From 1966 to 1999, Nigeria was uninterruptedly governed by a military government, except for the short-lived return to democracy in the Second Republic, which was from 1979 to 1983. That period happened to be the period of radicalization and political indoctrination for some of us, yours truly. For the first time, some of us, yours truly inclusive, were exposed to the free world and freedom of the university, where we went through various processes of teachings, through repeated instructions and engagements with colleagues of varied ideas, attitudes and cognitive strategies or methodologies. We mingled with the good, the bad and the ugly. Protest
By Bala Ibrahim
For those familiar with the famous Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, ABU of those days, names like Dr. Patrick Wilmott, the Jamaican-born legendary academic, late Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, the Nigerian historian, politician and aristocratic rebel, late Dr Ibrahim Tahir, Talban Bauchi, the renowned Nigerian sociologist, writer and a proud traditionalist, with unapologetic conservative views, would surely bring back nostalgic memories. As a University, ABU was esteemed in almost every discipline. But the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, popularly called FASS, distinguished the school as a big political laboratory, for the training and radicalization of students.
The regular open lectures and debates organized in the faculty exposed many, who were not necessarily arts students, including yours truly, to political awareness and by extension, leftist or radical indoctrination. Yes, some of us were disposed to such conditions of learning and experience, from where we borrowed the ideas of moral responsibilities. From the microcosm of ABU politics, the complexities of Nigeria could be completely comprehended. We saw ABU then as the mini Nigeria’s political laboratory, and the green white green nation, as the major political laboratory.
It was from that mini political laboratory, that yours truly came first-to-first with his first experience with the term political protest. It is not the mission of this article to dwell on the trends of terrible turmoil that had visited ABU, under the individual student’s understanding of the perspective of the term protest, but it is the ambition of the article to draw the attention of the reader, to the terrible or negative consequences of misunderstanding the meaning of the right to protest, when perused alongside it’s potency to destruction.
Protest, when poorly coordinated and executed, almost always, leads to outright demolition, devastation and dangerous destruction of all that stand for the dignification of the system. In the end, it leads to psychological disturbance, confusion and uncertainty.
History is replete with the sad and sorry situation of today’s Sudan. There is a video in circulation on social media, of a young girl, who has just graduated from university and is cheerfully looking forward to a favourable future, narrating the ordeal of her country, Sudan. She says, and it moves me to tears, “I am not sure if I am alive, because everything my parents laboured to bring us up for upward of forty years, has gone in the twinkle of an eye”.
Again Africa has another terrible tale to tell about native Kenya, where young, frustrated Kenyans mobilized, through social media, and came out to protest against what they called, punitive tax proposals. It was a contentious finance bill that aimed to raise $2.7bn, as a result of which, many Kenyans were lured or encouraged to go on a protest, that resulted in the rampage. At the height of the rampage, demonstrators stormed the parliament and burned part of it, after MPs passed the controversial bill. Today, the story from Kenya is more lamentable than the perceived consequences of the bill.
If we look at the history of Sudan, starting with Darfur, we would see how protests led to mass killings and displacements, that resulted in ethnic cleansing. At least 16,000 people have been killed, with over 10 million displaced within the country, making it the largest displacement crisis in the world. A large political laboratory is made to louse up, because of the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the word, protest. Ditto Kenya, where the efforts of their founding father, the late Jomo Kenyatta, an acclaimed anti-colonial activist and politician, who fought for the country’s independence and governed it as its Prime Minister and later its first President, are literally in a state of lay to waste.
Every year, Nigeria declare a whole day, with a view to commemorating or celebrating our Democracy Day. We pride the day as a national public holiday in the country because we are happy for the restoration of democracy in 1999. We have been given the ballot as a tool to change the government if we are not happy with it. We shouldn’t allow our enemies to give a reason for the substitution of the ballot with the bullet, through an ill-intentioned protest.
President Tinubu had also succeeded in reverting the country to the old national anthem that says, Nigeria We Hail Thee. To Hail Thee is to cheer, salute, or greet with enthusiasm and not protest.
For God’s sake, let’s not permit the entry of poorly planned protest into our jargon or political lexicon of enthusiasm, because it would only tear, and ultimately louse up, or lay waste, the efforts of our leaders past, who laboured to build the big political laboratory, called Nigeria.
