By Suyi Ayodele
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should count himself lucky. What he feared most has happened to him. What his predecessors in office could not do, he has done effortlessly. What others before him, including him, had used in the past to deceive Nigerians, while campaigning, but would never do when they got to the office, God has made it happen for Tinubu, seamlessly! Nobody can use it for political sloganeering anymore. Nigeria is ‘restructured’ without anyone calling for a roundtable discussion. Nature abhors vacuum. The cosmic has taken care of our desires.
We can no longer live under the pretence of Nigeria being one. The August 1, 2024 ‘nationwide protest’ that is no protest, has taken care of that for us. I have never believed in the ‘protest’. I have never believed that it would achieve anything. But I have been proved wrong! The ‘protest’ has brought to the fore the uniqueness of the three regions that constitute Nigeria.
The North has remained monolithic with the outcome of the ‘protest’ over there. Those children of the North have demonstrated to us in practical forms what their forebears had hidden from us for ages. The North does not think like the rest of the nation. Hunger also has its different forms. We now know that when people are hungry over there in the North, anything becomes edible. Computers now taste like masara (maize). Furniture tastes like tuwo shinkafa delicacies. Concrete slabs and iron rods are jollof rice spices. One of the ‘protesters’ in Kano carried a placard with the inscription that the price of ‘weed’ (Indian Hemp) should be reduced. I agreed with him. Once one is dazed, hunger will no longer be felt! What afflicts the North is different from what afflicts the South. It is like a case of the affliction of the mother being different from that of her child. The child is crying for breast milk, the mother needs a plate of amala to be able to lactate very well!
Even in the preparation for the ‘protest’, the North had its own agenda. It became open to us all that what afflict them is the temporary loss of power to the South. So, the ‘protest’ provided an opportunity for the leaders of the North to relieve themselves of the bottled-up frustration. Their foot soldiers who invaded the Palace of the Sultan of Sokoto in the name of #EndBadGovernance ‘protest’ asked, openly, for the Military to take over. Their war cry was Sojaji muke so (Soldiers take over). For them over there, bad governance ends only when the Military takes over, and a General Halidu Maisari Maiduguru is announced as the Head of State! Shame! In Kano, they paraded the streets, flying Russian flags! Yes, the North has a message for us in the ‘protest’, to wit: we will rather go our own way than lose power to the South. My reading of the ‘protest’ over there, of course. Why those boys did not shout yancin kai (independence) or araba (secession), beats my imagination!
I have been wondering if any leader in the North who contributed to the warped reasoning of those completely untrainable children we saw in the various videos of the ‘protest’ has sat down to ruminate over the creatures the region has donated to the Federation. What goes on in their minds now, I mean the leaders over there, who for decades have held the poor children of the North down, depriving them of any vestige of education? Do they think, as I do, that the next round of ‘protest’ will come for them, the leaders? I can imagine (God forbid o), that in the name of a ‘protest’, I found myself in a library! The police and other state authorities would arrest me reading! I can’t imagine how I would be able to take my eyes off the collections in the library; of how many synopses of the books I quickly want to read. But not so with the ‘protesters’ of the North. The brooms, waste bins and window frames are of more value to them. Someone made them like that. We are all in trouble. So much for the ‘protesters’ across the Niger River! A Mas’ud Muhammad Yakubu, who claimed to be a “Youth Copper” in the Federal University, Dutse, and holds a B. Sc in Criminology and Security Studies, captures the whole event in his “I am afraid, we have a problem in Kano!” piece that has since gone viral!
Let us look at the ‘protest’ in the South-East. I say this with every sense of honesty: if there is anytime I wish I were of Igbo stock, it is now. During the preparation for the ‘protest’, I was apprehensive. I asked myself whether the Ndigbo would allow the thunder to strike them for the second time on the same spot. I was alarmed. The genocidal campaign against the Ndigbo over the ‘protest’ was palpable; very ominous! Who would talk to my kedu, odinma brothers; who would lend them brains? Lagos was waiting for them. The “Oro Court”, as my great senior and Students’ Union President at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Akeem Adeola Soetan, is wont to call them, was waiting for the Ndigbo in Lagos.
Alas! The Ndigbo proved to be the wisest of all ‘protesters’ in all! Rather than hit the streets and be slaughtered like it happened in the 1966 pogrom in the North, the Ndigbo hit their homes. They borrowed the debased cliché of Senator Godswill Akpabio, our Senate President, who said that while those who wanted to protest could go ahead, he and other warped minds would be in their homes making merriment! The sons and daughters of Ndigbo did what those waiting in the wings for them did not expect. They stayed indoors, drinking and winning. One of them, a friend, even had the temerity to send me a video of him eating ugba and fish and washing it down with fresh juice. Ka bu ndu, (is this life?) was my response!
Even in their five states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo, there was peace. Rather than making themselves available for the security agents kitted with deadly arsenals to ‘curtail’ the ‘protest’ in the East, the Ndigbo locked up their shops and imposed on themselves “sit-at-home”! In frustration, and somewhere in Lagos, when the ‘waiting-in-the-wings’ state thugs stationed to “deal” with the Igbo boys and girls that would come out to protest, they mistook a Yoruba lady, one Olufunmilayo for an Igbo. I watched the video of the encounter, and I shook my head. Does hunger separate tribes? What if Olufunmilayo had turned out to be an Ibo lady? That is the question I have not been able to answer.
Granted, we have so many Ndigbo guys that are terribly bad. I have encountered a lot of them. But the Ndigbo are in good company as other tribes of the nation also have their own fair share of the bad and the ugly. We also equally have so many fantastic ones too that through them, you would wish to be an Ndigbo. Every tribe has such two categories. Even the North has so many other fellows that are more rational in thinking than many educated southerners. So, why should we prepare the slaughter slabs for an ethnic group over a ‘nationwide protest’ because our man is in power? What is the difference between the proponents of the “Ndigbo must go” campaign and the Kano boys who went to a library and looted brooms and dustbins leaving books intact?
We are talking of hunger that is ravaging the entire nation here. But even at that, there are still some people who don’t feel the pang like others. If a bag of rice goes for N100,000 today, and a bag of beans goes for N500,000, that Alaba International Market Igbo traders will buy them, while the ora esa (all right sir) streets urchins unleashed on the ‘protesters’ will still be on the streets begging! Now that the Ndigbo have shown that they can be ‘peaceful’ in the face of State provocation, who carries the shame? This, however, does not mean that the South-East is completely free from the malady that afflicts the entire country. But in this instance, the region has demonstrated that it could also do things differently from the ‘nzogbu nzogbu’ battle cry! That is a new lesson for us that the East thinks differently. But the greatest ‘restructuring’ from the South-East to the rest of us in this ‘protest’ is that should the country go aflame, the Ndigbo will watch from afar. I may be wrong!
Now, we come to the ‘sophisticated’ South-West, and to a great extent, the South-South. I wept for Yorubaland! The region proved to be the most unfortunate group in the ‘protest’,, which ensured that everything about the hunger in the land is as a result of the ‘hatred’ for Tinubu! I feel so ashamed each time I come across the state-sponsored narratives that have emanated from the South-West over this ‘protest’.
Again, the pro-government groups and individuals in the South-West have also shown that Nigeria is a superglued nation! For many of these ‘Hallelujah’ groups, it doesn’t matter if Tinubu performs in office or not as long as it is a Yoruba man that is there! They don’t care if or not their man would be leaving behind any legacy. These are the set of people (very many of them hungry and beggarly), who have taken the “Èmilókán” campaign to a level that no matter how fatuous a government policy is, as long it is Tinubu that initiated it, ‘all true sons and daughters of Yorubaland’ must embrace it! To them, with that kind of thinking faculty, the hunger in the land is because people lost elections. The inability of farmers to go to their farms because of farmers’/herders’ clashes can be traced to election losers. The floating of the Naira, poor economic policies of the government and the extravagance at all levels of government is all about 2027. Pity!
When you have a president surrounded by unfeeling aides, you cannot but have the type of address that President Tinubu delivered on Sunday to the “protesters” and their agitations, where the President said nothing! For me, I never expected anything from Aso Rock, and when I got nothing, I was least bothered! “There’s something I have to tell you: How to communicate difficult news in tough situations”, is authored by Charles Foster, a licensed psychotherapist. In closing, I have something to tell President Tinubu thus: Sir, there was no protest on August 1. You have nothing to fear. That is why your broadcast did not convey anything!
