Professor Baba Gana Zulum, must show up to witness the tragedy that has befallen their community. Zabarmari, in Jere Local Government Area, is about 20 kilometres out of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. Two weeks earlier, terrorists had also attacked and killed members of the community. Maiduguri and the entire Lake Chad region have remained the hotbed of terrorism in Nigeria. In September, the state Governor’s convoy was attacked by insurgents during a visit to Baga, on the shores of Lake Chad. A death toll of 30 was reported. Several policemen and soldiers posted to that axis to help combat the menace of terrorism have also fallen victim, and died in the hands of terrorists. Many have had to lay down their arms and remove their uniforms. The security situation in the North Eastern part of Nigeria is proving intractable despite the Nigerian government’s repeated assurances that the Boko Haram has been technically defeated and degraded.
The wanton killing in Zabarmari is a clear affirmation of the reality we live with: Nigeria has not defeated or degraded the terrorists, and if anything, the country’s security problem has worsened between 2015 and now. The lie has been further put to all claims of achievement of peace and stability through all kinds of military operations and initiatives - Operation Lafiya Dole, Operation Safe Corridor, the establishment of super camps, OperationYancin Tafki. Last week, Nigeria was named the third most terrorized country in the world in the Global Terrorism Index, after Afghanistan and Iraq. Governors of the North also cried out about the spate of insecurity in their region. They asked that the Attorney General of the Federation should grant their state Attorneys General the fiat to enable them prosecute terrorism-related cases at the state level. It was in the same week, that the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, speaking at a meeting of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) declared that the North is the most unsafe part of Nigeria, and the most difficult place to live in. Zabarmari is a tragic reminder of the truthfulness of this statement. The Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Coalition of Northern Elders for Peace and Development share the same view.
It should therefore make sense that as youths protested in October against police brutality in Southern Nigeria under the banner of #EndSARS, the protest slogan in the Northern states was tagged #EndInsecurityNow. As has become traditional, the slaughter of 43 or more farmers in Zabarmari has been greeted with expression of outrage, anger and disappointment. President Muhammadu Buhari through one of his spokespersons, says it is “senseless and insane”. It is indeed barbaric and horrific. What manner of men would tie up their fellow human beings and slaughter them like rams? The cruelty is unspeakable. For every act of this nature that is reported, there are many other incidents that are never reported. The biggest cost of the insecurity in Nigeria is the devaluation of human lives. Look at how Nigerians often argue over the number of casualties. It is 43, no, 45, actually UN says 110, as if not every single life matters.
On October 31, we all witnessed how the United States sent the elite SEAL Team Six special forces unit to rescue a Catholic priest and farmer, Philipe Walton (27), who had been kidnapped at the Niger-Nigeria border and kept in Northern Nigeria. It was a “precision” hostage rescue operation which was instructive for all it said about citizenship and state responsibility. The abductors didn’t know what hit them. Six of them were killed and the American was rescued. Over 40 Nigerians have been slaughtered and yet there has been no serious feeling of accountability and empathy on the part of government. Everyone was shocked yesterday when Garba Shehu, Presidential spokesperson reportedly told the BBC in an interview that the 43 farmers whose throats were slit didn’t have clearance from the military before going to the farm. So it is their fault that they got killed? Zabarmari is 20 km away from Maiduguri – should such an area so close to the state capital be an ungoverned space? Garba Shehu has since back-tracked a little. He was only explaining “the military’s mode of operation”, he says. The survivors insist that they alerted the military! Does Garba Shehu now speak for the Nigerian military?
In some other countries, the authorities would have deployed an elite counter-force to track down the murderers. But here, it is convenient to give excuses. One excuse is that the terrorists are now attacking “soft targets” and that is because they have been weakened. Only the wicked will refer to the waste of 43 lives as a “soft target”! Another excuse is that terrorism does not have a specific end-date; after all in Afghanistan and elsewhere, terrorism remains a problem after so many years. But how about demonstrable capacity to “downgrade, degrade, and defeat?” Where is the value of all that attempt to engage and rehabilitate the insurgents? And of what use is the store of intelligence about the enemy that is available? In another statement, the Federal Government says the military has been given “needed support to take all necessary steps to protect the country’s population and its territory”. Really? Where is the evidence? In August, President Buhari gave the service chiefs marching orders to “rejig their strategy” and address the security problem in the country. He needs to summon them to another meeting.
Terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, drug addicts and all kinds of violent characters including criminally-minded herders have constituted themselves into overlords across Nigeria. It is not only the North that is unsafe; the entire country has become a killing field. This is not new. President Buhari did not create terrorism and banditry, but the insecurity problem has worsened under his watch, and that is ironic considering the fact that he was the “expected messiah” who most Nigerians believed would put an end to insecurity in the country. Northern Nigerians voted massively for President Buhari in 2015 and 2019. If they also ever thought that having a Northerner in power would translate into special advantages for the ordinary Northerner, that has not happened. Not even in Katsina, the President’s home state is life safe. Nigeria’s insecurity crisis explodes the myth of the politics of proximity, the thinking that having “one of our own” in charge automatically confers advantages on the group or community. Northern Nigerian remains strictly divided along ethnic and religious lines; essentially, the significant war in Nigeria is between the rich and the poor. The latter are united by “their thingification,” that is the manner in which they are treated as worthless by a self-seeking aristocracy of power, and their own counter-response of anger and protest.
There are killings in every part of the North: Zamfara, Kebbi, Sokoto, Southern Kaduna, Adamawa, and in the Middle Belt/North Central Nigeria: Benue, Plateau, Niger, Nasarawa, Kogi. Life has become so short in many places, even luxury bus owners from the East announced that they may suspend trips to certain parts of the country. The Abuja-Kaduna highway has become a risky route either by road where bandits lie in wait, or by rail – a scary route where the Chinese trains Nigeria procured, often break down in the middle of nowhere. Many of the Governors and “big men of the North” have since relocated to Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory. They visit their states of origin, under the protection of heavily armed escorts. Even incumbent Governors are on exile in Abuja. One Governor was accused of abandoning his state for the Federal Capital Territory. His response was that he visits home four times a month, and why should anyone complain about that? It would be interesting to study this phenomenon of distance-governance and its value.
In the South, kidnapping is on the rise. Bandits have also taken over the roads. A day before the Zabarmari killings, bandits, identified as kidnappers, attacked and killed a traditional ruler, Oba Adegoke Israel Adeusi, the Olufon of Ifon, as he returned from a meeting in Akure, Ondo State. On Monday, November 23, during the debate of the #EndSARS October protests in Nigeria and the aftermath by the Petitions Committee of the UK House of Commons, there were references to killings by state authorities in Obigbo, Rivers state, the persecution of Nigerian Christians in the Middle Belt, and the abuse of human rights by state actors in Nigeria. In the Niger Delta, a coalition of nine militant groups has now served notice of a new round of attacks on oil and gas installations. They identify themselves as Reformed Niger Delta Avengers (RNDA). The reign of insecurity places Nigeria in great difficulty. The country suffers a revenue problem, given the volatility of oil prices, occasioned by COVID-19, the disruption in demand and supply chains and declining national productivity. The country is in recession, the second time in five years. Poverty is galloping, seated as it is astride a sturdy horse. Many are jobless. This has deepened the insecurity challenge in the country. The population of angry and hungry men and women has increased, creating a complex situation in which social, economic and political problems hold a rendezvous of violence.
But one unmistakable aspect of this dilemma is how insecurity up-ends everything else, particularly agricultural productivity, and job creation. Food security is one of the major cardinal targets of the Buhari administration. When the Federal Government decided to close down Nigeria’s borders with its neighbours in August 2019, the plan was to encourage food production within Nigeria, check food importation and encourage in particular rice production, in which Nigeria is said to enjoy a comparative advantage. At the time, the Minister of Agriculture, Muhammmad Sambo-Nanono even boasted that there is no hunger in Nigeria. Agricultural productivity also formed the kernel of the administration’s plan to diversify the Nigerian economy. But national insecurity is an antithesis to food security. What is curious is that bandits and terrorists seem to target agricultural production deliberately as a way of inflicting pain. In 2018, about 73 farmers were killed in two local governments in Benue state in what was described as a farmers-herders clash. The same 2018, a farm in Ondo State, belonging to Chief Olu Falae, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation and a Yoruba leader was attacked by bandits. Three years earlier, Chief Falae was also kidnapped on his farm. A week ago, the bandits returned to Chief Falae’s farm again. They set it ablaze. In the evening, they launched an attack on the workers as they slept. Chief Falae is calling on the “Amotekun” to help save his farm and workers!
Incessant attacks on communities and farmlands in Southern Kaduna have reduced food production in that part of the country. Fishing and farming around the Lake Chad Basin have been halted due to insecurity. In both the North East and the North West, farming communities have been displaced. The most affected states in fact represent the food basket of the nation. Zabarmari where 43 -110 farmers were killed on Black Saturday, is well known for the good yield of its rice fields. Now that terrorists have taken over those fields, surviving farmers would be afraid to go to farm. They may be peasant, subsistence farmers but they contribute to the country’s food output, and the agriculture value chain. Food transportation has also been affected. Even where farmers are still able to produce, they have to contend with the insecurity on Nigeria’s highways and the high cost of transportation. Why are farmers being targeted in the North and the South? The All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) has warned of an imminent food crisis. The crisis is already here. Food inflation in Nigeria is over 17% according to the National Bureau of Statistics. COVID-19, and the flood that disrupted food production in the Niger River basin may have been part of the problem, but insurgency and banditry pose the biggest threats to agricultural production in Nigeria. Food insecurity can in turn worsen the country’s public health crisis. The growing combination of poverty, hunger and insecurity in the land is a national emergency.
Security was projected as one of President Buhari’s legacy issues. Incidentally, that - combined with people’s welfare - is the original purpose of government. Rediscovering that purpose while eschewing the temptation to offer excuses, is the way forward.
“My brother, how you dey?”
“What can we do?”
“E ku recession”
“Excuse me?”
“I said er ku recession…”
“Are you Yoruba people alright at all? You people always make a joke out of everything. Does recession look like a joke to you? Second recession in the last five years, the worst in Nigerian history in 33 years, and all you can think of is some meaningless local greeting. Someone at your level should be above such provincial fixation that instinctively compels a Yoruba man to create one form of greeting or another out of every situation. That was how one of your brothers met me eating the other day, with his eyes rolling like rolling dollars, he told me: er ku jije mumu. Must you greet a person for performing a natural function? I am sure if a Yoruba man stumbles on you in the toilet, instead of leaving you alone, he will insist on greeting you for performing a biological function.”
“You don’t get it. Sunkunmus riranmus”
“And what gobbledygook is that?”
“It means when we are crying, we must also keep our eyes open. What has happened to Nigeria this year alone is an eye-opening experience. I am not trying to make light of the situation. I am just trying to find out how you are coping. By the first quarter of the year, COVID-19 had forced government to lock down the country resulting in the disruption of our lives. With the rest of the world also shut down, everything went upside down. Businesses collapsed. The country could not even sell crude oil, because there was no demand for our crude anymore. Nigeria like most developing countries became insolvent. And now towards the end of the year, we have been told that the Q3 data about the economy shows that the country is in recession.”
“What we are facing is worse than recession. It is stagflation. Economic growth is terribly slow. Inflation is high at 14.23%. Unemployment is very high in absolute terms: basic unemployment plus under-employment has messed up the populace. The implications are frightening. Long before the National Bureau of Statistics announced its figures, the evidence was already before our very eyes. In Lagos, it is now very risky to go onto the streets at night. Hungry and angry boys are now attacking people to seize their valuables at a rate hitherto unseen. One of my friends was sitting in his car, the air-conditioning system of the car had gone bad, so the side window had to be wound down, and he was busy eating a pack of chicken wings that he had bought on his way home. One hand appeared from nowhere and snatched the pack from him. It is that bad. People are hungry. They are ready to kill to get food to eat.”
“But we saw that during the attack on COVID-19 palliatives warehouses in the month of October. That wasn’t just about politics. It was an expression of hunger and anger. Even when the people were told that a particular warehouse had a large storage of poison, didn’t Nigerians attack the same warehouse?”
“I remember that story, but the problem is that it could get worse. Christmas is around the corner. In January, school fees would have to be paid, now that schools have re-opened. Meanwhile government says there is no money. Many employers of labour also insist that they need help to be able to recover from the effect of the pandemic. People can’t spend. They can’t sell. Have you not in fact, seen that this year’s Black Friday is truly black? With all the discounts that the stores are offering, I haven’t seen long queues.”
“It is people who are relatively comfortable that do Thanksgiving with Turkeys and rush Black Friday sales. Ordinary Nigerians just want to eat. The price of every staple food is now so high, it is a miracle how some people are still surviving. Onions and tomatoes have become as expensive as gold. I like to eat snails as part of my regimen of eating healthy. The last time I asked for the price of a basket of snails, I lost my sense of taste immediately.”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with economic recession, my friend. That’s COVID. The first thing you lose, when you are COVID positive, is your sense of smell and your sense of taste. I advise you see a doctor immediately.”
“No, my brother, it is not COVID. I know my system. And I know that nothing makes you lose your senses faster than the pandemic of empty pocket. Can you smell or taste what you cannot afford? But how about you? How are you coping?’
“I thank God for my wife. You know she works in an oil company. They still pay them well, so no matter what, we still manage to keep the household going. She is filling the gap. Slight adjustments here and there, but we have not yet lost our ability to smell and taste.”
“What you are telling me is that COVID 19 and economic recession combined have now turned your wife into the breadwinner in your house.”
“What kind of talk is that? She is my wife. We are together for better for worse.”
“Hmm. I get it. The number of families that will break up before this COVID and recession are over, we should just start counting. Have you ever seen any household where a woman is the breadwinner and there is peace in that house?”
“Yes”
“Okay, I will tell you a story.”
“No. I don’t want to hear your offensive piece of misogyny.”
“Calm down, omo boy. Once they have given you people efo riro to eat, that is how you sound. Get it right. This is not a white man’s country. The moment your wife begins to feed you, in this our Africa, you are finished. One of my friends lost his job. The wife had a good job. Three months later, the wife started hosting some funny-looking men at home. Our friend became depressed. He was helpless. I am worried that there may be an escalation in cases of domestic violence.”
“You are talking trash. My wife is a Psalm 31 woman. Recession cannot divide us. No weapon fashioned against us shall prosper in Jesus name. Our matrimony is holy and divine, and so shall it be.”
“Psalm 31 woman. I don’t understand.”
“Go and read your Bible.”
“In this Nigeria or inside the Bible?”
“In this Nigeria, and I have one at home!”
“Psalm 31 woman. But I think it serves all of you well. We would not be having this kind of conversation, if you had listened to me. I told you not to vote for General Muhammadu Buhari, and the APC. I told you APC is the name of an expired and banned drug that cannot cure anything. You said you wanted change. You see yourself now? You used to be an alpha male, but they have reduced you to the husband of a Psalm 31 woman who is now your master.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Wetin concern me? I jus dey talk my own.”
“Yes, you mind your business. And for your information, the recession has nothing to do with the Buhari administration. The current economic recession is global. Even developed countries are in bad shape in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. The problem with people like you is that you always try to play politics with everything. What we should be talking about at this moment is how to support government with ideas because we are all involved one way or the other. How do we restructure the weak fundamentals of our economy and our politics?
“Well done. So is it global recession and COVID-19 that are responsible for the inflation?”
“Yes”
“The closure of land borders”
“In a sense, yes.”
“The sudden breakdown of a passenger train between Abuja and Kaduna in the middle of nowhere and the abduction of innocent persons and the death of one person.”
“I will say yes”
“Even if that makes complete nonsense of the railway project and all the promises the government has made?
“These are difficult times. We can’t blame government for everything”
“Yes, we can. ASUU strike. Nine months now, public universities have been shut down.”
“ASUU should learn to be reasonable. It is not fair to continue to punish parents and innocent students”
“I see that even with all the hardship you have suffered, you are still stubbornly pro-government. I am sure if you were American, you would be a far-right supporter of President Trump despite the messy character of his politics.”
“One of these days, your mouth will put you in trouble, and I won’t be available to help you.”
“But what do you think of the various things we are now beginning to hear about the #EndSARS protests, and how the military and the police have been lying persistently, covering up one lie with another, adding to our misery, and making government look very bad? There say there are no corpses from the toll gate. A massacre without bodies they say. But the Chief Coroner of Lagos State is asking people to come forward to claim corpses. I don’t get it.”
“I believe some day, the truth will be unveiled. It is only a matter of time. As you can see, police men and security agencies are the same everywhere. What makes the difference is leadership and the political will to listen to the people. We have seen police brutality in the United States. We have heard stories of misconduct by the police in other countries.”
“Yes. Yes. I can think of one topical example.”
“From where?”
“Mozambique. I don’t know whether you saw the story. Two police trainers in Mozambique have been suspended for impregnating more than 15 female police trainees who were placed under their care. They were found guilty of sexual harassment.”
“From harassment to pregnancy. Wonderful. Were the female recruits raped?”
“No. What I hear is that they were hit by blanket bullets and accidental discharge, the male trainers shot blank bullets in the air, which landed on 15 female police trainees in the Mozambican police system, and the women immediately became pregnant. I think the matter should be carefully investigated.”
“Blank bullets. 15 women. Pregnancy. Are you okay?”
“I am. Nobody can ever understand these uniformed men, whether they are soldiers or policemen. I am in fact shocked that police men in Mozambique have turned pregnancy into a COVID-19 pandemic. The infection rate, 15 women in one swoop, is quite alarming. In Mozambique, they have their own notorious SARS. But rather than kill, those ones, fire and inflate the stomachs of women. Here, nobody would have raised any eyebrows if that was our problem. The women would have been congratulated for receiving divine favour in form of a gift of the womb. Du-du-ke... Du-du-ke.”
“I see you don’t quite respect women. How does your wife cope with you?”
“I am the man in my house. My wife calls me “okunrin meta” – one man like three! A man for all seasons. Ever-ready battery, ekun, in times of surplus, and a fighter of Buhari’s recession.”
“Stop blaming President Buhari. Use your head. What I think we need is a general rethink. What you don’t know is that the Nigerian economy is in fact doing better than many economies in Europe and Asia.”
“I don’t get it. Nigeria has had eight recessions since 1960. Three out of the eight under Buhari. That is a hat-trick. A legacy. You claim to know the Bible. Have you not heard of the king that said he will make the people’s yoke heavier and chastise them with scorpions?”
“1 Kings 12: 4-19. But you are a Devil misquoting the Bible. It is people like you that spread fake news about the leaders of our country. The same Bible that you are quoting also tells the people: “Obey people who have authority over you” (1 Peter 2).
“Go and say that to ASUU and NLC. Go and say that to the angry Nigerian youths who organized the #EndSARS protests and who have now taken Nigerian leaders to the UK parliament, the UN, and the International Criminal Court. I hope you listened to the debate on the Nigerian crisis at the UK Parliament, yesterday.”
“It is the job of parliamentarians anywhere in the world to talk. Let them talk. Let them say…”
“I see you are just a government apologist. I hope you know that Twitter has suspended the account of Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). I hope you also know that even APC Governors are now visiting former President Goodluck Jonathan. Na so the thing dey begin…”
“Good for you. But just watch out for accidents because the road lies in wait…”
“Is that a threat? We can’t talk again in this country?”
“You can talk. Who is holding your mouth? It is the consequences of talking recklessly that you have to worry about.”
“The last time I checked, the Nigerian Constitution recognizes my right to talk, to freely associate and to protest.”
“When a blank bullet lands on your head, you are on your own. It is your wife and children that I pity.”
If there is anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has proven beyond doubt, it is how humanity depends on science for its survival. Every confounding development that has been thrown up by nature or biology since the days of the pre-historic man has been resolved, and humanity has advanced on the back of scientific discoveries, from the argument by Galileo, who paid dearly for it, that the Earth travels around the Sun and not the other way round, to the equally transformative discoveries and innovations from Pythagoras to Copernicus to the present. Research resulting in new levels of epistemology may have helped, but the threat of pathogens – viruses, bacteria, parasites, the plague, cholera, and natural disasters – the flood, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones have shown over the years how vulnerable, small and terrified man can be in an environment, a world, in which he claims to be the most dominant of beings, the master of, answerable only to a Superior Being whom all faiths accept as the Master Builder. But the fact of being Human lies however in how man continues to strive to dominate his environment, his capacity to adapt, endure and aspire, and hence, out of every adversity, man pushes further – like Atlas, and Sisyphus, creating one of the greatest mythological narratives about the existential state. Against all odds, man continues to show a capacity to demonstrate that he is in a sense, a master of the universe, no matter the extent of the Unknowable that perpetually humbles him. I feel compelled to begin this commentary on this philosophical note on the back of the information now reaching us that scientists are now on the verge of finding a cure, a vaccine, for COVID-19.
Within the last week, three different big pharmaceutical companies, backed by the countries in which they operate have announced to the world, great advances that have been made in the race for the COVID vaccine. A week ago, November 9, to be precise, Pfizer, a US pharmaceutical firm, in collaboration with the German biotechnology firm, BioNTech announced that they had come up with a COVID-19 vaccine that is 90 per cent effective in protecting people from the virus. Although questions have been raised about the need for further peer review and the fact that there is a lot more that needs to be known considering the scope of the trials in this instance, while awaiting full results, the scientific community hailed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as “a major breakthrough.” Pfizer announced that it could provide about 50 million doses by the end of the year 2020, and vaccinate up to 25 million people in two doses within the same period. Newspapers in England were ecstatic: The Daily Mirror referred to “the vaccine breakthrough” as our “little bottle of hope”, Daily Mail called it “One little jab for man”. The Guardian predicted that “virus breakthrough gives hope of vaccine programme by Christmas.” The Daily Telegraph was more emphatic: “A great day for humanity”, it proclaimed. The Times of London assured us that “Vaccine milestone heralds normal life by next Spring”. But it was the Financial Times that brought home to everyone the practical implications with its headline: “COVID 19 breakthrough brings boost to battered global markets.” And indeed there was a boost in the markets. Stock markets around the world appreciated. Oil prices also jumped, the biggest daily gain in 6 months.
Two days after the Pfizer/BioNTech announcement, Russia’s RDIF/Gamaleya Institute which had been working on a Vaccine known as Sputnik V announced that its own vaccine provides even better news for the world with a 92% achievement record. We were told that the Sputnik V is also as efficient as the Pfizer vaccine. Yesterday, there was even bigger news when it was reported that Moderna, a US based company had also come up with a vaccine that is 95% effective against COVID-19. All the companies involved are seeking approvals and authorizations and when that happens, the world may indeed be able to heave a sigh of relief. There have been all kinds of permutations and explanations about how the world can beat COVID-19: the most concrete has been the need for a vaccine, even if scientists are not too certain yet about how many doses may need to be taken in a year, and how frequently, and whether or not the virus will end up as another ailment that humanity would have to live with. We may still need to wash our hands, maintain social distancing and wear face masks for years to come, but a vaccine would, the scientists tell us, make our lives much easier.
There has also been so much talk about herd immunity, and whether that would work or not, but whatever advances may have been made, there is still a long journey ahead, a lot more to be known. The news from Pfizer/BioNTech, Russia, and Moderna is encouraging but the truth is that there are about 156 vaccine candidates out there, including efforts by Astra Zeneca, Johnson and Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Novavax, Sanofi, at various levels of trials, which could further extend the optimism that science has brought at this point and which could further add to existing knowledge. Where we are, right now, close to the end of 2020, with regard to COVID-19 is both discouraging and encouraging: we are at a crossroads of sorts. The global total of infections is in excess of 50 million. The United States alone accounts for more than 11 million cases. As winter approaches and many countries in the Northern Hemisphere are now confronted with a second wave of infections, a fresh round of strong measures have had to be adopted with grave consequences for lives and livelihoods. COVID-19 has literally brought the world to its knees and it would take a while before our world would be the same again. What is encouraging is the fact that science is beginning to race ahead of the pandemic, or perhaps at par, or better still, playing catch up.. By January 2020, very little was known about the disease, its nature, management or future. Close to the end of the year, there is much better knowledge and a feeling of optimism.
As the world seems to make progress with the COVID-19 vaccine, which we are told is a better prospect than herd immunity, the big question is how to ensure that the whole of humanity gains access to the vaccine in an equitable and just manner. The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus drew attention to this at a recent meeting in Berlin when he said, the gold test for any vaccine is safety and efficacy, and that there is a standard protocol to which every vaccine candidate must be subjected. He made the point that it is better for some people in all countries to be vaccinated than for all people in some countries to be vaccinated. Ghebreyesus was raising a serious point about what is now at the centre of the global COVID-19 vaccine debate: the politics of it with regard to COVID nationalism and global solidarity. From what we have seen, finding a vaccine for COVID-19 and being the first to do so, has become a matter of national pride. Every rich country is in the race: China, Germany, the United States, UK, Russia, France, Japan, Israel… In the process, each country is making plans for its own people: who gets it first after authorization, how will it be distributed, at what cost and who bears the cost. A handful of rich countries have already bought more than half of the future supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses. Left to the developed countries, poor and middle income countries are not part of that equation. These poor and vulnerable countries have no competitive research laboratories. They have no funds. They may have scientists, but those ones, no matter how knowledgeable, are better off in the advanced centres of the world.
The World Health Organization has tried to draw attention to this inequity by reiterating that the rich countries of the world need to help the poorer countries. The argument is that nobody is safe until everyone is safe. The key message of COVID-19 is that poor or rich, we are all interdependent. We share the same common humanity whoever we may be, wherever we may be. This is the point of the COVAX Alliance created by the WHO and the GAVI Alliance, the objective of which is to ensure that even as rich countries buy up the COVID doses, provision is made at the same time for poorer countries. At the last count, 184 countries signed up to the COVAX Alliance or the ACT-Accelerator as it is otherwise known. The WHO has been looking for money to make its objectives possible. Not all rich countries are contributing. The Moderna vaccine and its 95% projected efficacy was announced yesterday. The government of the United Kingdom says it has already ordered five million doses for its people. Poor countries do not have such capacity. With COVID-19 vaccine, the poor and the vulnerable are in trouble. How do we ensure equity? How do we insist on the common humanity of the world? Or is this a case of self-preservation? Why should the rich help the poor, when the rich are most at risk?
But the issue is not just about resources. It is about the quality of leadership in the poorer countries of the world. With the notable examples of Donald Trump’s America, a nightmare that is nearing its end, Magufuli’s Tanzania, Nkurunziza’s Burundi, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and scores of unfortunate countries in Africa and Latin America. One key revelation is that the countries that have done much better in managing COVID-19, globally, have been majorly countries with good leaders. Africa is worse off in this regard. The simple assumption in Africa, except in South Africa, the only country that has been mentioned in the global race for a vaccine and which has paid more attention to testing and tracing, is that COVID-19 is a foreign affliction, from which an African is divinely and spiritually protected. For some reason, even the scientists are confused. Africa has not experienced the same rate of infections as other continents. Were that to happen, the tragedy would be writ large, but so far, the continent of Africa seems to be enjoying some form of protection even if there have been high profile COVID-19 related deaths in some of the countries. I think our people and our governments are simply living in denial.
In Nigeria at the moment, there are in fact many educated illiterates who would openly tell you that there is no COVID-19 anymore. Ordinary people stopped wearing face masks long ago. When middle class persons pretend to do so, they choose when it is convenient for them to do so. Social or physical distancing has gone off the list of guidelines. COVID-19 has migrated from being a pathogen to a symbol of fashion: the kind of designer face masks, sewn specially to match fashion apparels probably do not exist anywhere in the world. Every day, Nigerians hold one party or the other or a social event where nobody bothers to keep safe. Even prostitutes who complained a few months ago, that COVID-19 was bad for business are no longer unhappy. Their customers are back and business has resumed. With the recent #EndSARS crisis and the discovery of COVID-19 palliatives hidden away in stores and warehouses by politicians, many Nigerians simply concluded that the whole talk about COVID-19 is an organized scam, contrived and promoted to enrich corrupt politicians. It will be almost impossible for any Nigerian leader to convince the people, going forward, that COVID-19 continues to exist as a major public health crisis.
We have survived so far by sheer luck, it may be said. But if it is true that this disease which continues to mutate may still spring new surprises - a second wave, or an African variant of it, then African leaders must be better prepared. The developed world has left us behind in the race for the vaccine. We do not have the scientific capacity to compete with the more developed laboratories of the world. There has been some talk about some African and Nigerian scientists involved in COVID vaccine research but they are most certainly at the bottom of the ladder. What is certain is that Nigeria has been talking to Pfizer, through the office of the Vice President of Nigeria. Nigeria is also part of the COVAX Alliance initiative for vaccine equity. But I have not heard anything concrete about Nigeria’s plans to place orders for the vaccine, and a plan to ensure that vulnerable members of our communities and the general population have access to it, when eventually it is available. No responsible country relies on charity for ensuring the health and safe-keeping of its citizens. The Presidential Task Force must come up with an action plan for ensuring that we are well positioned in the race for the COVID vaccine. We need not wait for handouts, charity or the kind of token donation of a herbal concoction that we got earlier from Madagascar which turned out to be a hoax.
The most exhilarating part of the US Presidential election 2020 is the fact that President Trump lost the election. It is what many observers thought would happen. They prayed for it. They wished it. In the end, that is what happened on Saturday, November 7, 2020. The major news networks called the election and announced Joe Biden as the President-elect of the United States. Whatever level of excitement that the election may have generated however, it was after all, an American election. It was one of the closest and most fiercely contested elections in American history. Over 160 million voters participated; turn out was 66.9%. President-elect Joe Biden got over 74 million of the votes (the highest in 120 years), leading President Trump by over 4 million votes, and an impressive 290 Electoral College votes. Trump had over 70 million votes, with 214 Electoral College votes. The turn out was very much about how this was an election like no other. It was a battle for the soul of America. For many Americans, the nightmare is over. That nightmare is represented by four years of a divisive, problematic, abusive Trump Presidency. Trump talked about “America first”, a phrase that past and future American Presidents have also projected as a guiding principle. The difference with Trump is that everything got reduced to his own big ego, his rants, his abrasive, corrosive, fake, omniscient posturing. He turned Americans against Americans. He turned America against the world. He crushed established traditions. There was no one too big for him to abuse or insult. He alienated the world. He behaved very much as if the White House was an extension of the Trump Towers. Those who loved him did so passionately. Those who were opposed did so with as much fervor.
It would be wrong to assume though that he has been disgraced. Far from it. He may even in fact in the future be remembered as a great American President, depending on what the future holds. Or he may leave a legacy as one of the worst Presidents America has ever seen. The large volume of votes that he received shows he has a strong followership and a solid base whose views cannot be ignored. While Biden’s supporters and the Democrats celebrated across the United States on November 7, half of the voting population in the United States was in a sour mood. Trumpism, the ideology that has defined the US Presidency in the last four years is like an intoxicant. It turns its users into fanatics. With such persons, Trump can do no wrong. And the Trumpians are not restricted to America. They can be found as far away as Brazil where an incumbent President enjoys being described as “the Trump of the Tropics”, the UK and India whose political leaders (Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi) admire Trump.
Here in Nigeria, the weekend before the election, a church leader, Daddy Hezekiah took to the streets of Onitsha, Anambra State to campaign for President Trump and organize prayers for his victory. Trumpians are mostly Christian evangelicals who support his pro-life, anti-gay position and conservative views (even if Trump himself cannot be exactly described as a Christian); the far-right, ultra-conservative establishment whose members lap up his “America for Americans” rhetoric like honey, even when they are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Trump did not want to see Muslims from certain countries in the United States. He would rather build a wall to keep out Mexicans. He signed off a series of Executive Orders which smacked of fascism. His failure has been attributed however to two unfortunate incidents: COVID-19 and his careless handling of it which has resulted in over 235,000 deaths. There is also the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests which further divided the United States. If there was no COVID-19, the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement, Trump would probably not lose.
Trump insists that he won the election. He accuses the media networks of declaring an election unofficially. He was still hoping that he would win. He was in fact playing golf when Joe Biden was announced winner. Trump supporters in Africa admire him in part, I suspect, because his tactics are so familiar in African politics. Incumbent first-term, democratically-elected African leaders do not readily accept defeat. The exceptions to this rule are quite few (Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria, John Mahama of Ghana…). The pattern is for them to sit tight, change the Constitution and play the Messiah as we have seen in Cote d’Ivoire (Alassane Ouattara), Tanzania (John Magufuli) and Rwanda (Paul Kagame). Shortly after voting ended on November 3, President Trump had gone to Twitter, his virtual office, to announce that he had won “BIG” and “by a lot”. He didn’t wait for the counting to start or end. As counting continued and the popular and electoral votes were being announced, he and his supporters became restless. They crowded around the counting centres in Detroit, Michigan, Phoenix, Arizona and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There was unease in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona where recounts have been ordered given the closeness of the margins. When President Trump began to protest that the counting should be stopped and thieves were stealing his votes, it all looked surrealistically African. His second son, Eric was not left out. He resorted to false claims and conspiracy theories. At some point, Paula White, Trump’s Spiritual Adviser began to pray and speak in tongues. She called on “Africa Angels” to come to Trump’s rescue. Those angels could not get their visas before November 7! They were held back in their “shit-hole countries”.
Before the US elections, there had been fears that there would be a typical, Third World break out of violence over the elections. In Manhattan and Ithaca, Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, there had been violent confrontations between pro-and anti-Trump demonstrators. It looked as if the United States faced the prospect of a civil war over election results. Biden and the Democrats want all votes counted: both in-person election day votes and mail-in votes. Trump and his supporters regard the latter as “illegal votes”. But Trump is the victim of his own miscalculation. Mail-in and absentee ballots are the real angels of the US 2020 Presidential elections. Trump’s lawyers are all over the courts. There are projections of drawn-out legal battles all the way to the Federal Supreme Court. It is interesting to see a President who did his very best to compromise the Constitutional Order now looking up to the same institution to save his Presidency. Unfortunately, the horse has left the barn.
The feeling around the world is one of relief. Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris captures the mood of the world in three telling words: “Welcome back, America!” World leaders have congratulated Biden and Harris, and that includes friends of Trump: British PM Boris Johnson, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Indian PM Narendra Modi. Inside the United States, not all Republicans share Trump’s allegations of theft and voter fraud, and his attempts to raise questions of legitimacy about the Biden victory. Even while Trump insists that there can be no transition except General Services Administration certifies the winner after the recounts and a final tally, it seems all too clear that the Presidency has slipped from his hands. Within his own close circles, the only people still standing with him are few- his wife, Melania, his son, Eric, his lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, and Senator Ted Cruz who says: “Every time they close the door and shut out the lights, they always find more Democrat votes”. What is the matter with Senator Cruz?
Republicans should accept defeat and allow America to move forward. President Trump should be advised to stop stoking the embers of hate, fear and uncertainty. The legal and Constitutional options that are available to him and the Republicans should be kept open and exhausted if they so insist. It should be noted however that if the contested ballots are not so significant, the courts will be reluctant to take any hard decisions, and in any case, re-counts do not necessarily produce huge swings. Former Republican President, George W. Bush says the election was “fundamentally fair, its integrity will be upheld and its outcome is clear.” That is statesmanship, which Mr. Trump may prove incapable of when he is no longer President. But will he leave the White House? He clearly has no option in the matter. He may continue to play decisive politics. He may even choose to boycott Biden’s inauguration ceremony in January. He may also leave enough entrenched marks of Trumpism behind to make the transition process difficult for the Biden administration.
These are some of the reasons why Mr. Biden and Ms Kamala Harris have their job cut out for them. Joe Biden in his first speech as President-elect says: “This is the time to heal in America” Indeed, America is in need of healing and reconciliation. The Democratic landslide that was predicted by the left did not happen. There was no Blue Wave in the election. The Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives even if they are still holding on to their majority. The Republicans seem set to retain control of the Senate, even with the run offs scheduled for January. To heal America, Biden must be the President of all Americans as he has promised. He must reach across the aisle to forge a bi-partisan relationship with Republicans, many of whom may nurse a grudge for a long time to come. President Trump has been busy playing golf, we are told. He is probably swinging out his anger on obsolete golf balls. But Republicans in the Senate could give a Biden Presidency a tough time over key economic policies, appointments and his plan to chart a new course for the United States. Mr. Biden’s maturity, experience and style should stand him in good stead. He has the additional luck of a gifted Vice President, Kamala Harris whose unique accomplishments strengthen the narratives of hope, possibilities, diversity and historicity.
Whatever may have been the uncertainties and tension arising from the US elections, it is America that has won in the end. The American dream remains strong and alive, significantly through Kamala Harris who has shattered the ceiling, standing on the shoulders of women whose heroism has made it possible for a day to come in the United States when a woman will be Vice President, a child of immigrants, an Asian-American, an African-American, whose ancestors and relations can be traced to India Tamil Nadu, and Brown’s Town in Jamaica. It is the kind of America that Trump fought against. It is the kind of America that has made America truly great. There are expectations that a Biden Presidency will be more open to the rest of the world and that there will be changes with regard to immigration, trade and aid as America re-engages with the global community. But certain things will not change. America will always be America. Biden may not build any walls of division, but it is not as if the US Mission will start giving immigrant visas automatically to anyone who applies for it. His leadership will be more nuanced, and we may not have to wake up every morning rushing to Twitter to find out whatever POTUS came up with overnight. Even the managers of Twitter are heaving a sigh of relief already.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have hit the ground running. A Transition Programme is in place. A 12-man Presidential Task Force has been announced to tackle COVID-19. Biden will not wait for six months to make key appointments or to provide clear policy directions on key issues: COVID-19, economic stimulus, healthcare, race, justice and diversity, climate change. African leaders who have been firing off congratulatory letters should also look at lessons that can be learnt from the American experience.
China is so far strategically silent. Russian President Vladmir Putin and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro are holding back on congratulating Biden. Loyalty? Friendship? Or do they know something that we do not know? What we know is that on January 20, 2021, a new US President will be inaugurated. The US military will be duty bound to hand over the nuclear codes to the new Commander-in-Chief. Trespassers will not be allowed. “Welcome back, America…” Goodbye, Mr. Trump…
The #EndSARS protests which lasted for about two weeks until the crisis in Lagos on October 20, 2020, now known as the Black Tuesday in Nigeria’s contemporary history, may have abated, with the disappearance from Nigerian streets of the horde of protesters, looters, hijackers, and miscreants who together lent a new dimension to the protests. But essentially what we are now witnessing is best described as the “silence of the graveyard.” It is at best “a temporary reprieve”. The embers of the youth revolution that resulted in death, arson, wanton destruction and expansive alienation, are still smouldering. The extent to which this is true can be seen in (1) the renewed attempt in the Federal Capital Territory to loot a freshly discovered COVID-19 palliatives warehouse (2) the threat by some civil society groups that if the Federal Government does not address the demands of Nigerian youths about police brutality and good governance, nobody should rule out the possibility of another round of protests, and (3) the reported state of anomie in Oyigbo Local Government Area in Rivers State, where the people and the military are locked in a potentially explosive situation following the killing of six soldiers within the community by persons said to be militants of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra Movement (IPOB) and the imposition of a 24-hour curfew on the community by the Rivers State Government.
A “revolution” is like the spoken word – a word is like a seed, it germinates and in actuality, its embodied meanings could take on a utilitarian and practical edge. Kinjekitile in Ebrahim Hussein’s play of the same title, on the 1905-7 Maji Maji War against German colonial rule in Tangayika (modern day Tanzania), makes the point about the potency of the word: a word once spoken may be difficult to recall or control. Kinjekitile, the seer, energized the people with a word of hope about their own invincibility but even if he did not command the next line of action, the people were driven by their own emotions and enthusiasm. The #EndSARS protest was a spoken word which assumed a life of its own. The protesters in Kinjekitile thought water as directed by the spirit, Hongo, will protect them against German bullets. The protesters at Lekki Toll Gate and other parts of Nigeria believed that the Nigerian flag and the singing of the national anthem would offer them immunity from the same state brutality that they were revolting against. Many ended up as casualties. The state and the innocent have also suffered. The culture of hate that has been promoted thereby, the Nigerian fault lines that have now been further widened, and the gulf of alienation between the people and their leaders that has been further stretched - point to one fact: the need to save Nigeria from an avoidable blow-out between the people and the state that could prove costly. This will require a sober and detached reflection over the meaning and implications of the #EndSARS protests in terms of lessons, gains, loopholes and possible options.
One major lesson is about people power. Both #EndSARS protests in the South and the #Endinsecuritynow protests in the North were about the power of the people to insist on their own truths, hold their leaders accountable and ask questions. We often talk about the coercive powers of state, and how the control of such powers places Nigerian leaders in a superior position over and above the people. In the face of the people’s anger, the vulnerability of those powers was exposed and the true location of power in a state, nation and country was revealed. Power rests with the people. The youths of Nigeria coalesced around a word: #EndSARS - that word soon became a signifying coda, adopted and translated into different strands by even those who did not understand what it represented other than an opportunity for rebellion against perceived enemies - from the police, to political leaders, to the rich and affluent, business owners and the ordinary man or woman riding a flashy car.
What began as a protest by young men and women in the privileged quarters of Lekki, Ikoyi, Ajah, Banana Island, Victoria Island, later joined by celebrities and social media influencers taking photographs, making speeches and eventually, playing music, eating Shawarma, Pizza, delicious rice and puff puff, soon degenerated into chaos. Even before Black Tuesday, the protests had spread across the streets of Lagos, from Lekki toll gate to Agege, Iyana Oworo, Ikorodu, Iyana Ipaja, Oshodi, Fagba, Mushin, Alakuko…The youths in these parts and their cousins in Benin City, Osogbo, Federal Capital Territory, Onitsha, Oyigbo brought a new dimension to the protests. In Benin they attacked two prisons. In Ilesa, they went after the Soun of Ogbomoso’s palace. In Abuja, Lagos and elsewhere, they pulled down traffic lights and public infrastructure. These other protesters have been dismissed as miscreants and hoodlums, but no one has been able to deny that they are Nigerian youths. The sad news is that they are in the majority. With #EndSARS, Nigeria began to pay the price for its failure to provide for the future of its youths, to train its young persons and to empower them beyond slogans and rhetoric. The big lesson lies in the solidarity that we saw between the educated puff-puff and pizza eating crowd at Lekki Toll gate that spoke fine English and sang the National Anthem and carried placards and the stick-wielding, “we-die-here” youths that went after public infrastructure and anything that looked rich. They were both united by one word #EndSARS which had become a catch phrase for youth frustration.
Nigeria is a divided country across all lines: ethnic, demographic, religious, and geographic with tension and entropy sewn into the national fabric. Nigerian youths constitute more than 60% of the country’s population but they are the most neglected, and of course the most divided: North and South, rich and poor. The children of the rich live in privileged places. They go to the best schools abroad. They acquire vertical education, and the kind of exposure that money can offer. But when they return to the country, they don’t get jobs. They have no hope of self-actualization because the country itself is bleeding. And so they are angry and disillusioned. On the other side are the children of the poor: the products of Nigeria’s warped system. This other group has not enjoyed the opportunity to go to school. A few may have had the opportunity, but these are mostly school drop outs whose little education is of no use. The only toy that they have ever played with in their lives is a wrap of marijuana, a shot of cocaine, tramadol, a gun and a bullet. They speak the language of the streets. We saw them at work during the #EndSARS protests. In the South, they took over the protests. In the North, they became hired agents of their oppressors and attacked the protesters. Lesson: a country that fails to invest in the future of its youths is bound to count the cost in the shape of anarchy. Nigerian youths – whatever label we give them – protesters or miscreants have spoken up. They have shown that they have a voice that must be heard. When some funny lawmakers in the Lagos State House of Assembly – Mudasiru Obasa, Mojisola Alli-Macaulay and Desmond Elliot tried to reconstruct the nature of the #EndSARS protests, the same youths dragged them like dirt on environmental sanitation day! Those lawmakers must have now learnt that it is better to think before uttering a word!
Our youths need jobs. They need to be taken seriously. The challenge of poverty and hunger also needs to be addressed if Nigeria must have peace. Political leaders and government officials must also learn to be accountable. As it happened, the protests moved beyond a revolt against police brutality, to an attack on warehouses where COVID-19 palliatives had been hoarded, organized attacks on the homes and properties of politicians, even innocent entrepreneurs. It was shocking to be confronted with the ugly truth that Nigerian politicians had converted COVID-19 palliatives for personal use to be distributed as birthday souvenirs. One of such persons even had the effrontery to confess that he was saving the materials for his birthday anniversary. He wasn’t intelligent enough to figure out his own folly. The angry youths that attacked COVID-19 palliatives warehouses across the entire country were not alone. They were joined by ordinary people, pregnant women, and the army of poor Nigerian masses. What has been labelled as looting and criminality is subliminally an expression of the people’s frustration with government. Why hoard palliatives when the people are in need? To further show the rise of the lunatic fringe in high places, there has been a report that COVID-19 palliatives provided by the private sector coalition, known as CA-COVID are now actually on sale in some stores, locally and in London!
Nigerian policemen and women suffered a lot: 22 policemen were killed, 205 police formations and stations were set ablaze, operational vehicles were destroyed. We sympathize with the Nigeria Police… and all the families who lost their loved ones in the course of the protests. Nobody deserves to die in such manner. There will be need for healing and reconciliation at all levels. However, in an attempt to rebuild trust and confidence among his men, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Adamu has been quoted as saying that policemen have a right to defend themselves and that any policeman that is assaulted by anybody has a right to fight back. The IGP should talk more about peace building strategies rather than the politics of vengeance and confrontation. There is a Federal Government Committee in place to work out the processes for giving effect to the 5-for-5 demands. The Committee should conduct its work with the speed of light. States of the Federation have agreed to set up panels of Inquiry; about 13 states have done so, the others should hurry up. Nigerians need to know the truth and they need to know that justice will be done. The Nigerian Military stands accused. Its leaders must stop talking as if the military is above the laws of the land. Thy must learn to be humble and accountable
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The emergence of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the consensus candidate for the position of the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been held up by the last minute objection of the United States. The consultations process by the “Troika” saddled with the responsibility of selecting a consensus candidate in line with the Procedures for the Appointment of WTO DG (10 December 2002), followed due process and after 500 meetings and consultations, over a period of 4 months, 104 countries chose Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, 60 other members chose Ms Yoo Myung-Hee, the candidate of South Korea who along with Nigeria’s Okonjo-Iweala had made the final shortlist of 2 as of October 8. Further consultations gave Okonjo-Iweala 163 votes. South Korea did not withdraw the candidacy of Ms Yoo, but it also did not oppose the Nigerian candidate.
Under Articles 15-19 of its procedures, WTO chooses its DG by consensus. The General Council has now decided that a final decision will be taken on December 9, after a week of further negotiations with the United States. If that fails, the body will have no option but to activate Article 20 which talks about “recourse to voting as a last resort.” This gives us confidence and hope. Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has the critical support of her country, Nigeria, and all categories: developed, developing and other members of the WTO, across all representative continents. The US Trade Representative says “due process” has not been followed. That is not true. The attempt by the United States to tell a lie to give others a bad name is what has now united other members of the WTO Council against the United States. The US also says the WTO needs someone with “real, hands-on experience in the field.” Everyone else is convinced that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is eminently qualified. Look at her credentials. First Class. Outstanding. Great personality.
The United States is playing gutter politics. This is about the US Presidential Election 2020, and the trade conflict with China. Before now, President Trump described the WTO as “horrible” and too partial to China. He wants to be seen on the eve of one of America’s most divisive elections (cf. 1800, 1824, 1860, 1960, 1968 and 2000) as a strong nationalist who puts America first. There is also a ring of déjà vu to this. In 2012, the United States thought Okonjo-Iweala was too bold to seek the position of President of the World Bank despite the unwritten rule that the office is reserved only for Americans. The US prefers South Korea’s Ms Yoo because they think she would be more pliable. They also don’t want China to fill the slot of Deputy Director General. Okonjo-Iweala is also accused of being a globalist. Under President Trump, the US has played the politics of isolationism, unilateralism and a recourse to bilateralism on his own terms. I also think there is a racist sub-text to this: Trump has opposed every multilateral institution led by Africans: WHO and the AfDB are most recent examples.
Will the US have its way? I don’t think so. If Trump loses the US Presidential election today, as he should, that will change the game. If he wins, the WTO, in any case, operates on a “one country one vote” basis. A recourse to “voting as a last resort”, an exceptional departure from customary practice, should get Nigeria’s candidate the job, which she certainly deserves.
Things went out of hand very quickly with the emerging Nigerian “revolution” when on Tuesday, October 20, 2020, soldiers stormed the Lekki Toll Gate Plaza in Lagos, and started shooting. We were told they shot in the air. But the reports have been conflicting and troubling. The protesters insist that persons died, and that the attack was pre-meditated. The state authorities insist that persons were injured and that there were no corpses; may be just one. They made it sound as if one person dying was nothing to worry about. Nigeria is a country of over 200 million people. When one person dies, it is hard for the people to notice. The state does not even care. But the truth is that even if only one person died as claimed by the state government, that is enough indictment. There was no justification for anyone dying or sustaining gunshot wounds just because they took the patriotic step of protesting about injustice, police brutality, impunity and bad governance in their country. The #EndSARS protest was about justice, and good governance. The protesters were peaceful.
In the Northern states of the country, the protest was tagged #EndInsecurityNow, and the protesters were also peaceful. At the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, the protesters reportedly knelt down as soldiers stormed the scene. They waved the Nigerian Flag. They sang the National Anthem. Someone had told the angry young Nigerians- those I once referred to as the “collective children of anger” - that once soldiers see the Nigerian flag, they would not dare shoot at the target. The assumption is that soldiers only shoot the enemy, not their own country’s flag. The Lekki incident in Lagos turned that principle, if that is what it is, on its head. The most impactful image from Lekki is that of a blood-stained Nigerian flag, either as fact or symbol, but nonetheless a symbol of the Nigerian government’s clamp down on young Nigerians exercising their rights under Sections 35, 39 and 40 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended).
Away from the Lekki Toll Gate epicenter, other persons died in the course of the mayhem that ensued: from stray bullets, physical attacks, and wanton destruction. Amnesty International and other civil society groups have reported over 56 deaths. It has been so bad, so embarrassing, so disgraceful, that not even the military authorities are willing to admit that they sent soldiers to the streets. All of a sudden, Nigeria is back to the past, the military era, the bad days of dark-goggled Generals, the Abacha era, when human lives meant nothing; Nigerians disappeared in broad daylight,;and the state claimed that it would not tolerate any form of dissent. This throwback to the military era was further reinforced by the reluctance of the Nigerian leader, President Muhammadu Buhari to address the nation. Both the protesting Nigerian youths and the international community had to plead with him to take the situation in the country far more seriously and speak to the issues, empathize, say something to douse the tension in the land.
The official response was that the President had already acceded to the five demands of the angry young protesters. So what else did they want? The President later spoke at an event tagged Presidential Youth Empowerment Scheme (P-YES) but nobody took that seriously. His promise of an investigation that will ensure justice was dismissed as an afterthought, and an aside. The minimum demand of the angry youths of Nigeria soon changed from the 5-for-5 demands to a declaration that the President must speak up, and speak directly to the youths. On Tuesday, October 20, 2020, a day that is now a defining moment in the life of the Buhari administration, Lekki Toll Gate happened. It is now known as Black Tuesday. Or the Red October. A toll gate plaza, at which angry youths of Nigeria gathered has now become a symbol, indeed a watering hole, of the conflict, the alienation, the distance between the people and those who govern them.
After Black Tuesday, President Muhammadu Buhari finally summoned a meeting of the National Security Council. When the meeting ended, Nigerians were told to expect something important. The President had directed the Security Chiefs to use every lawful means to restore law and order, not just in Lagos, but across the country. By then, the #AntiSARS, #AntiSWAT, #AntiInsecurityNow protests had begun to spread like wildfire. The country was in turmoil, on the boil. We were told the President would finally address the angry youths. This was by the way, 48 hours after the blow-out in Lekki, Lagos, and 14 days after everyone had been pleading with the President to have a national broadcast. Expectations were high. On Thursday, October 22, 2020, the President showed up on national television. But it was an anti-climax. The 27-paragraph, 12-minutes delivery-time broadcast by the President was shallow, hollow, condescending, full of gas lighting and completely lacking in empathy, and emotional intelligence. It began on a note of warning, followed by threats, a thank you but shut up riposte to the international community, a bit of wrongly-timed self-congratulation about the government’s poverty alleviation programmes – now tell me, who goes to a condolence party to boast about their personal achievements! - and it ended on a note of threat. Nigerian were flabbergasted. They complained about the failure of the President to acknowledge the lives that have been lost. There was a line in the broadcast about the policemen that died in the course of duty, and yes indeed, police lives matter, and there was another line about the attack on the palace of the Oba of Lagos whose shoes, staff of office and other valuables are now missing, but the President said nothing about the many Nigerians who died, those whose investments and assets were attacked and destroyed, not even a word about the anguish in the land, the emotional trauma of citizens at home and in diaspora who had taken to the streets in every continent to condemn the reign of anarchy and chaos in their fatherland. I have argued on Arise TV that whoever wrote the draft of the President’s speech did him a bad turn. Whoever had a hand in the construction of that broadcast is unkind. The psychology of power, especially in Nigeria’s Presidential Villa conditions the people around the President to tell him to be strong and refuse to be intimidated by anybody. They would tell him: “Sir, you are the Commander-in-Chief, you cannot appear to be weak.” They will confront him with conspiracy theories: “Sir, it is your enemies that are behind the protests in Lagos. We know them. You must teach them a lesson. Your Excellency, you have nothing to worry about sir, we will deal with those hoodlums. We have everything under control.”
While such behavior can be explained away as human and archetypal, it is unacceptable that anyone will write a speech or offer such advice that will turn the President of Nigeria into his own fall guy. I am often reminded of the US President Harry S. Truman’s saying that the buck stops at the President’s desk, yes, but no two Presidents are the same. Buhari is not Truman. Some Presidents require more support than others. President Buhari’s advisers, who are now shockingly trying to edit, a posteriori, a speech they should have cleaned up properly, threw him under the bus. This singular error will redefine his Presidency and legacy. The best way to understand the ineffectuality of that broadcast is to assess what happened after in Nigeria, and in terms of international response to the Nigerian situation.
Things simply got worse. It would in fact have been better if that broadcast had not been made. Before Black Tuesday, there had been indications that hoodlums, fifth columnists and trouble-makers had hijacked the protests, infiltrated the ranks and were beginning to change the tone of the protest. With the alleged shooting and killings at Lekki Toll Gate, the peaceful protesters withdrew, and what was left was a spectacle of riotous and destructive behavior. Everything degenerated very quickly. Earlier, in Benin, Edo State, there were reports of the escape of prisoners from two prisons: the Benin Maximum prison and the Oko prison. This would eventually become a pattern as there were reports of attempted jailbreaks in Ikoyi and Kirikiri Prisons, Lagos and successful jailbreak in Okitipupa, Ondo State. Last week, in defiance of the President’s threat that those who had hijacked the protests will be dealt with, about 27 police stations in Lagos, were attacked and razed to the ground. The same was the fate of other police stations across parts of the country. Arms and ammunition and police uniforms were stolen. By weekend, Nigeria was in a state of anomie. In Lagos, Calabar, Jos, Osogbo, Ilorin Kebbi, Jalingo, warehouses storing COVID-19 palliatives were attacked by hungry and angry Nigerian youths. They said they were taking what belongs to them. They protested that it was wrong to hoard the COVID-19 palliatives meant for the people.
It was a bizarre situation. Not all the looters were hungry young men and women. Some middle class persons also went in cars, and tricycles and carted away their own part of the loot. Some of the palliatives – bags of rice, sacks of garri, boxes of Indomie and other food items …were found in private homes. In Lagos, the majority leader of the State House of Assembly said the palliatives found in his house in Ikorodu were being kept for distribution during the celebration of his forthcoming birthday. In Ibadan, another prominent politician from whose home over 300 motorcycles and 200 refrigerators were carted away said the materials were meant for the people’s empowerment. In Ilorin, Kwara State, soldiers were seen telling looters to loot peacefully and return peacefully! In Calabar, the home of Senator Gershom Bassey was raided. Furniture and other household items were carted away. Other persons and institutions were not so lucky. In Lagos, iconic buildings were set ablaze. BRT terminals across the city were torched, along with newly bought buses. In Calabar, 52 different sites were attacked. The home of Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba was set ablaze. Malls, supermarkets, private assets were not spared in Lagos, Ebonyi, Benin, Abia, Kano, Jos, Calabar, Kebbi and Taraba. Banks and their ATMs were a special target. The President’s words about maintaining law and order rang hollow. As the violence raged, the police were nowhere to be seen. The military also beat a tactical retreat and opted in Lagos for a strategy of pacification. Military officers became preachers appealing to the people to “calm down”.
What happened in Lekki on October 20, and the tone-deaf Presidential broadcast also seemed to have energized Nigerians in diaspora. After the President’s speech, more Nigerians trooped to the streets of UK, Germany and Canada to register their displeasure. The international community, asked by President Buhari to get the facts right before jumping to conclusions simply ignored him. It was after that ill-fated speech that the following spoke up: the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the US Department of State, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Special Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and many more. All of a sudden, Nigeria was on its way to becoming a pariah state all over again, as Nigerians signed petitions, directed at world parliaments and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to ask that Nigerian leaders should be blacklisted and arraigned for crimes against humanity.
Before Black Tuesday, there were insinuations of an ethnic, religious and geographical tint to the protests. The first sign in that regard was the emergence of a Pro-SARS group that emerged in Abuja and the Northern part of the country, a certain Northern Youth Alliance (NYA) which argued that there was nothing wrong with the Nigeria Police and that indeed, the people of the North needed the Special Anti-Robbery Squad that is considered lawless by protesters in the South. Before long, anti-SARS protesters were being chased off the streets in a violent manner by the pro-SARS groups, particularly in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Northern Governors would also soon visit the Presidential Villa to tell the President that the people of the North need SARS. What was meant to be a peaceful protest against police brutality which exists all over Nigeria, was thus reduced to the politics of ethnicity and geography. Eventually, a group known as the Northern Coalition of Youth Groups joined the fray. It called for protests across the 19 Northern states, but the coalition focused majorly on insecurity and banditry and the failure of the Northern leadership elite. The most fertile arena for a revolution is the mind of the people. But Nigeria was in the grips of collective psychogenesis. In Calabar, a psychiatric hospital was attacked. The patients were freed. The beds were carted away. Across the streets of Nigeria, armed robbers, thieves, mental health patients, drug addicts took over what started out as a peaceful protest. In Lagos, there were reported clashes between the Yoruba and the Hausa Fulani. One Yoruba boy in London asked Igbos to leave Lagos. Another Igbo activist in Europe reportedly asked Igbos in Lagos to attack Yoruba interests and investments.
This is what happens when leadership and the state are compromised. The #EndSARS protest in Nigeria has gone through all the initial stages of a full scale revolution as seen in the French, American, Orange, Red and Velvet Revolutions. The crisis must not be allowed to tip over. Losing the trust and confidence of the same young Nigerians, and the international community, that brought them to power in 2015 and 2019 is the biggest damage that the APC and President Muhammadu Buhari have both suffered. But what are the lessons of the current rude awakening? The gains. The loopholes. Next week.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Surely some revelation is at hand…
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)
The poem quoted above: “The Second Coming” by Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1919) is probably one of the most adapted and quoted poems in world literature, and in politics and culture, to describe moments of anxiety, uncertainty and a seeming “slouching towards” chaos and anarchy in any community. Written in 1919, in the context of the Spanish flu, after the First World War which ended in November 1918, and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence (1919 – 1921), W.B. Yeats’s poem helps to encapsulate the horror, confusion, the disarray, the despair that has overtaken Nigeria in the last two weeks, in the wake of a revolt by Nigeria’s Generation Z, a generation that insists that they can no longer tolerate the failure of the Nigerian state and leadership. They are saying “Enough is Enough”, and they would not be deterred until they see concrete assurance that the change that they demand is in the horizon. The “slouching beast” of their protest is a notorious unit of the Nigeria Police: the much dreaded, now defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). SARS was known for its brutality, its indulgence in extra-judicial killing and the lives of many innocent Nigerians which its members deleted with impunity. Police brutality is not the only beast: the youths of Nigeria have since identified more beasts: a problematic foreign exchange rate, cybercrime and fraud, fuel price hike, legislators who are underworked and overpaid, terrorist herdsmen, unemployment, bad roads, a failed leadership elite – all of which combined threaten the future of the average Nigerian youth. They want to take charge of their own future. They want to take their country back as they now say - “#one-step-at-a-time”.
For the past two weeks however, the street protests that have been staged by the youths have assumed a new life, resulting in a great disruption. The protests have spread like wild fire, fuelled by innovation, creativity and “passionate intensity”. One striking feature of it is how it has taken the shape and form of community transmission, especially in Lagos where every neighborhood feels obliged to organize its own version of the protest. On Monday, October 19, the state of Lagos was practically on lockdown. Every major street junction was blocked by angry youths playing music, wielding placards of protest, and asking motorists to either join the protest or return home. At the Lekki end of the city, the Lekki toll gate has been shut down since the beginning of the protests. That particular spot has emerged as the nerve-centre of youth revolt, and a cultural melting pot where solidarity is the normative code, and rebellion is the spirit of the congregation.
In Abuja, critical road arteries were also blocked, effectively shutting down the entire Federal Capital Territory. The road to the International Airport was occupied. Northern Youths under the aegis of the Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) are also protesting across the 19 states of the North. The difference between the protests in the North and the protests from the Middle Belt to the South lies in the emphasis by the Northern groups on the need to end insecurity in the North. Essentially, there is a meeting of minds among Nigerian youths, North or South, that something terrible has gone wrong with our country that needs to be fixed. The other exception that we have seen are those “rented” youths whose sponsors are yet unknown who attack the protesters in Abuja and Lagos, those who steal from youths who are fighting to save Nigeria, and those youths who are giving the emerging revolution a bad name by engaging in acts of violence.
The sad part of the protests so far is the degeneration into violence. What was conceived as and which began as a peaceful protest has now turned bloody. It has now been overtaken by the Nigerian factor. It would be most unfortunate if the protesters lose focus or they are pushed to do so. Amnesty International reported last week that about 10 persons had died in the course of the protests. The number has increased since hoodlums infiltrated the protests and policemen who had been warned by the Inspector General of Police began to shoot at protesters. The emerging picture is frightening. In Osogbo, Osun State on Saturday, the convoy of the State Governor, Adegboyega Oyetola was attacked. The Governor insists that it was an attempt to assassinate him. In Abuja, more than four deaths have been reported within a week. Yesterday, Benin City went up in flames. Police stations and vehicles were set ablaze. Prisoners jumped the fence at the Benin prison and escaped. Just as we defend the right to protest, any act of violence is also condemnable. It is in order to prevent this that the Nigerian Civil Society has been very vocal in insisting that the police, the military and other security agencies must not turn their guns on protesters, or arrest or detain or harass them. It is also in part why the decision of the Nigerian Army to launch Operation Crocodile Smile VI in the middle of a nationwide protest has been criticized for its bad timing. The explanation that the Operation has nothing to do with the #EndSARS protest has been dismissed as insincere. Soldiers have now been seen on the streets of Abuja, confronting #EndSARS protesters. Things are clearly falling apart…
The protesters claim that they are being provoked, or blackmailed, but as the days go by, it is difficult to identify a coherent strategy despite the gains that have been recorded. In the absence of an identified and structured leadership, the protest is at best amorphous. The Northern anti-insecurity protesters appear to be better organized. Every zone has a leader with published details. In the South, every man or woman who goes out to protest is a leader in his or her own right. This has resulted in internal bickering, and much in-fighting. Each member of the protest would seem to have an agenda of their own: from the adoption of protest as a new found vocation, or the enjoyment of the carnival-esque ambience of the protests. What needs to be watched also is the manner in which the protest in full flight is beginning to alienate those who should naturally be part of it. The organizers should also watch out against inflicting emotional pain and psychological violence on the same persons whose interests they are fighting for. We are all involved in the struggle to save Nigeria. There is no Nigerian who has not suffered a form of police brutality or the other or the impunity of uniformed state officials. The various stories that have been told convey our collective pain and the depth of our anguish, and the drowning of our innocence. But when protesters block a major highway, and all arterial roads from dawn to dusk, they inflict pain on innocent persons.
For days, people living in the Lekki part of Lagos have not been able to go to work or go about their daily business. When people go to work on the Island from the Mainland, they are not sure of what awaits them on the road. Protesters take over the roads and harass motorists. The Lagos Ibadan Expressway has been shut down repeatedly in the last two weeks. Transporters are put through enormous stress. The supply chain between Lagos and other parts of the country is disrupted. The economic impact of the on-going protest is huge. A newspaper investigation reveals that since the protests started in Lagos, the closure of the Lekki toll gate alone has resulted in a loss of about N234 million. When all this is over, is there any guarantee that the managers of that toll gate will not take it out on the young people who work daily at that toll gate. And there have been reports as well of persons who died in the last two weeks because they could not be rushed to the hospital because the roads have been blocked. All schools in Lagos have been shut down over #EndSARS protests. My point is this: while the right to protest is sacrosanct, it needs not extend to a violation of other people’s rights.
Nigeria faces a dilemma. How would the present crisis be resolved? The Federal Government has accepted all the five demands placed before it by Nigerian youths, North and South. It has dissolved the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. It has announced the establishment of a Special Weapons and Tactical Unit (SWAT), which has been roundly laughed off because of its peremptoriness and lack of originality. A total of 37 officers have either been reprimanded, demoted or dismissed from the Police for having been involved one or the other in the abuse of office and privilege. In Lagos, four officers have been named and are likely to face prosecution. At the last National Economic Council meeting chaired by the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, it was agreed that every state government and the Federal Capital Territory should set up a judicial panel of inquiry to investigate all cases of police brutality and extra-judicial killing and ensure that justice is done. By yesterday, six states have set up the panels as agreed, and two - Lagos and Kaduna states- have inaugurated them. In addition, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has personally offered Nigerian youths an apology. The First Lady, Mrs. Aisha Buhari has also called on the Nigerian government to “rescue the people.” Yesterday, the Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Sunday Dare after a meeting with the President at the Presidential Villa reported that the President has appealed to #EndSARS protesters to give government time to address their demands; they have spoken and he has heard and that the reforms they are asking for will happen.
Indeed, the protesters have achieved a lot in two weeks. They have demonstrated the power of solidarity and the importance of their voice. This generation of protesters is not ready to “off the mic”. They insist on being heard. Their voice is so clear, it has been amplified across the world by celebrities, governments and Nigerians in Diaspora who have taken to the streets in about 10 countries of the world to draw attention to the Nigerian crisis. We have seen impressive displays of character and humanism as the story of the revolution continues to unfold, the physically challenged like Jane Obiene and Charles Nnama - victims of police brutality - who joined the protest and got the support and adulation of others. The nursing mothers who took their children to join the protest. The elderly mothers who protested on behalf of all mothers who lost a son, a daughter, a husband or a relative to police brutality. An 89-year old citizen, Professor JTK Duncan showed up at the barricades, waving the Nigerian flag. Aisha Yesufu remains irrepressible. The Feminist Coalition, which has coordinated donations to the cause and the setting up of helplines is the very definition of responsible citizenship. We have also witnessed a harvest of creativity: new songs by Davido, Asa, Fikky, Kabex, Ripple Effect, Falz and M.I. Abaga which define the protest; many more are emerging: short skits, paintings, memes, ingenuous tweets…an online SORO SOKE radio platform, Nollywood movies in the making…The protest has been teleological, technological, poetic and physical.
But when and how will these protests end? The real protest is in the mind of every young Nigerian who has been disappointed by the Nigerian state and who prays for a better country. No one can put a final date to that. The youth of Nigeria will not begin to trust their governments because of a few concessions and fine rhetoric. When their country changes for the better, they will be the first to know. But protest as an event cannot be an end in itself. I believe that with the present outing, the time has come for an audit and a review of strategy after two weeks. The protesters must resist the temptation to be turned into shooting targets by a state that is becoming overwhelmed: in Lagos protesters reportedly took over the international airport; in Benin, prisoners escaped, and in the face of all that, some government officials are beginning to tell us that the government of Nigeria will not stand by and allow anarchy to reign. To whom it may concern: The time has come for a review of strategy and tactics.
As for the Federal Government of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari should step forward and address the angry youths of Nigeria at home and in diaspora. He can no longer afford to speak through proxies and third parties. The protesters won’t listen to such persons. They don’t trust anyone at all at this moment. The Falcon can no longer pretend not to hear the Falconer. This is the time to change the narrative of the on-going protest, and only you, Mr. President can do it. Talk directly to the youths of Nigeria. Then sack one or two guilty persons to show that you truly believe in the principle of fairness. Seize the moment. Now.
The increase in the pump price of fuel, in 2020, a fall-out of the deregulation of the downstream sector, did not compel the youths of Nigeria to troop out onto the streets. The additional hike in electricity tariffs was not enough to ignite their anger either. The government of the day explained to the people that the additional burden of higher prices was part of the sacrifice they had to make as citizens. The impact of COVID-19 was hobbling the country: loss of revenue, inflation, a weak national currency, foreign exchange crisis. The people showed understanding. The strongest point about the average Nigerian is that he or she is resilient, long-suffering, yet ever ready to give up a little comfort for the country’s sake. Nigerian leaders do not show as much readiness or patriotism in the same manner. Nonetheless, Nigerians continue to endure, but the lesson of the #EndSARS crisis that has now engulfed the country is that it is not good to take the people’s patience for granted.
Last week, it took an encounter between a young man and the notorious Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) in Ughelli, Delta State, for the people to cry out and show their outrage over unending cases of police brutality. A young man by name Ochuko, was first said to have been killed by the men of the FSARS. It was later established that he did not die. He was brutalized. His vehicle was seized by the police. He ended up in hospital. The Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, SAN who was born in Ughelli intervened and tried to explain. He said the victim was alive and that in fact, the outfit involved in the encounter was not SARS, but Operation Delta Safe. These were policemen all the same. The youths of Ughelli therefore turned their anger on the police. Whether it was Operation Delta Safe or SARS did not matter, the truth is that the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad established in 1992 has over the years become synonymous with impunity and brutality.
CSP Simeon Danladi Midenda (assisted by DSP Taiwo Lakanu) who helped to set up the unit as a default strategy at the time, is on record as having said that the unit, one of 14 in the Nigeria Police Crime and Intelligence Division, has “deviated from the original concept.” The exact nature of that deviation is that over the years, Nigerians concluded that FSARS had transformed from being a crime-fighting unit of the Nigeria Police into a criminal unit, granted automatic immunity by official status and the guns that they wield. Rather than fight armed robbery, SARS officials spent more time terrorizing Nigerians. The many stories that have been written about this unit of the Nigeria Police convey a picture of how Nigeria itself has deteriorated and how institutions of state can be easily used to condone and promote impunity. In 1971, Nigerian policemen killed Kunle Adepeju, a promising Nigerian student at the University of Ibadan, who was not even involved in a protest about the inefficiency and incompetence of a University catering manager.
In April 1978, the police killed Nigerian students for daring to query the then Olusegun Obasanjo military regime. The government had increased the cost of meal on campuses by 50k per day. The students revolted. The Nigeria Police, this same one, joined by soldiers who were called out to quell the protests, littered every campus from Zaria to Lagos with corpses. In 1981, they killed Dele Udoh, a 24-year old, award winning athlete. He was gunned down for having the temerity to argue with a policeman. With the emergence of a unit of the Nigeria Police Force called Nigerian Mobile Police (MOPOL) Nigerians were finally confronted with the spectre of police brutality in full force. It was a para-military police unit. It would eventually distinguish itself internationally and bring laurels to Nigeria in UN, AU, ECOWAS international peace-keeping operations. But locally, the MOPOL, as it was called, was known for its human rights abuses. Under Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Adewusi (1981- 1983), the MOPOL became so notorious, so evil, that it was called the “Kill and Go Police”.
After dismissing the civilian Shehu Shagari administration in 1983, the military rulers that came after had to whittle down the influence of the MOPOL. It had become a threat not just to society but also the military. MOPOL may have been bad but SARS is worse. Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad inherited the “Kill and Go” label and turned it into a shameless brand. Nobody is spared. You only need to drive a good car, wear dreadlocks, look like you had just returned from an overseas trip, speak with a foreign accent, or look like the son or daughter or wife of a rich man, or make the mistake of being seen with an expensive phone or tablet, and you automatically become a target. Walking too confidently on the streets of Nigeria is now regarded as a crime by SARS policemen and yet, the Nigerian Constitution guarantees the freedom of movement. SARS officials pry into people’s bags, enter their houses and look into soup pots and refrigerators, and ask for a share of family assets or else, they will “kill and go” and as they often say, “nothing will happen.” And indeed, often, and always, nothing happens, and if anything happens at all, such policemen are protected by the police and subsequently rewarded with promotion and better postings. They are not answerable to anybody in the state to which they are deployed. They operate as a Federal Force! This is exactly the problem. A Police system that is supposed to protect the safety of lives and property but which operates like an enemy of the people, and the state lacks the will to do what is right, is a threat to everyone.
It has been argued that we should never have expected, and should not expect much from the Modern Nigeria Police. It was established by the colonial authorities as a force of domination, division, suppression, and control, and so the argument goes, we should expect the Modern Nigeria Police Force to remain true to its antecedents. The weakness of that argument is that it props up colonial determinism. It has been 60 years after independence. We can’t keep blaming the past. My take, in fact is that the colonial police master is much better than the post-colonial police masters we now have. Present day internal colonialists are far less human than the British colonialists. There are many Nigerians who will readily argue that colonialism had its good sides, highlighted ironically by the wickedness of a generation that inherited independence and subverted it.
Too many panels and committees have been set up to reform the Nigeria Police: why has that not worked? For more than 40 years, civil society groups in Nigeria and the International Community have been drawing attention to human rights abuses by the Nigeria Police: why has nobody listened? Every Inspector General of Police since the 1990s has talked about Police Reform, Police decentralization, Police restructuring, but that has also not worked. The current #EndSARS protest is a response to years of inaction and the deafness of the Nigerian state. The argument is not about a colonial heritage. It is about the failure of leadership. This is worsened by the fact that the protesters do not trust the Nigerian government anymore. There is nothing new about police brutality and the violation of human rights by the Nigerian State, but the people have seen that it may never end. For the past four years, there have been similar protests and demands. This is not the first time Government will restructure the notorious SARS or direct that checkpoints should be disbanded. In 2017, 2018, 2019, the police hierarchy gave the same directives. The police simply went about their duties and punished the people even more. It is tragic to have a Police system that the people do not trust.
After the aforementioned Ughelli incident, the Inspector General of Police - Mohammed Adamu announced that SARS officials had been ordered off the streets, checkpoints banned and that every SARS official must wear a uniform. The public laughed. They dismissed the directive as “an audio directive.” AUDIO used in that context in Nigeria’s street talk means mere sound, nothing of substance, it can be heard but there is nothing to it because it is deceptive and dishonest. The people have been proven right. When a people begin to call those who are supposed to protect them liars and hypocrites, something has gone crazy in that society, and a bomb is ticking. Indeed, within 24 hours after the IGP’s mollifying directives, SARS officials were seen again on the streets, acting like emperors as usual. The people then resolved that “Enough is Enough”. In Ughelli, Lagos, Osogbo, Abuja, and elsewhere, they confronted the SARS officials. The Police fought back. Nigeria now looks like a scene out of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “Na on top that matter we dey since oh” as the people say.
The people standing up to the Nigeria Police are to be exact, the youths of Nigeria. The #EndSARS campaign is an expression of youth power. What we have seen is a whole generation speaking up. Their protest goes beyond police brutality. It is an outflow of pent up anger about how Nigeria has been mismanaged over the years. It is a protest about the failure of the state, the reign of impunity and the abuse of uniform, not just by the police, but Customs, Immigration, Civil Defence, Road Safety officials, and anyone who wears an official uniform and thinks he or she has been empowered to humiliate and oppress less privileged Nigerians. But the Phoenix has risen. Before now, many young Nigerians kept calling on the older generation of activists to speak up for them about contemporary issues. The majority actually thought the duty of liberating Nigeria should be carried out by the same set of old actors. This time, new heroes and heroines have shown up from the most unlikely quarters. Their protest goes beyond police brutality. It demonstrates the power of technology and the nature of a modern revolution and its potency. The Arab Spring was triggered off in December 2010, by an act of self-immolation by a Tunisian youth in protest over police corruption and brutality. In Nigeria, a Revolutionary Spring has been afoot for days. Well, almost.
Nigerian youths took over not just the streets of Nigeria, they possessed the international social media space. They ignited the fire of patriotism at home and in Diaspora. There have been protests by Nigerians across the world- in Paris, London, Johannesburg, Monrovia, Dublin and elsewhere. On Twitter, a dedicated team called out international celebrities and governments to help defend the rights of Nigerians to live in peace in their country. Within 24 hours, the #EndSARS campaign became the Number one trending topic on social media worldwide. Governments and embassies joined the protest, calling on the Nigerian government to address the grievances of its angry citizens. I saw Drake, Cardi B, John Boyega, Trey Songz, Chance the Rapper, Estelle, global cultural figures asking questions about Nigeria. It was in the government’s interest to respond. The IGP has now announced a complete disbandment of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, but two days later, nobody trusted him. Nigerian youths shouted “AU-DI-O”. They have remained on the streets. They have asked that the President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari must address the nation. He has now done so. It was in his interest to do so. Every step that has been taken by the Nigerian government in the last three days is not because the government listens, but a response to a desperate situation. #EndSARS was beginning to graduate to an #EndNigeria campaign. Even the Vice President and one of his daughters joined the campaign. One of the President’s daughters, Zahra Buhari also tweeted on the side of the people. The children of both billionaires and the poor are united. One of them, DJ Cuppy, has said she had to defy other people’s counsel but as a young Nigerian she felt obliged to speak up.
The #EndSARS campaign has produced new heroes. We have seen an expression of youth anger and patriotism that we never expected was possible. Omoyele Sowore, the activist who ignited the fire that now burns, must be pleased. The other hero is Aisha Yesufu, the foster daughter of the North, who has emerged as a symbol of the protest. There is Rinu, the young lady who acted as spokesperson at the Lagos State House of Assembly. And Segun Awosanya, the #EndSARS architect and spirit. Deji Adeyanju. Dipo Awojide. Reno Omokri. There are others: those who lived, those who died, the living ancestors, and members of Corporate Nigeria who stood up to be counted. The Nollywood and Creative Industry team gave verve to the protest: Falz the Bad Guy, Wizkid, Davido, Tiwa Savage, Paul Okoye, Rema, Don Jazzy, Mike Edwards, Genevieve Nnaji, Toke Makinwa, too many to mention… and the BBNaija queen – Tacha showing that far beyond beauty and brains, conscience matters… Notably, there is no single hero. The youths of Nigeria led themselves. They blocked politicians from hijacking the protest, and therein lies the strength of this unfolding Nigerian story. We have not yet seen the end of it. It is a much bigger story: the story of how a strategic police unit that used to be known as the “Scorpions” ended up as a group of “Monkeys”, looking for “Bananas”, so badly they became involved in land matters, snatched ATM cards, and became “AsSARSins.”