The ongoing hardship protest in Nigeria may be squelched by strident rebuke and heavy-handed coercion, but there’s a deeper dynamic in it that bodes ill for the country.
By Chudi Okoye
After weeks of it being whispered and days of its disrupted execution, the 2024 hunger protest in Nigeria (hashtagged #EndBadGovernance) is winding down to a whimper.
Compared to the Kenyan protest (hashtagged #RejectFinanceBill2024) which erupted earlier in June and eventually forced President William Ruto to reject his legislature’s controversial finance bill, the Nigerian affair – some might argue – has yielded little except carnage, deaths, arrests, and a roiling of the republic. The fissures and pressures that provoked the protest persist, but the brutal response of the Nigerian regime makes clear that it isn’t going to give ground, despite pious pretenses about its disposition to dialogue.
That said, any claim of a failed #EndBadGovernance protest, already gleefully and unconscionably made by some, is, in my opinion, wrong. Something important has come out of the chaotic protest in Nigeria.
An Igbo proverb says a fierce wind reveals the rotten rump of a hen. So it has been with Nigeria and the #EndBadGovernance protest. The blustery wind of the protest has revealed the rotting rearside of Nigeria.
The patriotic protagonists who planned the Nigerian protest, evidently disillusioned and yearnful youths, were not naïve. They likely anticipated the antiquated heavy-handed response of Nigeria’s ‘hybrid regime’: as the country is currently classified in The Economist’s global Democracy Index which rates countries on a continuum between autocracy and democracy. They likely also envisaged protest infiltration by spoilers and nihilists, some possibly planted by the regime itself. But it is a safe bet that the protest organizers never saw this coming: the injection of ethnic dialectics into what is essentially class struggle, and thus regional variations in responses to their protest.
The #EndBadGovernance protest is about much that ails Nigeria today. It’s about the excruciating hardships faced by the populace, the lack of jobs and grinding poverty; about the surging inflation, seen most acutely in the astronomical rise of food and fuel prices, all made worse by the government’s neoliberal economic policies, including petrol subsidy removal and Naira depreciation. It’s about worsening insecurity in the land, the rampant kidnappings, banditry, farmers-herdsmen conflict and violent secessionist agitation.
The protest is also about the rank insensitivity of the present administration. In Nigeria, no one fears the lumpen povertariat. Not the gilded few, roistering and flaunting their fabulous wealth amid monumental poverty. Not the government, engorged in unbelievable profligacy. Even as the nation groans under the policies it has floated, the government remains bloated, its officials living large: miles-long convoys; new SUVs for federal legislators, price tag: ₦160 million each; ₦20 billion (nearly a fifth of Ekiti State’s entire 2023 budget!) spent renovating the vice-president’s residence; plans to purchase new planes for the presidency, to add to the existing fleet; and, despite public outcry, plans proceeding apace to spend ₦15 trillion (about the combined 2024 budgets of the 36 states) on a coastal highway contract, awarded without competitive bidding to a company connected to President Bola Tinubu and his family.
It is for these outrages and more that the protesters are pouring out on to the pavements.
But not if you ask some ethnic chauvinists. Even with the #EndBadGovernance protest merely looming, word was already abroad, pushed by mischief-makers purporting to speak for Yorubas of the Southwest, that this was a plot by Igbos of the Southeast, an “insurrection” no less, to bring down Bola Tinubu’s government. Soon there was talk of a counter protest, with genocidal threats and the tag #IgboMustGo, insisting that Igbos must vacate Lagos and other parts of the Southwest. On July 27, the following message was posted on X, the social media platform, under the handle, Lagospedia:
“Lagosians and every S’West stakeholders [sic] should prepare for the massive protest of #IgboMustGo on the 20th – 30th of August. They have 1 month from now to leave and relocate their business from all S’West States. We urge all Yorubas living in the S’East to return home.”
To their credit, as the tempo of threats and intimidation rose, some Yoruba leaders spoke up to foil the roil. Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, along with spokespeople for Yoruba organizations like Afenifere, the Yoruba Council of Elders, the Eminent Elders Forum and the Western Regional Organization all made statements to douse the tension. So did candidates in the 2023 presidential election, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), who condemned the ethnic slur and incitement, calling for the purveyors to be apprehended by the authorities. Even President Tinubu, in his otherwise vapid address to the nation on August 4 about the protest, spoke out against the ethnic attacks.
Igbos, however, were not entirely reassured. The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) waved off the Yoruba leaders’ statements as “hypocritical,” insisting they were the secret “sponsors” of the attacks on Igbos. The South East Caucus in the National Assembly criticized the ethnic profiling and scapegoating of Igbos, recalling the bloody history of such targeting, for Igbos in Nigeria but also other tribes in Africa. Other interventions were defiant, insisting on Igbo right to live anywhere in Nigeria as long as demands for restructuring or Igbo separation from the federation are rejected.
Nevertheless, with an apparent ploy to pin protest planning on the Igbos unfolding, and with all that this entailed, there was a cascade of cautions from Igbo leaders and groups advising Igbos to shun the protest. The pitch for protest abstention came from all corners: Ohaneze Ndigbo, governors, lawmakers, IPOB, etc. All urged Igbo people to stand down and let this one pass because the calculus of blame and retribution was stacked against them.
Dissecting Indifference
It is totally understandable why Igbo leaders would urge a path of protest resistance. It’s self-preservation. Thinkers and philosophers going back to Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes – and even their predecessors in classical antiquity like Epicurus – have emphasized the idea that self-preservation is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A 2018 reissue of Samuel Butler’s 1900 prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey has a subtitle that captures the sentiment: “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
And so it is with the Igbo decision to stay out of the 2024 #EndBadGovernance protest.
At first, one might wonder how wise really it is for Igbos to opt out of this historic political surge in Nigeria. It is not as if they’ve fared any better in this economy.
Igbos are not in any way immune to the widespread privation in Nigeria. Although their homeland was once posited as a felicitous region somewhat better off than the more impoverished parts of Nigeria, years of marginalization and neglect by the federal government (which became more acute in the Buhari/Tinubu era), along with sustained misgovernance by a rapacious regional ruling class, led to an increasingly radicalized separatist movement which in turn has spawned a spate of violent criminality, seen most vividly in a rising scourge of self-terrorism in the region. The economic and social consequences of this have been devastating: a contraction of the regional economy, caused by supply chain disruptions, market uncertainty, investment flight and business collapse; all leading to a loss of productivity and widespread unemployment, creating a swollen underclass which, in turn, feeds the terrorist enterprise. It is a vicious circle.
Given the festering conditions in the region, and especially the widespread discontent, you would think the Southeast would offer a fertile ground for the current protest. Alas, but for a smattering of protest activity in some of the Southeastern states, the region in general demurred, in line with leadership guidance. In fact, there was even the depressing spectacle of some Igbo characters taking matters too far, disporting themselves in pubs and parks as they mocked earnest protesters in other parts of the country who were getting killed, arrested and generally harassed by the authorities.
It was most unbecoming. But you could understand (even if you don’t justify) the detachment and sense of schadenfreude in a people long brutalized by Nigeria, whatever they do. Igbo people have gone from initially resisting assimilation into a colonial Nigeria to a Nigerianistic fervor under the leadership of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. From there, after being framed for the failure of Nigeria’s First Republic, it was ‘Biafrexit’, as I call it, led by Emeka Ojukwu which culminated in civil war. Then there was a re-embracing of Nigeria, in the Second Republic, led again by Zik and the likes of Alex Ekwueme. After that, with yet another bout of Igbo othering and rejection by Nigeria, an impatient tendency emerged seeking Igbo exit from the country, led by the likes of Ralph Uwazuruike and Nnamdi Kanu. A brutal suppression of that tendency led to yet another phase in Igbo evolution in Nigeria: what I call ‘Biafritis’, a phase of despondency and self-mutilation.
Igbos have tried really hard, yet again, to be good Nigerians in this Fourth Republic. In the first 20 years of the current dispensation, across six presidential elections held between 1999 and 2019, Igbos overwhelmingly voted for contenders from other parts of the country, even rejecting their own kin who contested (including, in 2003 and 2007, their great war leader, Ojukwu). However, in 2023, they backed Peter Obi, not necessarily for primordial reasons but because Obi had put together a third-party electoral coalition that they thought offered Nigeria reprieve from the governing duopoly of the PDP and All Progressives Congress (APC) that seemed bereft of new ideas to move the country forward.
Obi constructed an unusual coalition comprising a cross-section of eager youths (of the type behind the current hunger protests), organized labor, members of the enlightened urban professional class, segments of the intelligentsia, and even organized religion (mostly Catholic and evangelical), all built on a primordial core of Obi’s Igbo South East.
Obi was not returned as winner of the 2023 presidential election. He was instead accounted by the electoral commission to have secured 25.4% of the votes, carrying 11 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, as against the 36.6% won by the APC’s Bola Tinubu who carried 12 states, and the PDP’s Atiku who secured 29.1% and also carried 12 states.
Although Obi contested the election result in court, his legal challenge was nowhere as fierce as Atiku’s who really shredded Tinubu in his forensic assault. Even as Tinubu settled into governance, it is Atiku, I would argue, that has provided the boldest opposition to his administration. Yet, time and again, we see tics of nervousness and vituperation from the administration whenever Obi pipes up in opposition to its policies and actions. It is not hard to understand why: geopolitics.
This is what we have seen with the ongoing hunger protest in Nigeria. Though backed both by Obi and Atiku, bigots and regime apologists – most of them edgelords and bargain basement provocateurs – were fast to fasten an ethnic logic to the protest, attempting to foist it on Obi and his Igbo ethnic group. Hence, the Igbo abstention: a rational reaction by a people constantly threatened in the Nigerian firmament.
There’s some concern, no question, as to the near- and long-term implication of Igbo protest avoidance. One could make a cogent case that it culminates to self-disenfranchisement, given that there’s casus belli for the protest which affects the Igbos and everybody else – more so because the Nigerian constitution envisions democratic participation both through street protests (see Sections 39(1) and 40) as well as through the ballot box (see for instance Sections 14(1)(c) and 77).
One could also make a case that protest abstention threatens to fracture Peter Obi’s delicate third-party coalition, comprising a concentric circle of an Igbo core and outer progressive rings, which he will need for another sortie in 2027, failing which Igbo stab at the presidency of Nigeria will be unfeasible until 2039, as I have argued in previous writings. Protest abstention could prove a forced error in this regard.
But all that aside, Igbo abstention signifies something deeper for Nigeria: an emotional withdrawal, a form of psychological abandonment, by a constitutive part of the federation which had hitherto invested energy and resources into the Nigerian project.
Similar to signals before an earthquake (animal behavior, changes in water level, earth tremors) or those before a volcanic eruption (gas emissions, temperature changes, subsidence), for those who wish to take note: Igbo emotional or strategic exit portends an ineluctable fracturing of the Nigerian federation.
Great!
Note, though, that the warning-off of SouthEasterners from the protest pre-dated the accusations that they were the ones plotting the protest. In fact, even in 2023, after general elections, there were calls by some activist groups, for demonstrations to reject the farcical outcome of the presidential polls against the backdrop of the obvious rigging, the cases of violent attacks on voters (especially in Lagos – against SouthEasterners and anyone mistaken for a SouthEasterner); the “glitches” in INEC’s systems, the lies? subterfuge, irregularities and obvious manipulation that headlined the elections, country-wide. Whilst Peter Obi had advised against the then planned protests, Ohanaeze and many notable Igbos advised SouthEasterners specifically, to ensure not to join any protests as they would be singled out and gunned down.
This time around, in the build-up to the #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria protest, the repeated and variegated warning pound out also, and, thankfully, our people heeded.
More loves and properties were thus saved. Our profile as a political entity was burnished beyond expectation, our force as a voting bloc also underlined, as day rapidly follows night (and vice versa) in the march towards 2027.
One more thing: it had been made clear that we have have protested by not protesting. There are SouthEast-specific issues for which we have been agitating and clamouring. Not only has the government at the centre turned derisive deaf ears to them, but the rest of Nigeria pretends not to even see our tears pouring, our blood spilled at every opportunity, our people repressed, maltreated, maligned and marginalised, nor do they ever indicate that they hear our weeping and wailing for the injustice with which Nigeria force-feeds us morning day and night and in every sphere of national life.
Our sit-at-home/stand-on-the-sidelines on August 1 2024 was the wisest, most resounding and most effective format of protestation witnessed in Nigedia during this #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria adventure.
Daalu.