Nigeria is a country given to hysteria, histrionics, and even the occasional huff of hubris. The tendency to overblow things here, and mount its inflated wings, is never far away.
This tendency to be lured into crowdsourcing anger borders on gullibility and usually clouds more important issues.
To protest against a government that has been disappointing, for want of a better word, protesters mobilized across the country between August 1 and August 10. The protests were meant to last about ten days but never survived beyond the sixth day as the government clamped down, and many retreated to the safety and anonymity of their houses.
However, just as one cleans up after a child, the government has had a lot to do after the protests. The aim of the protesters was to disrupt as well as disturb a government that appeared too comfortable in its listlessness and carelessness.
To clean up after the protests, the government deployed the Department of State Services (DSS) which has continued to hound those who participated in the protests in a bid to forestall future protests. If the DSS was not such a desperately poor student of history, it would know that the reason such tactics don’t work is that when people protest, they are responding to something primal, something that is almost impossible to contain.
While protesters in other parts of the country had the dignity and civility to keep their protests peaceful and measured, things took a dangerous turn in many parts of the North where the protests were not only violent but bloody.
In Kano State, protesters attacked public buildings including courtrooms and libraries, clashed with security personnel and even called for a regime change.
If the sudden spike of hunger and anger in the North after eight years of stony silence was suspicious, the call for regime change confirmed that the protests were hardly about hunger.
The government’s response which included rounding up some of the protesters, many of them minors, and moving them to Abuja for trial ended in a fatal misstep when they were arraigned on 1st November 2024 at the Federal High Court.
The charge for treason which is a capital offense and the stringent bail conditions were always going to draw flak for the government. However, when some minors fainted ostensibly out of illness, ill-treatment and malnutrition, the uproar home and abroad was deafening, forcing the government to release them.
Protests should never be criminalized in Nigeria whose resilient democracy is still going strong more than twenty-five years later. However, what must be done to those who criminalize protests, hiding under protests to unleash the worst version of themselves, especially when their bodies are those of minors but their minds those of master criminals?
Public property was destroyed in Kano State during the protests. Will no one be held responsible? If no one is punished, won’t those who never want Nigerians to protest hold up the destruction of public property as a reason to suppress protests in the future? There are landmines everywhere.
The minors have been flown back to Kano and other states. The governor of Kaduna State has offered thirty-nine of the minors who are from his state the sum of one hundred thousand Naira each, as well as smartphones while reuniting them with their families. Yet, the rush to score cheap political points must not be allowed to mask systemic issues which will explode in the future with frightening consequences if left unaddressed.
The question must be asked: how many of the minors who participated in the protests in the North were enrolled in any school when the protests started? It is doubtful that they would have joined if they were in school on that day.
Northern Nigeria has the highest number of Nigeria’s millions of out-of-school children. These children, many of whom beg for a living are also amenable to many crimes which no society can live with.
In feting them for escaping the government’s ‘oppressive claws’, crime must not be rewarded. Beyond giving them gifts in an attempt to be considered responsive, the government must confront what are human bombs biding their time to detonate.
Failing to do this, then it is only a matter of time.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
Ikewilly9@gmail.com
