Earlier today, The ‘Barometer’ column of The Nation Newspaper made an argument rubbishing the TakeItBack protests that happened last week Monday against the Oworonshoki Demolitions, the Rivers Emergency Military Rule, and the Cybercrime Act. Calling these protests “perfunctory” shows how disconnected the writer of this Barometer column is, and shows how much this Barometer can no longer measure the pressure of the people’s resistance. No matter the size of the protests that happened on Monday, the protest was far from perfunctory. Many Nigerians are very interested in the issues being protested, and I speak from experience.
Last week Sunday, a day before the #TakeItBack protests, I was at Oworoshoki with many anti-neoliberal activists who were there to visit the victims of demolition who were having a meeting in the area. This meeting had over a hundred people in attendance and the quality of conversations showed how angry the people were at the policies that steal their homes from them in the name of ‘development’. Some of them narrated how they were the ones who recovered their land from the water and now the government is trying to take their land from them, without any compensation, for some private developer to build an ‘Elite Villa’ that will not be affordable by them or anyone in their living standards. Part of the technicality the government is trying to use to take the land is to ask them to bring their land purchase documents for a land that some of them literally made – filled the water with land. Another technicality the government has used against them over time is environmental concerns. We were able to visit the site of the most recent demolition in the area and it felt like a huge rally as the crowd of victims and visitors moved through the community. I must admit the conversation ensued that no one should have to live that close to water or in these conditions in the first instance, but the consensus of that conversation was that until the government can provide a better alternative, the people should have a right to the kind of housing that they provided for themselves without facing the threat of demolition. In fact, one major conclusion of that conversation was that Nigeria needs a constitutional land and housing reform that makes land and housing a right based on social use, and demolition should never happen until there is an alternative provided to serve the same social use without any cost, and that any land or housing that is empty and tied down for money manipulation by developers can be taken over by citizens who need it for more pressing use to occupy it. A good example are the hundreds of unaffordable empty estates in Abuja. With such law, many young Nigerians who have to sleep on the streets in Abuja would have a squatters right to legally occupy the empty estates of Abuja and if the estates are empty for long, they can be repossessed to provide social housing for these ‘squatters’. This kind of law will ensure that land and housing are basic welfare needs to be met, and not commodities to be sold to the highest bidder, and to be subjected to commodity speculation.
With this amount of interest behind the most local issue in that protest, I wonder how any reasonable person can call the protests “perfunctory”. The less local issue of the Rivers State Emergency Military Rule was not only exposed as an obvious authoritarian power grab, it has also been exposed as an attempt to militarize oil-resource extraction (that is peculiar to Rivers State) by Tinubu who has been exposed to corruptly hold a stake in the oil sector, especially oil refining. For the Tinubu presidency, the militarization of Rivers State was not about the Wike-Fubara godfatherism tussle, but about how to make the land of the indigenous people of Rivers State more accessible to corporate exploitation and environmental devastation without any dissent. The most national issue that formed the theme of the protests was the Cybercrime Act, which did not only recently become a tool by the police to crush all democratic dissent in the country, but also has become a legal representation of the Nigerian Police’s only work which is Bullying – the Nigerian Police is now useless on security or mediation but very useful when it comes to being rented thugs of the rich to bully the poor. The major tool for this bullying is often the Cybercrime Act, and it is very sensible for any poor and middle-class or young Nigerian to rise against this because at one point or the other, we have either been victimized or threatened with this law.
Given this level of interest on all of the issues that formed the basis of these protests, it is true that one would expect a bigger crowd in the protests across the state, if not for the wickedness of the Tinubu regime. Because, is it not wicked that the same government that kill tens of protesters during #EndBadGovernance and hundreds during #EndSARS now mock some of the citizens for being afraid to join protests that affects their interests? I am directly linking the author of that Barometer column to the government, not because of any rumored ownership of The Nation by Tinubu, but mainly because the cynical arguments in those three paragraphs are not the words of an average cynic or a random apologist of the Tinubu regime, but they are the words of a collaborator of the regime who is writing a short love letter to the President on their column. As much as the writer tried to fake some neutrality, the dead-soul violence in their tone betrayed them because it is very similar to the violence that the Tinubu regime executes on protesters.
The baboons in Aso Rock are playing with the fire that will consume and crush them, by jumping from one tree to the other in an effort to ridicule the resistance of the young population of Nigeria. These people are not only safely insulated from the police batons and demolition bulldozers that have formed the theme of our young lives, they are the ones behind the batons and the bulldozers. How can they then pretend to lecture us on how to ‘safely combat’ the crises they caused, and that does not affect them? Why won’t they call the protest “protest for protest sake” when the issues being protested seems like nothing to them because it does not affect them? Why won’t they tell the youths to “shake their common sense” when they infantilize us and only see us as impatient children that their gerontocratic regime can talk down on? Why won’t they sneer at us that “the world does not give a damn” when they think the world revolves around them? In the voice of Micheal Jackson, “We are the world” – the dispossessed people who are interested in all of the issues raised by this protest are the majority of the world’s population. The writer falsely claimed that “the world is uninterested in Nigeria… If the world is to pay attention… it would be if the country became another Somalia or Sudan,” but went on to mention Trump and Gaza where the world is paying attention despite the fact that they were both not a failed state situation. The attempt to reduce international solidarity to the interventionist response of imperialist nations to the Nigerian situation shows that the writer of this article does not see the people or the power of the people. The world is often interpreted as the “Western Powers” and given that the Tinubu regime is a loyal dog of Western imperialism, the apologists of the regime believe ‘the world’ does not care about us because they (our oppressors) are in the good books of ‘the world’.
The writer asked “What alternatives did the protesters proffer?” System change! The practice of protest and revolution is to create a rupture that exposes the system we are in so that we can change the system. The alternative is in the act of resistance itself, because it mobilizes the people to fashion out their alternatives by themselves. But what alternative did this writer suggest? Conciliation! Unlike the column article suggested, the people of Nigeria will not seek “inclusion and political conciliation.” We are not delusional. A neocolonial puppet of transnational capitalism like Tinubu is structurally incapable of ‘conciliation’ and only through protests, strikes and dual-power structures will we end the callous policies of the regime. To mediate with this genocidal state is to become a party to one’s own oppression, and we won’t stop resisting because the world cares – because we are the world, and we care about our own plights.
