In this interview with WALE AKINSELURE, a retired professor of Sociology and former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Lai Olurode speaks on the planned August 1-10 protest.
THERE is a planned nationwide protest starting on Thursday. Protest is not a new thing around the world and Nigeria has had its own like the Ali Must Go protest, Occupy Nigeria protest and most recently, the #EndSARS protests. What do you consider as the peculiarities, trends of protests in Nigeria?
Protest in this country is just one-way traffic. Generally, they tend to fall in the line of open protests, street marches, people marching on the road, carrying sticks, banners sometimes armed with microphone, going about in public places and the trend has been that they will be joined by people that have a different motive. They get intermingled with them and sometimes, the protest gets hijacked and gets diverted from the original intention of the planners of the protest. Let me say as a preamble that protests are legitimate; they are meant to invite attention of government that is thought not to be listening, to certain acts of omission or commission. But largely, it is a means of expressing social discontent and getting government to respond. People all over the world since the 1960s in the United States of America, where protests have become a medium through which the Blacks, the poor people, those social groups that are discriminated against, communicated their reservations about the governance process to those in power, especially to political authorities or local authorities. Sometimes, they could be localised to invite attention to certain peculiarities in the local government, like wanting to cut down a tree that is believed to have been there for years. In our own contest, it is more political, more directed at government officials that are thought to be unreachable, irresponsive, irresponsible to the yearnings of the public. It has been one-way because we have never adopted the other modes of civil disobedience. For example, in some other civilised terrain, it could be through picketing, sitting, boycott of government services, petitions. We have never explored petitions. I have advocated that we have used this conventional approach of protest often and often. So government gets jittery, why not choose something else and you catch government by surprise. You sit down in your homes, you petition the president, governor or local government chairman that are believed not to be responding or addressing issues of development and issues of democratisation rather than going to the streets and allow people to be shot, why not engage in other modes of expressing dissatisfaction with government policies. Using petitions, for example, our post offices will come alive; you take letters there, address them to the president, governor. Some elites can help to finance it if the people are so poor, just write petition that you are not happy with what government is doing, that will be a powerful signal and we can say why we are unhappy instead of carrying placards that will make us to be easy targets for security agents who themselves are angry and hungry as well, who may want to take their vent on the masses.
Are you emphatically asserting that protests, over the years, have not yielded the desired result?
I don’t think, in most cases, we get the desired result; they turn out to be destructive, private and public property are destroyed. At the end of the day, who pays for the damage that has been caused? Probably insurance, but insurance may not cover all. We may end up using taxpayers’ money to fix those destroyed facilities. You destroy buildings, vandalise government, private properties. Look at what happened in Lagos, it was like some people targeted Lagos and they wanted to level Lagos. Sometimes, politics has the colour of ethnoreligious politics, that is why we need to be very careful. I am not against protests but I am saying that let us be creative, scientific. If you have done the same thing over the years and they are not producing results, what is its essence? The essence is to communicate your grievances, communicate what you are not happy about to government, critical state actors. There are means by which you can do this. I am not sure we have employed petitions before, boycott of government services so that there will be no bloodshed, destruction of lives and properties as lives destroyed cannot be brought back. Lives lost to protest, how do we bring them back? Properties are looted, damaged, and we have to go all over again. If you wreak havoc on the nation, who is going to be responsible in the end? We will be responsible again. That will mean additional tax or government will remove subsidy away from some areas into areas that ordinarily would not have been in our calculus at all. If you are employing the same procedure over the years and it is not yielding the desired results, why can’t you try another procedure to arrive at the desired result.
Some would argue that writing petitions is not new and has not yielded results overtime hence the resort to protest. But with hours to the planned protest, government has announced a raft of measures which shows that the protest is already yielding results. Don’t you consider writing petition too soft to deal with our kind of government?
We are not sufficiently challenging those in power, we just take it for granted, they cannot function, they will not perform and we don’t look in their direction. I once asked my students when I was in the university: ‘How many of you know your local government chairman?’ Very few hands were up. I also asked: ‘How many of you have ever written a petition to local government authorities that you have no adequate water supply and bad roads in the neighbourhood, and you mention the name of the road, the name of the street that has to be fixed?’ Nobody. We just complain underground but petition is okay, manifest just like protest because the media will go there, see you, interview you, when you are going to submit your petition to the local government chairman, governor, president or their representatives. So, I don’t think because you say that the only language that government understands is threatening protest. There are other ones, like I have mentioned, that are legitimate expressions of social dissatisfaction with government. Communicating grievances to government cannot be limited to just street protest. I recall some years back, I did some analysis of Letters to the Editor when Lateef Jakande was governor; I did the same thing when Lam Adesina was governor. You can see that government, at that time, was responding to some of these letters to the editor. Jakande and Adesina, in particular, would quietly flip through the newspapers, look at letters addressed to them, and in a way, respond to them, that is civil procedure of communication between the government and the public, it is a way of building citizenship and empowerment. We have to attract our citizenship. Let’s be positive; let’s think that government meant well; let’s concede it to them that it is not visiting this crisis deliberately on the masses. What do they stand to gain? They have family members among us. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. I think we do a combination of several methods of civil disobedience not just street protests alone.
You mentioned Lateef Jakande and Lam Adesina, there is the notion that today’s leaders love to be on their high horses and rarely communicate with the citizens like leaders of the past.
That is what is unfortunate, but I have seen some governors actually coming down from the Olympian heights and talking to the people. I have seen the governor of Niger State and one or two other governors, that is what they should be doing. They cannot be coming to us every four years to ask for votes to renew their mandate, but it is because we are not asking them questions. How many of us have written a letter to the governor directly or to our senators, we focus on highly placed elected public office holders. What about senators, House of Representatives members, local government chairmen, councilors? They are closer to us but we hardly address them. It is our country, we need to take our country back from those people if they are not respecting the rights of the people. They must not wait until it is time to renew their mandate. It will be in their own interest, if they don’t to commit class suicide, to listen to us more.
What must the Tinubu administration do to prevent more protests or acts of civil disobedience during his term in office?
We need massive investments in social services delivery, that was the magic that Obafemi Awolowo did, I was surprised that they are looking in that direction sufficiently enough. There has to be massive investment in health, education. Go around Ibadan, Osogbo, see our schools, roofs have been blown off, classrooms are deteriorating condition, chairs have been broken, roofs are leaking. Go to health, go to the so-called state hospital in Iwo, Osun State, you can’t have two medical doctors there; you hardly will meet 15-20 nurses there. When I was young, I used to go to the local dispensary, we grew up there. I grew up knowing tap water, not borehole water; children of nowadays may never see tap water in their lives. I grew up in an environment where the school was well maintained, you are given lunch in school. Private universities have proliferated; private secondary schools have multiplied. Go and juxtapose structures in these private institutions with the structures in public schools; public schools have been destroyed. Public hospitals, schools are where you build citizenship, nationality, where people say this is the hospital where their mum gave birth to them. We have destroyed the public sphere, we are matching on them. All we need to do is to get our priorities right.
Let our priority be in education, health and we can have a turnaround. Everything is not about election. If the massive accumulation from the removal of oil subsidy has been spend on social services largely, rather than on rice and these other items, I am sure our country will be better for it. The only miracle that Awolowo did was massive investment in education; school-age children were able to go to school, without having to pay and the progressive governors during the era of 1979-1983 repeated the same thing and post 1999, there was massive investment in those key social sectors. Let us look in that direction. Also government should address too much flamboyance; government is too flamboyant and too loud. They ride the best vehicles in town which are even being used in America. In those European countries, they are careful about living too big. It is too pronounced in our country. We need to reduce the flamboyance of political office holders so that they can have a feel of what the ordinary people, people who are out of government, feel. And that is why there is congestion, everybody wants to be in government; all of us don’t need to be in Aso Rock but let them give us our own comfort zone. Let them not suffocate us; let them give us some breathing space so that we can also live not as well as they are but we can have a modicum of stable life.
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