By Steve Nwosu
Not being one of the organisers of the #ENDBADGOVERNANCE protests, I wouldn’t know if the streets would still be occupied after today, or whether President Bola Tinubu’s underwhelming national address on Sunday morning, has done enough to engender a ceasefire. What I do know, however, is that it is now very clear that we have more persons working against the success of the Tinubu administration from within than from without.
This administration is bursting at the seams with enemies within!
If not, they wouldn’t have tortured Asiwaju through that speech that said absolutely nothing. A presidential speech without, as Okadigbo would say, any ‘quotable quotes’. No sound bites. And above all, without any landmark proclamations on the problem at hand.
What President Tinubu just did on Sunday was to simply aggregate all that his talking heads, security chiefs and other appointees have been assaulting our sensibilities with, since the build-up to the anti-hunger protests, and all through the last three or four days of the demonstrations. Yes, the same statements which, we’re all in agreement, stem from the deepest crevices of insensitivity and sycophancy.
For, apart from the current minister of information who seems to get it right most of the times, and is a refreshing breath of fresh air from what used to be, what I see around President Tinubu is a gang of desperadoes either seeking relevance or trying too hard to keep a job they know nothing about.
I particularly feel for the Chief of Defence Staff. With viral videos of protesters in Kaduna unabashedly inviting the military to come and take over power, very scary for those of us who worked and lived through the military interregnums, it was necessary for the military high command to speak, dissociate itself from the abominable calls, and restate its support for the democratically elected government. And, of course, Gen. Musa also used the opportunity to warn the media against giving publicity to the protesters. They same way the military always warns us about the coverage of Boko Haram. Yes, in his books, Boko Haram and anti-hunger protesters are one and the same.
For me, that senseless call for military intervention was the only explanation for Gen. Musa’s presser, on a matter the IGP and the police were clearly on top of.
Having probably assured the President that there was nothing to lose sleep over, with regards to the protest, and having, as Sen. Ali Ndume alluded, effectively shielded the President from the realities on ground, all the president’s men, and women, agreed to hand Tinubu a speech that clearly reproduced just what they want the President to know – which is the utopia they have been feeding him with: That Nigerians, except for a few sour-graping political adversaries, are happy with him and want him to ‘keep up the good work’.
In all, they made our poor President labour through 38 paragraphs of high-sounding nonsense. Speech that did not address why Nigerians were on the streets protesting. Thirty-eight paragraphs that merely made the President reproduce the same scorecard he reeled out to us, in batches, on May 29 and June 12, few weeks back. Nothing to show that our disagreement with that very scorecard, and the sufferings therefrom, was the reason Nigerians had poured out into the streets in protest. Put another way, the President simply said:You want me to talk, now I’ve talked. I know you’re suffering. I know I’m the cause of it. I intend to do absolutely nothing about it! He couldn’t even sneak in something into the speech, like we were told he did with the subsidy removal bit, which they said was not contained in the written speech handed over to him on inauguration day.
For me, the speech, and the mismanagement of our President, especially on the score of this protest, speaks to high heavens. It’s a discourse for another day.
For now, I’m excited by another related matter. And that is the fact that my fears about Lagos being set ablaze did not materialise.
Of course this has nothing to do with scaremongering of a certain Joe Igbokwe or anyone else. I was genuinely concerned that, giving what happened with the #ENDSARS riots, a good course could become another curse. Not only because the demonstrators suddenly lost focus, but because the authorities became jittery and pressed a wrong button.
So, even at the risk of celebrating too early, I think my dear Lagos has pulled through this, handing over the baton of poor management to Abuja and others
In fact, if there was any political office holder who appeared to have learnt anything from the #ENDSARS protest of four years ago, it was probably Lagos State governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu.
To begin with, while those managing the President in Abuja were busy grandstanding, and talking to themselves – too arrogant to talk to those who really mattered in the face-off, Sanwo-Olu did not have any such over-bloated ego. He quietly reached out to all of them: The organisers, the supporters (including those rumoured to be bankrolling the protesters), opposition politicians, the foot soldiers, and all manner of groups. Everything went on behind the scene. Even when he met with members of the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), he had planned to keep it out of the press, until it inadvertently leaked out.
But in all, the public narrative coming out of Alausa was always about appealing to Lagosians of all persuasions to conduct themselves in a civil manner. Unlike the FCT minister, Nyesom Wike, Sanwo-Olu never talked down on protesters. Never read any riot act to anyone. Restraint is the finer virtue of valour! Even when he never really wanted the protest to happen, Sanwo-Olu knew the inevitability of that reality, and rather than spitting into the air and collecting it with his face, threatening that protest had no place in Lagos, Gov. Sanwo-Olu busied himself with putting structures in place to manage the situation.
Unlike those in Abuja, and even a few South-East states, he did not tell us that the organisers were faceless, to justify their remaining aloof. Nor that he did not know what their demands were. Yes! Because when it also suited his colleagues, they told us they knew the protesters, but that they did not want to use kinetic approach. Then, at another time, they would say it was Peter Obi and the Obidients. What inconsistency!
Of course that did not mean that a few underhand tactics did not come into play in Lagos. They sure did – Like the emergency 10-day state-wide Oro masquerade festival. Political Oro! Similar to the one that was hurriedly announced in the Lekki axis during the fractious general elections of last year.
Of course those of us who have lived long enough in Lagos know that Oro has never happened simultaneously in all the chiefdoms of Lagos. So, when the festival is suddenly announced to hold across the state at the same time. And for the entire 10 days that the protest was planned for, even the dumbest of us would know it was just a desperate bid to scare people away from the streets.
Unfortunately the spirits, whom the Oro is called to celebrate, have been known to prefer moving under the cover of darkness. And since the protests were scheduled to hold in broad daylight, it meant darkness and light would never meet. So, the Oro huddle was dead on arrival.
Apart from the Oro exponents, a handful of other nitwits also sought to muddy things up by playing the ever-effective Igbo phobia ethnic card. They desperately tried to play on the intelligence (or is it emotions) of the Yorubas, by telling them the protest was another Igbo agenda to take presidency power through the back door, since their man, Peter Obi, failed to take it legitimately through the ballot box. It was a logical retail enunciation of diabolical theory propounded by none other than presidential adviser Bayo Onanuga.
Like Onanuga and his co-travellers on the Rwanda route, other do-gooders also latched on the old trick of recruiting thugs and hoodlums to infiltrate the protest, cause violence and justify the unleashing of full police and military fire power on the protesters. A classic case of calling a dog a bad name to hang it. But isn’t it a shame that authorities still resort to this tired old tactic which even the blind can see through?
In Abuja, even after the FCT Administration obtained a court order restricting the protesters to the Moshood Abiola National Stadium, government goons still went ahead to plant their hirelings and paid anti-protest protesters at the venue before the genuine protesters got there. The idea was to deny the real protesters access to the stadium. The result was that the protest almost turned violent before it even got started.
And when the genuine protesters now moved to the precincts of the Eagle Square, where the authorities didn’t want them to go in the first place, the soldiers and police were waiting for them with teargas and, probably, live ammunition.
Incidentally, the same court order that the police and the FCT Administration are bandying in our faces were also obtained in Lagos, to restrict the protesters to MKO Abiola and Gani Fawehimi Parks in Ojota. But neither Sanwo-Olu, his aides nor the police commissioner threatened anybody about it.
In fact, to get to the designated Ojota venues, the train of protesters actually detoured into Alausa, the Ikeja seat of the state government, passed through the governor’s office and the state assembly complex, then proceeded to Ojota. Not even a teargas, let alone live bullet, was fired at the protesters. And when they got to Ojota, the police commissioner was on ground to address them. At some point, even policemen supplied them drinking water. And when things wanted to get out of hand the next day, with protesters wanting to spill out of the designated venue onto the road, Sanwo-Olu’s men were on ground to arrest the situation.
On the other hand in Abuja, an old, unrelated video was doctored and sent viral, to deliberately implicate a serving senator for sharing water to protesters. Yes! In Abuja, giving water to protesting citizens was akin to treason even when the accuser-jury had not only given water, but also transportation and money to some other anti-protest ‘protesters’
Like in Abuja, what we have had so far in several other states, except probably Rivers, where Gov. Sim Fubara came out, on the first day, to address the protesters, are cases of genuinely clueless governors, overzealous police and security operatives and instances where some governors are trying to score cheap political points with the protest.
Eventhough one cannot categorically vouch that some of these pranks did not happen in Lagos, it was clear that the governor had no hand in them. Rather, it was the handiwork of political jobbers who feel they are more pro-Tinubu than Sanwo-Olu. But they end up doing more damage to the Tinubu brand. They are the ones who keep creating the impression that bullying, blackmail, intimidation and general thuggery are part and parcel of the Tinubu essence, especially in Lagos and the South-West.
But Sanwo-Olu is also on record to have distanced himself and the government from the charlatan who began the #IgboMustGo campaign on X (Twitter). Incidentally, I learnt that some otherwise respected persons in the system are unhappy with the governor for throwing the thwart under the bus. They would rather he looked the other way as the anarchist kindled a potential inferno in the underbelly of Lagos.
I still expect the ‘protectors’ of that felon in the system to come after Sanwo-Olu, but the governor can hold his head high as having acted in the most elevated interest of the President Tinubu. The issue was already beyond just another family affair. Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar were already in on the matter, and it was in the best interest of Tinubu that someone cleared his name from the mess. That was exactly what the Lagos State governor did for him.
In fact, if there was any person who did the Tinubu image any favours in the ongoing anti-hunger protest, it was Sanwo-Olu, working with the Lagos State Police Commissioner. By managing the situation in such a way that the protesters amply made their point, without the state erupting into the orgy of violence and mayhem, and killings, it experienced during the #ENDSARS protest of 2020, Sanwo-Olu sure deserves some accolade. Take a bow, Mr. Governor!
