The #EndBadGovernance protests, which were held from August 1 to August 10, have ended.
The protests, which spread to many parts of the country, have resulted in breakdown of law and order resulting in avoidable loss of lives and property especially in the North. Many states affected had to impose 24-hour curfew to bring the situation under control.
The reality is that the protest created an atmosphere of uncertainty across virtually every part of the country. Economic activities were brought to a standstill even in areas where the protest did not take place. It has also, in varying degrees, raised questions about the capacity of governments at all levels to be responsive to challenges facing citizens.
Without attempting to review the responses of governments at all levels to the #EndBadGovernance protest, it certainly fell short of public expectations.
There was almost a complete absence of initiatives at all levels to identify the organisers of the protest and seek to engage them with the view of attempting to end the protest.
On the other hand, the organisers maintained a low profile and didn’t fully disclose the identity of its leadership. Although some activists made public appearances in TV and radio programmes, there was nothing that can be used to validate the claims of those individuals.
In the circumstance, therefore, the organisational structure, membership and scope of operation of the #EndBadGovernance protest organisers remained nebulous, and Nigerians can only continue to hazard guesses about which the organisers of the #EndBadGovernance campaign are. As it is, there is information suggesting that the organisers have announced October 1 as the date for the resumption of the protests.
Every Nigerian should be worried about this development. With governments at all levels failing to engage the organisers, practically underestimating the capacity of the organisers to mobilise for the protests, ordinary citizens are left at the mercy of angry Nigerians.
The truth is that virtually every ordinary citizen is a potential member of such an angry group simply because the condition of life in the country is harsh.
Let no one be deceived, the situation affects virtually every living soul in Nigeria on a scale highly unimaginable and never experienced in the past.
Without doubt, the trigger for our current situation is the withdrawal of subsidy on petroleum products and floating the exchange rate of the naira against other international currencies.
For an import dependent economy, it is predictable that the two policies will produce inflationary pressure. Unfortunately, so far, the government of President Bola Tinubu is unable to produce any clear definitive policy response to the situation.
All that citizens hear the government to be saying is calling on citizens to be patient without outlining how long it will take for the harsh reality to abate.
Meanwhile, daily, Nigerians confront challenges of hunger and threats to daily survival. Many citizens die prematurely on account of hunger and preventable diseases.
While acknowledging government explanations about how bad the economy has been mismanaged by previous administrations, it must be stressed that being an elected government, Nigerian political leaders should be more responsive.
The minimum should be to acknowledge the reality facing citizens and demonstrate some measure of compassion and seek to ameliorate the harsh conditions facing citizens by relaxing some of these policies. Instead, painfully, elected leaders, including President Tinubu are grandstanding, behaving basically as colonial overlords who have conquered Nigerians.
With a conquest mentality, our leaders have proceeded to demobilise virtually all political structures in the country such that today Nigeria has earned the bad reputation of being a democracy without any functional political party. All the registered political parties are nothing but legal entities that only present candidates for elections.
Partly, because of that reality there are none of the parties that are able to recruit the leaders of the #EndBadGovernance protest or at least publicly join the protest.
Although individuals such as Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Mr. Peter Obi have declared support for the protest, they were unable to contract any strong relationship with the protest organisers.
So long as political leaders and political parties in the country will be unable to contract strong relationships with veritable and energetic constituencies such as the #EndBadGovernance protest organisers, Nigerian democracy is imperilled.
This could potentially increase the frustrations of Nigerians and may be responsible for the existence of high levels of desperation that produces the explosive realities associated with the last protest.
We must caution that if this is left unattended to, and especially if the government continue with its grandstanding dispositions, doing nothing to either produce clear policy plans that will arrest the harsh realities facing Nigerians or produce functionally responsive measures that could ameliorate and unshackle citizens from the grip of hunger and starvation, the risk of the protest resuming any day before October 1 date is very high.
Part of the reality is also the associated exposure of virtually every Nigerian to becoming potential victim of the anger of hungry Nigerians is the high possibility of angry hungry protesters breaking into peoples’ homes and looting everything that was lootable. Already, in some parts of the North such ugly incidents have happened during the last protests.
Given such possibility, it is in the enlightened self-interests of all well-meaning Nigerians committed to the democratic development of the country to step out and seek to engage young Nigerians, including the organisers of the #EndBadGovernance protest.
All Nigerians committed to the democratic development of Nigeria must mobilise to give practical expressions to the aspirations of all Nigerians to guarantee that elected representatives and governments are responsive to challenges facing citizens.
A situation where the government resorts to a cheap campaign of blackmail with arguments of the opposition sponsoring the protests should simply be ignored.
In any event, it is legitimate for the opposition to start working for the defeat of a ruling party once they are unable to justify the confidence of the electorate.
In fact, ideally, if democratic structures of the country are functionally working such as political parties and the National Assembly, with what is going on in the country, President Tinubu and many state governors are candidates for immediate impeachment.
The comatose reality, which has reduced the National Assembly to a rubber stamp with political parties that are nothing more than leprous fingers, is responsible for the current high levels of frustration and desperation of Nigerians to register their anger through protests.
Combined with a reality whereby INEC seems to be unwilling to discharge its statutory responsibility of registering new parties that could produce veritable options for legitimate leadership contests in the country, all hopes of democratic change of leadership in the country are fading away.