31/07/2024
WHY we must Protest.
WHAT we must Protest for.
We must protest peacefully because it's one of the rare most effective ways citizens of a country voice out their frustrations or aspirations. Any sensitive and sensible government ensures the safety of protesters and the integrity of the protest.
We must protest because we are gasping for air, the government is strangling us to death through hunger, insecurity, hyperinflation and other debilitating ills.
We must protest because Nigeria exported crude and imported refined oil when there was no refinery. Now there's a refinery able to refine enough fuel for the country and the government is exporting and importing crude, chai, this is unimaginable horror and humour.
However, there's a crucial distinction between WHY we must protest and WHAT we must protest for or against. If we don't get this right, any protest is a possible wasted opportunity. I have already listed some reasons WHY we must protest.
WHAT we must protest for is not food even though we are hungry, not high cost of commodities like fuel, food stuff, even though they are choking us. If we protest for these things, the protest will end in pyrrhic victory like the ones in the past.
When hunger is the WHY of a protest and food is the WHAT, people easily get assuaged , pacified and appeased with some food palliatives. They get a short time relief while the problem hibernates and insidiously mutates.
During Babangida's junta, the price of fuel, exchange rate and other commodities were cheaper than Abacha's. Things also were cheaper at Abacha's time than Obasanjo's. Same pattern from ObJ to Yar'adua. Things were cheaper at GEJ's time than it was during Buhari's administration.
I know how people lamented about hardship during Buhari's time, who could have thought that in less than a year of a new administration, Buhari's time would become paradise we long to return.?
Who tells you and I that after Tinubu things will not be costlier and harder? The pattern has been on repeat mode. It means there is something FUNDAMENTALLY, SUBSTANTIALLY AND STRUCTURALLY wrong, and behind the successive arithmetic or geometric rise in cost of living in Nigeria.
That is what we should be protesting for, we should target the causes and not symptoms. We should protest for the RESTRUCTURING of Nigeria. Politicians mouth it for political reasons, let the citizens mount and ride it to the finish line.
We don't even need to break our heads over it, the documents are ready, they are: 1. Justice Uwais report. 2. 2014 Confab report. 3. Sir Steve Orosanye's report.
If you want any protest that will cause a major shift in the political and economic trajectory of Nigeria, a protest that will have foundational and substantial change, insist on the sequential implementation of those 3 reports.
Let's start with Justice Uwais' and Steve Orosanye's reports, let this administration be held to the jugular for the conscientious and rigorous implementation of those reports. If we all decide to shut the country down until those reports are implemented, we would have been a generation of Nigerian citizens that took our country back.
Nobody can accuse such protest of partisan, tribal, ethnic or religious malice. Most importantly, that's the protest that will change Nigeria.after those two are implemented, we return to the 2014 Confab. These are the real issues we should protest for. Hunger and hardships are the WHY, implementation of these reports are the WHAT.
