The youths plan a public protest. The land has been feverish with hunger and suffering.  The grounds for a protest can’t be more legitimate and compelling. The cost of living has become punishing.

The weak naira has pauperised everyone, and the poor have been left without hope. The new government arrived with the old cluelessness. Its mode is the boring Business As Usual.

The youths believe that besides pervasive ineptitude, the political class has been chronically aloof and wasteful. Rather than engage the youths, the political class has opted for scaremongering, delegitimisation and demonisation. The government is going for the kitchen sink.

The most troubling tactic is the equation of peaceful protest with violence. Some elders have been co-opted to warn the young not to partake in the protests because they have information that the planners of the protests want to burn the country. Even during the military regimes, students were allowed to protest. The military dictatorships, striving to be seen as humane, didn’t employ this disingenuous tactic.

If every government treated public protests as inevitably destructive then the citizens’ right to protest would have been effectively abolished long ago. It’s heart-wrenching to see politicians and former Rights activists who championed protests under the military say only ugly things about the right to protest. Their forgetfulness is painful. They are carefreely painting protesters as arsonists and vandals even before the protests have started.

 It’s been a hard watch these last few days. Security agencies have been addressing press conferences to warn protesters. Those whose duty it is to protect protesters are announcing in advance that they are incapable of performing those duties. The situation is pathetic. At these press conferences, no effort is made to give the protesters the benefit of the doubt. Almost all the security agencies have exhibited a blanket disdain for protesters. Rather than engage in this shameful and self-humiliating scaremongering, the federal government should outlaw the right to protest. In North Korea, nobody can protest. That’s a more honest path. Politicians are always slippery. So seeing self-anointed progressives eulogise the right to protest in one breath and in the next send out messages that protests will destroy the country isn’t all that shocking.  But watching noblemen sink into barefaced lying to deny the youths a voice has been unbearable.

It hasn’t stopped at scaremongering. When the government isn’t gathering and persuading traditional and religious leaders to help it delegitimise protests, it’s allowing its officials to engage in naked bigotry and divisiveness. Not long ago, a special adviser to the president pointed accusing fingers at Peter Obi and his supporters. He had no evidence. All he sought was to drive a wedge between ethnic groups to have the protests truncated. The people paid with taxpayers’ funds to promote national unity have sunk into political skulduggery. This recourse to political agbeorism may not end with fishing for advance scapegoats. It has the potential to set up a conflagration between ethnic groups if the peaceful protests are hijacked and derailed by thugs, as is being speculated.

Before this government, opposition parties used to champion or promote public protests against bad governance at the centre. In 2012, President Tinubu and his comrades led pretests against the then President Jonathan, who had partially removed fuel subsidies. Then, it was the duty of the opposition, acting as an electable alternative, to use protests to keep the ruling government in check. Today,  protests are taboo. Even opposition leaders are forbidden by bigots in the boys’ quarters of power to engage in any protests.

Nothing has been spared in this attempt to stop the protests. Now, some local priests in Lagos have announced that they will be engaging in a spiritual cleansing called Oro for 15 days. In other words, they have casually outlawed any movements in the evenings for the ten-day period the planners of the protests plan to engage in peaceful protests. The Lagos State Govt has said it wasn’t consulted. Yet, it doesn’t intend to condemn or stop the Oro priests. The Constitution explicitly states that citizens have the right to reside wherever they like and to move freely. Such a constitutional right can only be curtailed by the government in pursuit of overriding public good. The idea that some priestesses or cults can wake up and declare a part of the state out of bounds to residents at certain times without the approval of the state government is ridiculous. To employ such arbitrariness to sabotage the right of free citizens to protest against bad governance is the final descent into anarchy.

These bad precedents being laid cheerfully may seem innocuous. But once they prove effective, they will be exploited on a larger scale to destroy our democracy. It’s noteworthy that Oro is making a second ignoble entrance. During last year’s elections, it was used to scare away and disenfranchise voters who were not indigenes of Ikorodu. This time, it appears it will be used to undermine the protests. Who knows what next this cleansing process might be used to corrode? If some local priests in every town in this country can wake up and prohibit the movement of people as long as they like in the name of one religion or the other, then we are in a mess.

During the Endsars protest, some agents of that government mobilised counter-protesters with cudgels to chase and hound protesters in certain parts of the country. Janjaweed style. They called it fighting fire with fire. If those who protested against the  Obasanjo government in the early 2000s were chased away by machete-wielding thugs, all those protests that shaped our political culture during the Adams Oshiomhole NLC days wouldn’t have held. Perhaps we might have killed this protest culture many years ago. Perhaps the ruling APC might have remained in the opposition forever as the PDP had bragged.

 If our political leaders no longer believe that protests are part of the democratic culture, they should say it aloud. So that everybody can allow the country to slip into a one-party state, and we all watch peacefully to see where we will end. Since our political leaders now think that protests can never be peaceful and are inherently violent, they should outlaw protests so that the citizens can understand the boundaries of our democracy. We can help them by forgetting that the president and his party leaders led protests in the past. They need not subject themselves to this dehumanising level of hypocrisy. Senator Akpabio can arrange laws and constitutional amendments, like fast food. The governors run the state legislatures like rubber stamps. So they can help with a lightning constitutional alteration.  We can quickly amend the constitution and repeal the right to protest until further notice. That is more honest than the scaremongering, shameless witch-hunting, and the bastardisation of a cleansing process like Oro.