Peter Obi, The August 1 Protests And The Rest of Us

Bayo Onanuga’s allegation that Peter Obi is behind the planned national protests of August 1 has expectedly come with some ripple effect. Groups and individuals have responded to the accusation. Peter Obi himself has come out with a strong-worded letter of reply through his lawyer to the presidential aide demanding retraction and other remedies while threatening a court action should the veteran journalist fails to attend to the demands.

Thus, at a time the populace are so beleaguered by hunger and all-round deprivations, the people in government are pretending not to be aware that citizens have got more than enough reasons to get agitated and prone to restiveness. These occupants of the corridors of power seem to be assiduously working to distract us from paying sober attention to what is definitely more than a crossroads in our national history. Yes, no matter how Onanuga and his fellow Aso Rock residents may try to obfuscate the fact, it is clear as daylight that the patience of Nigerians have been so much tested that it should even be a surprise that citizens have been calm all this while without actually taking to the streets on a scale comparable to the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 which ignited the inferno now known as the French Revolution.

To be straight, Onanuga chose to ignore the growing mountain of socio-economic woes being forced on the citizenry and started engaging in a frivolous blame game aimed at achieving nothing but a drama of.distraction. Unfortunately for us, his tactic has been working, even if not fully, then certainly partially. At least, he has succeeded in prolonging the plot of that drama, adding episodes like angry retorts from Peter Obi’s supporters, emotional reactions from other Nigerians, a trenchant reply piece from Obi’s media aide, a satirical pastiche from Sowore, Obi’s letter to the protagonist, the protagonist’s defiant response that he was waiting for Obi’s court papers, the wait by all of us to see if Obi will make good his threat… and the drama drags on, deflating attention from what is definitely an existential situation.

However, Onanuga is not alone in this act. We have also heard from government that those planning the protests are enemies of the country. There have been various comments delegitimising the planned protests, including from President Tinubu himself. A common thread that runs through all these reactions is that they deliberately evade the question of whether there is enough reason for the planned protests. This is what philosophers describe as PETITIO PRINCIPII (the fallacy of begging the question). Onanuga and co should kindly eschew circumlocution and address the question of whether the agony in the land is not enough to push the citizenry into a total dissilusioment.

Curiously, the political class never gets tired of this same uninspiring strategy that it has been using for decades; the tactic of seeking to discredit whosoever that calls attention to any wrong or shortcoming in the system – of course without bothering to discredit the point being made by such persons. In the days of Adams Oshiomhole as the NLC president, the Obasanjo government at some point suggested that he was working for the opposition. The same thing happened with ASUU during its last industrial action. When the EndSARS hashtag first trended in 2017, the then police spokesman, Mushood Jimoh, appeared on Channels TV to mention the name of the person who started the hashtag and the fact that he has political affiliation. But good enough, the presenter tried to call his attention to the fact that the affiliation or even motives of the initiator of the online protests wouldn’t matter as long as he was pointing out genuine abuse of power by personnel of the police force. Of course Jimoh and his fellow leaders of the force kept chasing shadows instead of addressing issues until 2020 when the seething discontent flared up into violent street protests that left the nation seriously scarred.

Still in our character of preferring to discredit the complainant instead of addressing the complaints, the government chose to blame the #EndSARS protagonists instead of reflecting on the state’s decades of inaction that has turned our police force, a supposed institution of protection to that of destruction. As if the demonization was not enough, after the protests, the government, through the CBN, went after the bank accounts of some of the leaders of the protests. That was again how we lost an opportunity to soberly and conclusively address a perennial institutional malady that is eating up the body of our number one law enforcement body.

I don’t have to bore the reader with an endless litany of similar instances of official indifference to public grievances and discontentment, where the authorities chose to chase shadows instead of urgently addressing issues. But suffice it to observe that society becomes better with shocks that come from such internal scrutinies and censures – but only if those in authority will react positively to such shocks to right whatever wrongs pointed out.

This is what our leaders have repeatedly failed.to do. Following all the horrifying revelations made before the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (popularly known as Oputa Panel) and government’s failure to act on the report of the commission, one of its members, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, wrote that Nigeria is a nation that has blown every single opportunity presented to her for self-redemption. This, to mind, is an apt summary of our pigheaded refusal to be better.

This attitude has been the reason we have persisted in our old retrogressive ways in the face of all promptings to change course. This is why protests, exposition of corruption by journalists and other forms of censures directed at our public institutions have failed to work.

Which sane clime would stand aloof, taking no decisive actions in the face of mind-blowing revelations of corruption made by daring investigative journalists like ‘Fisayo Soyombo, David Hundeyi, Jaffar Jaffar and numerous others? Which progressive nation would continue to live in denial even as bodies like Amnesty International continue to issue reports of human rights abuses by her security agencies? Which forward-looking country would be content with mere unconvincing rebuttals when Transparency International continuously returns terrible verdicts of corruption against her? One thing that is certain is that we have so.much.cohabited with evil that its stench no longer offends our nostrils.

After ‘Fisayo Soyombo got nomination for an international award for his investigative report that exposed the mind-numbing corruption going on in the Nigerian prison system and police stations, the publisher of THE CABLE, Simon Kolawole, under whose auspices he did the daring investigative story, gave an account of how he had intervened to save the journalist when his cover was blown in the Ikoyi Prison (he had framed himself as a criminal to achieve his detention in the prison in order to observe the corruption going on behind the high walls). It was the Chief of Staff to President Buhari, Abba Kyari, a former journalist himself, that helped him to save Soyombo. According to Kolawole, after he told Abba Kyari of Soyombo’s predicaments in the hands of the enraged prison officials, he sighed and said, “This is what journalists do in advanced societies to expose the rot in the system and government will act to put things right. But you know how we are in Nigeria.”

Abba Kyari was a man that had seen it all, both (as a journalist) from the side of those who expose evil and (as a government official) from the side of those that refuse to act on the evil exposed. He spoke from experience and indeed said it all.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.