End hunger protests, state of the nation and Dogara’s misstep

BY UDENTA O. UDENTA

Hunger stalks the land like the proverbial wounded lion, nasty, unrelenting and unrepentant. The “end hunger” protests is a child of compelling historical circumstances, a dialectical response to the excruciating material condition of not just the masses but virtually all societal strata with the exception of the 10%. Unless hunger is mitigated, poverty reduced, prices of staple food items crashed significantly, inflationary pressures lowered, naira depreciation reversed and the prices of petroleum products made within the reach of the people the nation should expect more hunger protests in the nearest future, higher in intensity and range than the just concluded ones. As Karl Marx so powerfully put it, a time will come when the working people will have nothing to lose but their chains. Such a time is now upon us in Nigeria.

President Bola Tinubu’s national broadest may not have met the expectations of large segments of society but give him credit for admitting that the people are hurting and he hears their cry, loud and clear. But so long as they continue to cry with no end in sight expect social instability, mass mobilisation, regime demonisation and national fault lines tearing apart rapidly, no matter the forces that are deployed to contain them. As the saying goes, he or she who is already on the ground indeed fears no fall.

Mass protests – so long as they are peaceful, civil and lawful- is a constitutionally prescribed civic right designed to provide guardrails for the protection of democratic governance, and in furtherance of human liberties. Well organised protests enrich the constitutional order by empowering civic spaces and helping to strengthen and consolidate popular democracy under persistent attacks by illiberal – authoritarian statecraft.

No amount, and I repeat, no amount of pressure, persecution and prosecution by the state and its security, intelligence and defence apparatuses can constrain or eliminate mass protests so long as their purposes are genuine, pro-people and progressive in nature and orientation, and so long as such actions are peaceful and civil.

In the same vein organisers of mass protests must respect the very constitution they seek to honour and disavow violence and the presence of anarchists and anti-democratic elements within their ranks because as lousy as Western liberal democracy has become in Africa with the immensity of its shabby record, it must still be protected from assault by reactionary forces that want to plunge society to moments of unremitting angst with no end in sight.

Let me spare some thoughts on the well publicised Igbo abstention from the end hunger protests. Why was this so? Search for answers within the disruptive nuances of Igbo exceptionalism in Nigeria’s political geography; not the exceptionalist mindset incubated by their prodigious entrepreneurial spirit and acumen but a notion of a people set apart as a consequence of the Biafra experience.

Defeated in war, structurally disadvantaged and excluded from the commanding heights of the nation’s institutional designs the Igbo, particularly, the elite have been caught between the rock and a hard place. Historical romanticisation of the dawning of a neo-Biafran eldorado has gripped the imagination of millions of its youth and diaspora communities, and with Nnamdi Kanu still inexplicably rotting away in detention while bigger threats to the survival of the nation state freely roam the land the regrettable contemporary Igbo attitude is – to hell with all this.

Sure they are hurting, may be more than many other national groups, but with the strong belief that they will be exceptionally treated harsher than others as was done to the Eastern Mandate Union (EMU) in relation to NADECO in 1994 when the two groups issued ultimatum to Gen Sani Abacha to vacate office by end of June 1994, whereupon NADECO was rewarded with a begging and supplication visit by Gen Diya while Enugu – EMU’s headquarters- was surrounded by Army tanks, low flying fighter jets and our first dose of detention.

So the Igbo non- participation in the just concluded protests, in itself a form of protest against the Nigerian state, is a vexatious matter that requires rigorous interrogation and negotiation so that Igbo people can continue to play their very important role in the conversation about the future direction of the country and their place in it.

What is the way forward in ending the protests driven by hunger and stoked by poverty? I am not an economist and neither am I a policy wonk. But even if I am one, let it be stated clearly that given the way national politics is currently being played no amount of policy prescriptions will solve the current economic and social challenges that the nation faces.

The economic foundation or base incarnates the political superstructure in a complex pattern of cause and effect relationship but again as Marx averred, the history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle(over economic determinants) but all class struggles are political struggles. Until we get the politics right we can never get the economics right. Bola Tinubu’s government has not gotten the politics right so it can NEVER get the economics right.

More on this shortly.

STATE OF THE NATION

The current crises bedeviling the nation including but not limited to the parlous state of the economy, the pervasive hunger and multidimensional poverty stalking millions and the overall state of national anxiety stem from the inability of the Bola Tinubu presidency to manage the political state. It’s pretty obvious to any discerning eye that Tinubu is running Nigeria from the edges of the political state and that the most pronounced political pathology of the moment is the absent centre in the nation’s political ontology- the lack of elite consensus and through that the construction of overarching national consensus.

Tinubu’s power base appears more narrow now than it was over a year ago when a confluence of forces produced a tenuous coalition that was adequate in securing him a controversial and highly contested victory. The administration thinks that it can by-pass and sidestep the political elite and ground its vision of national progress through the intensification of policy options, strategies and prescriptions. This was clearly demonstrated in Tinubu’s policy-laden national broadcast on the end hunger protests.

This is nevertheless a demonstrable fatal political misjudgment given that unless and until he moves to the political centre as Olusegun Obasanjo did in 1999 and Umaru Yar’adua and Goodluck Jonathan did in 2007 and 2011 respectively by reaching amity with the political elite and leveraging on their deep anchorage on dominant civic, cultural and corporate forces his policy formulations and prescriptions will keep behaving like water being poured onto a stone- it is easily washed off.

The regime’s problems are further compounded by a baffling contradiction- how to secure mass support through the application of anti-people neoliberal capitalist economic projects in the specific circumstance in which he is suspicious of the political elite and is intent on keeping them at arm’s length. If he makes peace with the elite, he can at least enlist their support in the apparent war his policies have temporarily declared on the people. But by rejecting them, he has unwittingly driven substantial portions of the civic universe into the arms of his bitter political opponents.

Anybody who tells President Tinubu that he can continue to govern as he is presently doing doesn’t mean well to him and the long suffering Nigerian people. I observed about three years ago that given the gradual disintegration of the state and the weakening of the historicist logic that undergirds it, it’s in plain sight that no one single party, no one single faction of the elite can govern Nigeria without it falling apart in no distant time.

What is required now- for the sake of the nation and beyond the narrow permutations and interests of partisan warlords- is a rethink of the foundational logic that President Tinubu underpinned his presidency. As was drawn to me by a deeply knowledgeable player in the nation’s ideas circuit, President Tinubu’s national broadcast did not contain one line of presidential proclamations, presidential convening orders and presidential directives! Not one line!

What then is to be done? President Tinubu should quickly convene a conclave of the nation’s leading political players as follows: Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, Peter Obi of Labour Party and Musa Rabi’u Kwankwaso of NNPP; the national chairman of the APC and those of the above parties; the leadership( majority and minority of NASS), the chairman of Nigerian Governors’ Forum and the chairman of the PDP Governors’ Forum. It is his call to reach out to his political opponents and not the other way round. He is the president of the country; they are not.

At the end of the conclave the following political direction can be charted:

A. Re-establish the office of special adviser to Mr President on inter-party relations as President Obasanjo did in 1999 when he appointed no less a person as the founding national chairman of APP( as it was then called), Sen Mahmud Waziri, as its head with unfettered access to him and as President Jonathan did when he appointed Sen Ben Obi to same office who went all out to platform the current high performing National Peace Committee with support from the EU.

B. President Tinubu should, as a matter of urgency, re-constitute his cabinet and incorporate elements within the organised political opposition and civic groups as President Obasanjo did in 1999 and Yar’ardua did in 2007. The outcome of such an arrangement will not be a coalition government or a government of national unity in its ‘normal’ institutional appearance; it’s rather a way of re-building political trust and constructing elite consensus and thus enacting one of the pre-conditions for any meaningful impact of economic policies to be felt.

C. President Tinubu should also convene a meeting with the nation’s leading civil society lights. The primary purpose of this conclave is to work out modalities for mainstreaming civic concerns and strategic agendas into governance programming, specifying the correct way and posture in grounding state- civil society relations through the activities of a presidential council on civil society which he has to set up without delay, and more practically to work out the details for re-animating the office of the special adviser to Mr President on civil society relations as President Yar’adua did in 2007.

My personal suggestion on the stalwarts to invite to such a gathering are individuals I have neither discussed this matter with and do not really know how they will individually react to it: Femi Falana SAN, Dr Olisa Agbakoba SAN, Annkio Briggs, Clem Nwankwo, Sen Shehu Sani, Dr Kole Shettima, Owei Lakemfa, Prof Sam Amadi, Prof Jibrin Ibrahim, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, Prof Chidi Odinkalu, Ene Obi, Omoyele Sowore, Amb Nkoyo Toyo, Deji Adeyanju, Dele Farotimi and Aisha Yesufu. These are Patriots with impeccable credentials and a proud history of telling unvarnished truth to power. They are fearless and if only President Tinubu will engage them openly and honestly the disaster that awaits this troubled nation if things persist the way they are may very well be averted.

DOGARA’S MISSTEP

Let me close this statement with a note of warning to the political class to watch their language even in this unbecoming moment of extreme political tribalism and hyper-partisanship. Words have meaning and they carry immense weight. The nation is fragile and people are hurting. Rather than speak in temperate tones, some politicians are busy sowing seeds of division, fear and anger with their base and insufferably loutish words.

I am referring to Yakubu Dogara who demeaned the high office he once held with his uncouth language directed at Gov Bala Mohammed of Bauchi state and the chairman of PDP Governors’ Forum. There are other Dogaras still lurking in the shadows and intent on unleashing words full of putrescence.

Bala Mohammed is more than capable of rebutting Dogara and already the media is awash with a massive push back on the former speaker’s comments, given that barely a year ago he vehemently pilloried Bola Tinubu for his Muslim-Muslim joint ticket he called unspeakable names but is now a presidential cheerleader.

This is not about taking sides in an altercation between two political leaders -far from it- but about how one individual-Hon Dogara- abandoned the lure of political high olympus, the calling of the vibrant upper air, and the appeal of the redemptive force of Elysium or the elysian fields only to embrace the muck, dirt, decay, smell, and the squalid existence of hell itself. Here are the words and expressions that Dogara casually flung at a fellow political leader for the public to feed on and for his supporters to be empowered into waging war on his behalf: “Buffoonery, thug, thuggery, mushroom, profane individual, dog whistler, debased, demeaned, etc etc”. If the likes of Hon Dogara, a former speaker of a federal parliament and not a lowly political actor, are not called to order and reprimanded in robust terms their words will readily form the building blocks of hate, animus, social disorder and systemic instability.

In late 1999 three ambassadors from very influential countries lamented to me separately that one of the principal worries they have about our fledgling democracy is the absence of data on over 90% of the emergent political office holders- who they are, their background, pedigree and accomplishments. But once they enter high political offices, their two paragraph CVs are transformed into over 60 pages of awards and decorations they acquired while in office. Such a mode of leadership production – from nothingness to unimaginable and dizzying political height- does not prepare one for the high offices they covet and secure.

More worrisome- and this is a direct dagger thrust at the heart of our constitutional democracy- is his terrible charge that President Tinubu personally and unambiguously instructed the judiciary from the tribunal through the appeal court to the supreme court to declare victory for Bala Mohammed. That President Tinubu’s spokespersons haven’t debunked this reckless accusation that their boss is a serial perverter of the course of justice is more than strange. Dogara’s intent in normalising political diatribe as an acceptable means of political communication and intra- elite conversation is clearly very dangerous but it’s not only Dogara that is afflicted with this issue. Even in the corridors of power, a spokesman of President Tinubu is known for his horrifying penchant to trade on ethnic baiting, hateful speeches and divisive rhetoric that diminish his office and tarnish the reputation of the presidency. To him and others like him, I say: Enough is Enough.

A NATIONAL CLARION CALL

Nigeria is in trouble. Anybody who denies this is delusional to say the least. The nation state’s historicist foundation has weakened drastically with the steady implosion of the paradigm of colonial modernity that constructed its contingent geography to the decades of post colonial misgovernance under which its structural and institutional underpinnings are decaying before our eyes.

Buffeted by hunger and choked down by poverty and unremitting insecurity, Nigerians are now held together only by their shared humanity, their shared misery and their shared traumas. Yet from the outer limits of the Sahel to the deepest reaches of its coastal marshes the land is brimful with Patriots who toil the land the milk of which bloats the stomach of the insolent few.

Without a functional constitution, haunted by the atrocious record of Western democracy with its sham normative claims and betrayed by the nation’s thinkers who have repeatedly outsourced thought to an unprepared political class the people are stoically plodding along hopeful of a fresh dawn.

The clarion call of all genuine Nigerian patriots is that the governments the people hire should and must be responsive to their core needs built around the imperatives of empowering human infrastructure and ultimately human security. This is not too much to ask for. But there is so much that Nigerian patriots can take or endure.

Many patriots in our midst proudly wear their gloves which restrain their tongues and constrain their actions. I urge them to keep wearing them because once the gloves are off all bets are off too. And I hope and pray we do not get to that moment.

Professor Udenta O. Udenta is the founding national secretary of the Alliance for Democracy (AD)