Actions, inactions of Hunger Protests, aftermath

WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER

info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com

The last days of the 10-day August hunger protest were a nightmare to Nigerians. I am careful not to venture into the discourse of whether or not the protest was successful. What we lost and what we gained are topics for another day, and I hope when they are told, we would all take the appropriate lessons from them.
But there are pertinent concerns we must begin to address from now on due to their sensitivity and imperative to our national life. For instance, when we consider the destruction occasioned by the protest in selected states of the north, what I expected to see were not just the property destroyed or the unavoidable loss of lives, but the children and the youths unleashed on the system. Those children seen in the protest, as captured in the media, I would ask, were they protesting against hunger and bad governance? From all indications, no. They were available, engaged and mobilised and turned against the system. Without mincing words, the children were weaponised. Our problem as a country shouldn’t be more about those who engaged and mobilised them, a practice which by global convention is condemnable, but for the fact that we parade that much population of youths and children that can easily be engaged, mobilised and weaponised against the country. That is a bad omen for our country. No wonder, the fight against insecurity is somewhat unwinnable for us; as ready and cheap recruits are littering in every corner of our streets.
Another concern, thankfully, the Nigerian police authority under the commendable leadership of IGP Egbetokun has been able to curtail the foreign elements from hijacking of the protest by engagin hostile actors who want to destabilise the country. Reportedly, one of those hostile foreign actors has a shop in the headquarters of the Nigerian Labour Congress which was raided by the police aside others who were able to escape out of the country. If anything, it sends a strong signal to any hostile foreign actors that the Nigeria Police Force is ready to thwart their efforts in equal measures.
However, I expected President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to address these revelations, especially the case of the minors in the protest, with the urgency it deserves. I expected his topmost team of experts to equally spot this worrying concern and advise the President promptly and accordingly. The state governors and the local government administration must, as a matter of urgency, begin to draft an inclusive program for the youth and the underage with regard to development and positive engagement. I suggest the imposition of a state of emergency and the calling of a national or regional emergency meeting to decide the way forward to redeem the strength of the Nigeria underage and youths from extreme negative social and political engagements.
The protest has come and gone – hopefully. But it has opened all our eyes, most especially those in the corridors of power, that Nigerians are not finding it easy to survive. The economy is hard and biting seriously. Most worrisome is the huge challenge of affordable access to basic food items in the country. Right now, there is only one thing to do: respond and respond most appropriately. The President characteristically told the youths that he heard them and that he heard them loudly; now, he must also work to respond very loudly to their cries. And what must be done, must be done, with all hands on the deck from all corners of the country, across all levels of government running down to the citizens living up to their responsibilities.
We will not go away from the ill-fated protest and the cumulative cause of the national socio-economic decay that precipitated it, until we have radically x-rayed governance errors – at all the levels – in providing real governance for the people of Nigeria. Except we are deceiving ourselves, even those with secured careers and entrepreneurial activists would continue to suffer if our government at all levels keep failing to do their job as expected. For goodness sake, this is a federated unit, with responsibilities handed down to the government at all levels. Where are the state governments? Where are the local government authorities? Can we be frank and face reality for once? Are we supposed to suffer food insecurity in Nigeria if we have functioning governments at the state and local government levels? 36 states Ministries of Agriculture and 774 departments of Agriculture at the Local government; what are their job functions?
If we are really serious about having positive changes and solving our problems as a nation, we must also jettison our biases and sentiment and point our anger at the appropriate quarters. Until the governments at the state and local government levels become responsible to their constitutional roles, there is nothing much the federal government can do to alleviate our suffering.
We must get to the point – and hopefully soon – whereby the state government would become accountable for the wealth of their states. The era of former governors suddenly becoming richer than the states they governed for eight years can no longer be sustainable. If we must end bad governance, we must beam our touches at the local and state governments; and for the citizens and residents of each respective state to do the needful. We can only solve the challenges of food insecurity, poor education and health services from that level. We should begin to see state administrations embarking on holistic NEEDS assessments before planning state budgets. They should know what the people need and put the state monies where they are needed.
The basic problem of our country is our inability to feed our population, arising from below par operation of the national agricultural sector. But the failure of the sector does not only bring food insecurity upon us, but also denies us further development in every other sector that largely depends on agriculture to flourish. Every national development begins with agricultural development and sustainability. No nation has grown and become strong without first fully developing its agricultural sector. When a nation builds self sufficiency in the sector, it simultaneously solves a number of national problems. Job creation would literally resolve. The sector would engage a large population across its many fronts and value chains. Cottage industries, semi and large scale industries that absorb produce from the primary sector would spring up across the country; and even in neighbouring nations, the sector would begin to constitute a major element of foreign-earning for the country, and definitely, we would see the emergence of a less crowded urban settlements and reduce insecurity when a large number of our youths, men and women are gainfully engaged in the agricultural sector.
This is what we lost as a country when we abandoned the agricultural sector in the early years of our political independence, to romance the beautiful new bride of the time: crude oil. And that is one thing we must return to if we are serious about redefining the progress of this country. There is no other way. We cannot manufacture jobs without sustainable industries and we cannot have industries without sustainable raw materials. We cannot be a mass food producing nation and suffer food insecurity. The ball is on the table of our leaders across all levels of governance; lead rightly and let Nigerians follow.
We must provide sustainable answers to the national oil and gas debacle. Like I always say, corruption in the sector is as worse, if not much more than the errors of fuel subsidy. If we can summon the strength to take off subsidy, we must likewise summon all the courage to deal decisively with the elements behind the corruption that forces the petroleum sector to its knees and are grossly responsible for the entire pains the sector constitutes to the Nigeria economy.
If we can live up to the presidential order to make adequate crude available to all local refineries with payments in naira, we would have started decimating the ranks of the bad guys who are bent on turning the national property to a self-serving resource. Secondly, if the President can force off the hands of the cabal, and see the Port Harcourt refinery onboard, producing 12 million litter of petrol daily as projected, as soon as possible, we would have obtained the local capacity to offset a modest 27 percent of the 44.3 million litre per day consumption of the country, according to the Nigeria Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA). Now, we would have to consider all the other privately owned refineries, including the Waltersmith Refining and Petrochemical Company Ltd, OPAC refineries, Niger Delta Petroleum Resources (Train 3) and Dangote Oil Refinery Company, and factor them into the national supply equation. With the reality on ground, it is however necessary to consider increasing the crude allocation to local refineries. The President must promptly look into this consideration.
With full access to local crude using the local currency, and zero importation of finished petroleum products into the country by government sanction, the pump price would have no other alternative but to take a downturn to as low as #300 in the near future. This is obtainable, but requires the President to approach the industry with the same resolution with which he ended the petroleum subsidy in the country. Doing this would no doubt endear the President to the majority of Nigerians once again because the perennial supply uncertainty in the sector would be no more.

The Nigeria we began to build some few decades ago, suddenly, by some forces, explainable and unexplainable, has deviated from the foundational standard needed to build a thriving nation. Suddenly, rather than committing our strengths to virtues that upend peace, productivity and work, all our attention is now shifted to prosperity and what we can get individually partially from the system, in return for the lowest input to the same. Our leaders over the years, no doubt, relegated, if not abandoned agriculture and its immense benefits for the darling petroleum industry, because the latter comes with fast and huge money. The citizens went after prosperity with a craze that is undefined; those that are not devising means to corruptly access public resources and wealth, are pursuing, with abandoned obsession, material wealth and lavish lifestyle through religious affiliations and worship. As a consequence, financial crime has been on the rise, given that a significant number of Nigerians want to make money without commensurate work. In all these, hard work, as a value, does not have a place in our reckoning as a people and a nation any longer. This is why our politicians are no longer serving us but their bellies. Like former President Obasanjo once said, the two most successful industries in the country have since become politics and religion. We are all in the struggle to make money without work. We cannot expect change when we are holding to this error; we must change to get the change we desire.
I will round up this piece today with some lines on the roles played and still being played by some political actors in the country before, during and after the protest. Across the board, we saw some statesmen, traditional rulers and a number of religious leaders openly addressing and pleading with the organisers of the protest and the youth to consider dialogue as a better option, knowing full well the antecedents of the country and the very likelihood of the protest being hijacked. Unfortunately, we also saw some who decided not to only spur on the protest, but were seen doing everything possible to romance and curry favour of the protesters. The likes of Atiku Abubakar’s and Peter Obi’s actions and inactions regarding the protest should worry all of us. At a time we were all scared of a repetition of the gruesome killings and destruction that greeted the ENDASRS protest of 2020, these men with their huge influences were apparently only interested in how the protest would enhance their chances at winning future elections. Their utterances and direct attacks on the government and its apparatus as the protest went on, and their indirect attitudes of speaking out for the protest at all turns, when others were busy appealing to them to end the outing, cannot be forgotten without reckoning. When the time is ripe, we must ask them questions about the roles they played.