#EndSARS campaign by Nigerian youths did not to come to me as a surprise. As a matter of fact, I had long expected something like this in Nigeria… something like a quiet attempt that always end up in great revolutions that liberate people from shackles of oppression.
Just last week for the first time, I revealed to the reading public of the completion of my medium-sized book in which I chronicled my observations after studying several revolutions that took place around the world during different periods of human history.
The book is tilted “A History of Revolutions; Remote and Immediate Causes in an Analytical Perspective”. I had made references to some of the observations I made in that book in last week’s Part III work on “Stemming the Tide of Official Corruption in Nigeria”.
Though I had speculated last week that the docility of Nigerians (caused by hunger and penury) may, as always happen in Nigeria, change my general observations and summations in the factors that trigger off bloody revolutions, the event of Tuesday, 20th October 2020 seem to have brought the Nigerian experience into proper focus with my hypothesis on revolutions.
The carnage and massacre of Nigerian youths in the Lekki axis of the #EndSARS campaign actually fall into one primary immediate factor for revolutions around the world where authorities display both insensitivity and callousness to people’s demands.
This happened during the Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917 between the Czars who had acquired all the lands and other resources in Russia, and the vast majority of peasants who, being land owners, worked on their ancestral land holdings as slaves for masters.
For the past thirty years, even as a young man, I had seen the dangers in the way Nigeria is constituted, and have been making my views as opinions in different media including The Guardian Newspaper, The Punch, The Vanguard, etc. I made more expressions in The Guardian Newspaper where I shared spaces in the Reflection Column of the Guardian On Sunday with Professor Wole Soyinka, Professor Tam David West and the Itsehure, the erudite and politically-vibrant Chief Priest of the ancient Benin Kingdom during the time of Omo N’Oba N’Edo Uku Okpolokpo, Oba Erediawa, who also wrote to implore the authorities to chart a new course for Nigeria or allow her sink.
Today, we are at cross-roads as the ship of the nation is almost sunk beyond the mast.
How did we get here, you may ask? To start with, the Nigerian system is flawed… seriously flawed. Recently, these flaws which had long existed in the socio-politico-economic space
has been spiced with impunity and recklessness on the part of some people who believe that Nigeria is there inheritance.
Now, the first problem with Nigeria is what I usually tell anybody who cares to listen.
The Nigerian example shows that no matter how you mix, stir and try to keep kerosene with water, there must be globules which effectively picks out the kerosene from the water. Worst still, your mixture can neither serve any new purpose nor serve the individual old purposes of your water and kerosene before you mixed them. They destroy each other and would have served their individual purposes better if not mixed together. This is common sense.
The northern and southern Nigeria would not have been one country. That was a grand mistake, and I wonder why it is taking us so much time to correct this mistake. The only reason for the northern elitist political class to still want the north and the south to be glued together in an unholy alliance may be the reason of the crude oil resources of the South. If the north and south were to swap places in natural resources, the north would have long been separated from the south. But this is political and economic myopia on their part.
History records that palm oil from the East, cocoa from the West, and groundnut from the North made economic waves around the world, and earned foreign exchange for the country in the early sixties. These are, unlike crude oil, very elastic products that can make a country with huge land mass as Nigeria, great, earning her foreign exchange endlessly. What about if there were to be three or more countries from this Niger area co-operating in mutual trust and relationship to enrich one another? Why must Nigeria use the temporal presence of expendable crude oil resources to hold down herself? Na wa oo!
It seems somebody somewhere is nuts. Why is the north afraid to support a restructuring of Nigeria? They had once, prior, and sequel to the first republic shouted ‘Araba’ (Division). Why do they not want ‘Araba’ now? Crude oil resources? Easy money? That is bad political and economic permutation.
I foresee that northern Nigeria will benefit more than southern Nigeria from a restructure of the country because her expansive and cultivatable land mass, the only fixed, inelastic and highly-prized factor of production (other factors of production are labor, capital and organization) gives her a comfortable edge and a natural advantage to negotiate labor, capital and organization (which three factors are both elastic and swappable) to her benefit.
People like me and many of my friends stationed both here and the Diaspora who are nationals of the landlocked parts of Nigeria will surely pick up our international travel documents, if need be, to come back here to do serious agricultural and mechanized farming.
As a foreigner in the north, I bet that one’s investment will be better promoted and protected by international treaties than they are presently protected in the present lawless Nigeria of administrative impunity where somebody may wake up from sleep one morning to suddenly, without notice, clamp down on ongoing business projects with vindictive policies or withdrawals of existing privileges on which the business ran. This has happened before to an Igbo investor, the owner of the largest tomato puree factory in Africa. Erisco Benfet is the name of the company and the factory was located in northern Nigeria.
I have not heard any other thing from this company, but it seems it has relocated to another part of the world. So many other Igbo businesses destroyed by the punitive Nigerian policies to check the so-called economic domination of Nigeria by the Igbos have re-located outside Nigeria, and they are all doing well.
The problem with some of the northern political elites is that they have been used to cheap money, so, the fear of the unknown would not allow them to think properly and productively. An example is a case of the video of N800 million naira stolen and stashed money that went viral. The money which was hidden in a local and damp secret vault by an idiot politician who did not know the simple technique of how to preserve pulp and paper materials, was found decomposed by the new buyer of the politician’s house which was sold by the indigent and wretched family of the politician when he died. This is a good example of the type of wickedness that have held Nigerians down for fifty years now.
I have no doubt in my mind that northern Nigeria will have the same advantages which Sino-Asian countries had used to out stage the economic hegemonic influence of America and Western Europe because like Sino-Asian countries, northern Nigeria is blessed with both land, and most probably, cheap labor (which is another natural factor of production) as a result of her vast and teeming human population.
With the mineral resources and the entrepreneurial spirit of the East, the seaport and diplomacy of the West, and the huge land mass and population of the North, a new restructured Nigeria of both political and economic autonomies to the constituent parts that is aimed at mutual co-operation and trust, in whatever name it is called, will surely rule the world.
Total freedom in the form of reverting to the previous autonomies of Nigerian ethnic nationalities before the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria to be archived through the restructuring of Nigeria is the only thing that can guarantee lasting freedom in Nigeria. This is more expedient now especially with the official looting of the treasury through bogus salaries and all manner of allowances which Nigerians are now
aware that all the legislators are involved in, as they compete with the executive in the scramble for the destruction of our common patrimony.
This is why I fault the opinion of a former military President when him recently granted an interview to the Channel’s television station where he said, among other things, that the process of selection, mark his choice of word “selection” of a Nigerian Head of State must conform with the desire and aspirations of those of them who WORKED HARD (emphasis mine) to ensure that Nigeria remains one. He also said that some people died (may be, he was talking about 3 million Igbos who died during the civil war) to keep the unity of Nigeria, but failed to add that more people die every day as a result of poverty and penury clamped on Nigerians by those of them who WORKED HARD to keep the unity of the country.
The former military President went on to say that such persons to be vetted as probable candidates (vetted by whom?) for the high office must believe in the indivisibility of the country. The message was well given and we have heard him very well. A recourse to history shows that popular opinion always over rule the opinion of a privileged class. History will vindicate itself in Nigeria. We shall see.
The summary I can make out of the elder statesman’s interview is that Nigerians can now understand their problems better and the sources of those problems, and must move ahead to solving those problems, without unneeded reference and unnecessary permission from the very few Nigerians who had the opportunity either through rigged elections or through the bravado of coup d’ etat, imposed themselves (not for the reason of their exceptional intelligence in spite of the fact that they have all gone to schools in the most prestigious and costly institutions around the world at the expense of the country) and wish now to stamp their opinion perpetually over Nigerians.
No matter how important such people think that they are (made important anyway, by their previous free and illegal access to national treasury), I think that it is wrong for them to believe that their decisions are better than the desire and aspiration of the vast majority of Nigerians to restructure Nigeria.
How will they know the feeling of Nigeria having isolated themselves in highbrow enclaves unlike those of us who have spent all our lives with the people.
The problem is that living in denial, some northern politicians do not want to be told the truth. Anybody who dares to tell them the truth is labeled as ‘an enemy of Nigeria’ because they work in ‘the best interest of the country’, ‘to keep Nigeria united.’ These are the verses of deception that Nigerians have been used to in the last fifty years.
The question should be asked again; how did Nigeria get to this point? Were the different representative organizations of the people including the labor unions able to engage the government to secure both economic and social relief for the people, the situation would not have degenerated to what it is presently. Having felt abandoned, the Nigerian youths took their destiny in their hands through a sudden muster of cohesion and synergy, being resolute in their demand for change.
Though it was condemned by the elitist political class around the world, the recent military putsch in Mali where young army officers forcibly took over the reins of political power from the ‘go-slow’ ‘debt-acquiring’ old politicians who are being phased out by the natural order of old age in that country shows that youths, the people whose future is being mortgaged by a passing generation of corrupt, inept and greedy politicians are getting increasingly impatient with how carelessly and badly their countries are governed.
Though not a good omen for Africa of the twenty-first century, the events in Mali should teach corrupt politicians that people who render peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. But for the corruptive influence of politicians who use the carrot-stick approach to buy-over the conscience of some young Nigerian youths around the corridors of power within whose ambiance the onus of change of guards falls, I prefer the type of political culture and evolution of group consciousness which, through a spontaneous action of mass and popular verdict or through the electoral process, will quietly move away power from the old generation politicians.
On Monday 19th October, 2020, the Military hierarchy deployed troops on Nigerian streets in the same manner that they have failed to deploy effective ones in Sambisa forest and some other North East parts of Nigeria that are infested with terrorism, in what it calls ‘Operation Crocodile Smile’, to check the #EndSARS peaceful protest of Nigerian youths who are asking for justice, equity, fair play, freedom, and right to life in the country.
On Tuesday, 20th October 2020, the blood thirsty crocodile smiled home in the rivers of blood of unarmed Nigerian youths mowed down in the Lekki axis of the #EndSARS campaign. That day has become a sad day, and the first episode in what shall unfold in the story of the last days of what was once a country.
In deploying the Military, the Nigerian government claimed that the protest have been hijacked by, wait for it, ‘the enemies of Nigeria’. No! I do not think that the protest was hijacked by anybody, safe for few cases of government-sponsored hoodlums attacking protesters, and in such cases, those intelligent Nigerian youths who are mostly professionals and artisans have always handled the situations with both maturity and understanding, sometimes, giving those hoodlums both food and some welfare packages to take care of themselves.
The truth is that what we see today going on in Nigeria is actually the mood of the times long suppressed and bottled up because Nigerians are a very peaceful people with an unequalled virtue of patience and long-suffering. More than ten times the nature of abuse of people in many African countries which led to their slip from the cliff to the abyss has happened in Nigeria, and Nigerians, a prayerful lot and specially regarded by God, have kept their peace. This peace-loving nature of Nigerians is actually what the corrupt and inept politicians have taken for granted. But there is a limit to everything, and the bubble bursted.
Well, we shall keep talking, so, I suggest that the government should immediately respond to the demands of the youths who understand, without doubt, that their future is being seriously mortgaged by politicians. The government has militarized the streets and death tolls are rising by the day with the massacre and carnage at the Lekki toll gate, Lagos, where a clandestine ambush was laid on the protesters by Nigerian soldiers, with yet-to-be-known number of life’s lost in the brigandage.
Unfortunately, most of these youths who have been gunned down by the soldiers were draped in national colors. Others were flying Nigerian flag.
It is inconceivably insensitive for the President not to find any humane reason to mention the gruesome massacre of Nigerian youths by the gestapo, Nazi styled Nigeria soldier in Lekki, Lagos, during his national broadcast after his reluctance to do so was challenged by the House of Assembly who asked him to do the needful by addressing the nation on the emergency situation created in the country by the #EndSARS campaign.
Ordinarily, it should be against the Rules of Engagement outside a war zone for any security officer to use arms on a person flying the national flag of the country that the security officer represents.
Combat demanding a military response under Rules of Engagement outside a war zone can only be established on conditions of both an originating aggression and assault wherefore a reason for deployment of an authorized reprisal action can be sustained. The deployed authorized reprisal personnel must also need to use a public address system to warm of an impending action if the aggression is not stopped, and this process which happens to be the last in the chains of command and order must have tangible evidence (possibly video evidence) to show that it actually happened.
This is why the military maintains such sophisticated and well-funded forward-mission under-cover departments as the Reconnaissance and Espionage as prelude to tactical operations for the penetration of ‘enemy’ territory before a core military campaign is mounted.
It is criminal to act outside these Rules of Engagement in civilian enclave where, even if you must shoot, you either shoot cannon bullets or water bullets and not shoot to kill, but shoot to conquer, employing all deceptive means approved for such tactical operations including stunning.
Any security officer or agent of government who goes contrary to these stipulated Rules of Engagements is liable, together with the issuing command officers along the chain of command (if any), to military court-martial or subject to charges against international human right laws applicable around the world , if the home government refuses to act and bring the perpetrators to justice.
This is the minimum standard as enshrined in the United Nation’s relevant Charters in military Rules of Engagement in public places, to which Nigeria is both a member and a signatory.
Against this background, it is very clear that with the recent development in Nigeria especially the Lekki massacre, the Nigerian government and the government officials who authorized those actions are already in trouble, because, if the human and civil Rights groups in Nigeria know how to find their way to the international court of justice at the Hague, some Nigerian leaders who may be charged for crimes against humanity may have to spend the rest of their lives, after their tenors in government, cooling down in prison.
To elucidate how responsive the Rules of Engagement must be in the respect for national colors, Dem Furhrer, Adolf Hitler the Nazi Chief, criminally used this revered privilege to negative and selfish advantage during the Second World War when his flight officers flew aircrafts fully cloned and adorned in friendly nations colors to bomb allies of such countries after using the mischievous disguise to gain free and easy access to their air spaces as a result of the colors of the aircrafts.
This is one of the reasons the government must be quick in attending to the demands of the youths including re-structuring Nigeria, to avoid the next level of degeneration in the pursuance of popular and mass verdict. This next level is the appearance of the ‘fifth columnist’, the true and real enemies of the government and Nigeria, who will escalate and possibly make the struggle get out of hand. Adolf Hitler used the ‘fifth columnist’ method to complicate and prolong the Second World War.
Finally, one thing is certain. On Tuesday, October 20, 2020, the real foundation of the realization of a popular mass verdict in Nigeria was deeply etched in rock and watered with the blood of Nigerian youths. It is only a matter of time, and the peoples’ aspiration of equity, justice, fairplay, freedom and right to life will be realized in Nigeria.
So help us God!