Hardship protest: “Bi iwo ba se rere…” Festus Adedayo

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By Festus Adedayo Ph.D

All of a sudden, President Bola Tinubu is running from pillar to post. The febrile fear with which his presidency tries to stave off the proposed August 1 hardship protest is baffling. It seems to remind one of the biblical verse in Genesis 4:7 which says, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?” This English interpretation does not convey the message’s total interpretative capturing as its Yoruba version rendition. That particular scriptural verse is interpreted in Yoruba as “Bi iwo ba se rere, ara ki yio ha ya o?” It was God speaking to Cain, Adam and Eve’s firstborn, who was enraged because he reaped what he sowed. Cain leapt into a fury because God rejected his paltry offering and accepted his brother, Abel who was God-respecting. Rather than see this rejection as his own doing and take a redemptive detour, Cain took a callous step further. He murdered his younger brother.

Recounting Nigerians’ groaning lot in the last 14 months here will be an overkill. The man they hyped as coming from a pedigree of dancers whose eclectic dancing feet attracted donations of slaves now dances and is barely gifted a wrap of corn meal. Rather, his feeble dance steps attract curses and boos. A pre-dancing cheering audience now jeers as its stomach hisses and rumbles. To say Nigeria tastes as bitter as Jogbo leaf would be an understatement. Our country is Jogbo leaf itself. Wherever you turn, it is bitterness. And this is under the grip of a man who was said to be King Midas whose touch turned everything to gold.

Nigerians’ unusual resilience makes the world agape with incredulity. They are a people who could weather the storm, no matter the turbulence. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti couldn’t understand such orthodoxy of suffering which he called cowardice. “My people sef dem fear too much… My Pa dey for house…I nor wan die…” he dramatises our pacifist spirit. Rotimi Amaechi said something worse recently about Nigerians. In a viral video which appeared to be a lecture on Nigerians’ famed pacifism, he said even if you kill a Nigerian’s father and mother, they would move on and say it was God’s wish for them. What many do not know is that Nigerians detest their leaders taking them for granted. Wily General Ibrahim Babangida knew only of the first sheaf about Nigerians’ resilient spirit. He didn’t however know about the other sheaf – the people’s tendency for rebellion. The truth is that, when Nigerians flip the other side of the cudgel, they are difficult to tame. By the time Nigerians made up their minds about IBB, they dropped his heap by the dumpsite of history.

Revisionists say that the key to Nigerians’ docile tendencies can be found in their history. What they call a history devoid of bloodshed. They juxtapose Nigeria with Kenya. In the latter, the Mau Mau rebellion in the British Kenya Colony between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the Mau Mau, and the British authorities lasted for a good eight years. So they submit that whilst rebellion against oppressors was a Kenyan DNA, pampering oppressors were Nigerian’s. Which is not true. Our forefathers fought, and shed blood for the freedom we have now. Collective fights against white aggressors may be rare but we had the Ovonramwen Nogbaisis. Ovonramwen was the Ọba of the Benin Kingdom who fought British usurpation. He attacked British Deputy Commissioner and Consul for the Niger Coast Protectorate, James Robert Phillips, killing him and virtually all of his entourage. A punitive expedition against the Benin kingdom resulted in its razing in 1897 and the looting of its bronzes.

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Nigerians do not expect their leaders to be magicians, apologies to Madam RAT. They even know that the taciturn Mallam from Daura inflicted his Janus persona on the economy so fatally that the wound would take a long to heal. But Nigerians detest governmental deceit, incompetence and hypocrisy advertised as leadership. In the last 14 months, this has been the broth served Nigerians a la carte. To worsen matters, our leadership has carried on with an I-don’t-care attitude which Yoruba describe as a “let the angry torrents of rainfall pierce into shreds the helpless cocoyam leaves if it can — òjò pa ewé kókò, b’ó le ya, k’ó ya”.

So when this same leadership runs from Ankara to Kutuwenji in its bid to stop Nigerians from letting the whole world know of their plight, the apt response to it is the same that God gave to stubborn Cain, “Bì ìwo bá se rere, ara kì yíò ha yá o?” In the last couple of weeks, the government has been funnelling scarce resources into bribing cash-tivists who call themselves activists not to come out and demonstrate on August 1. Students’ union leaders have received theirs. Journalists have. The Three Gbosas people have. Traditional rulers across Nigeria, too have visited an Aso Rock which changes people into unfeeling mummies.

So many reasons have been proffered for why Nigerians must not protest their deplorable plights. One is that criminals could hijack the people’s constitutional right to protest. So, why spend people’s money to pay policemen if they cannot be funnelled out in their thousands to protect protesters on their constitutionally mandated responsibility to an absent government? The second reason from the government on why Nigerians should dress their punches in velvet gloves is that the government is finding a way around the hunger in the land. One is reminded of someone who is spending 20 years to practice madness. They even say that since the protest has no identifiable leadership, it could be uncontrollable like scattered pellets of a dane-gun bullet. The police also came out to Afghanistanize the protest by claiming that intel told them foreign mercenaries were part of the ploy. Since they know anything security is opaque, it is quite easy for them to befuddle the people with such scary lies. This is the same police which no calamity has ever befallen Nigeria that they forewarned Nigerians about. But, shouldn’t Nigerians let the world know about their plights?

Let me mimic judges at the temple of justice: Considering all the evidence before me, Nigerians must protest on August 1. Nigerians need to retrieve their country from the hands of leaders who don’t care about their plights. Not violently. Violence under-develops a people. Do you think, if he ever survives his ongoing ordeal, William Ruto, in his own words, “the village boy (who) has become the president of Kenya,” will ever take Kenyans for granted? Let the man whose ambition it has always been to live in Aso Rock be made to commit to making Nigerians live a meaningful life.