Lessons from the #EndSARS protest

The #EndSARS peaceful protest has come and gone as it has been called off by its promoters. In the protest, there were clear challenges and threats leading to adversity.  But in every adversity, there is a silver lining of lessons and opportunities unleashed, which if carefully identified and tapped will lead to a more prosperous future while guaranteeing that the labor of our heroes past and present will never be in vain. This discourse seeks to tabulate the adversities while listing the opportunities thrown up which can be tapped for a more secure future.

Even though the promoters were peaceful, orderly and organized, the fallouts from state-led interventions generated violence as thugs and hoodlums attacked peaceful protesters in the first phase of the protest and many peaceful protesters were injured and wounded while the authorities looked the other way. The protests were about illegal policing methods and directed at rogue elements in the police. As such, the police initially thought that their business was to stop the protests. Even the arrogant presidential spokesperson, Femi Adesina, thought he could insult and talk down on the protesters. But when it became clear that a movement was on the way, the police retreated and refused to protect the protesters. And then pictures of apparent security operations aiding and abetting the hoodlums emerged on social media. There were attempts at bringing in ethnic and religious fault lines of Nigeria to break the movement, but this did not fly and finally, the Lekki and other shootings.

Lives were lost in violation of the constitutional right to life; these include civilians and security men and women. Public and private property were vandalized and looted; the latest being the looting of warehouses where COVID 19 relief materials were stored. Women and girls were raped in contravention of the new national resolve to end sexual and gender-based violence. While the mayhem was in progress, many businesses were forced to close and lost productive hours. This is coming after the COVID-19-induced closures which had inflicted serious harm on the economy.  Social events were postponed, and airlines had to suspend flights while travelers on road were trapped due to road closures. The economy must have lost hundreds of billions if not a trillion or so due to these challenges. All these are in the negative domain and they are issues that no reasonable Nigerian wants to see a repeat.

Flowing from the foregoing are urgent questions that need to be resolved and lessons that need to be drawn to harness the opportunities. Otherwise, these adverse happenings would have been in vain and those who died would have lost their lives for nothing. A little suffering and deprivation for a better future should be a great opportunity. The first lesson is the need for government at all levels to be attentive and listen to the voice of reason during times of peace. So many civil society organisations, intellectuals, cultural associations, etc. have been involved over the years in a plethora of workshops, lectures, publications, drafting of bills and produced very well-nuanced documentation on not just the need for police reforms but also the exact contours of what needs to be done. As usual, the authorities arrogantly refused to grab the opportunities provided by these free consultations to reform the Nigeria Police. Complaints upon complaints of violations of fundamental rights by the police were overlooked until the protests. The wrong message may have been sent by government that until people protest strongly and ground national activities, no one would listen or act. The proper lesson is that government should not wait for any issue to get out of hand before initiating reforms once there is public consensus that a system is not working.

The second issue and lesson are strong messages to the youths. They outnumber the decadent old generation who have set Nigeria on the path of economic, social and political ruin. The political actors in the two dominant parties whose only stock in trade is organizing to rig elections through violence, bribery and exploiting the fault lines of religion and ethnicity have lost the plot and can no longer hold Nigeria down. The protests have shown that the youths of Nigeria can mobilize, hold out and win the long-distance battle of wits to reclaim the soul of Nigeria.

Moving from the above is the need to sustain the structures that piloted these #EndSARS protests and turn it into a political machinery to contest power in 2023, with clear cut fundamental ideas of modern governance to propel Nigeria out of the doldrums. Disbanding this network would amount to missing a great opportunity. This mobilization and organization must start immediately to build a true progressive party. Part of the movement will be to engage the respective agencies who hold the key to specific reforms. This will include the National Assembly who should amend relevant laws, especially on electoral, political and economic reforms.

In the looting of COVID 19 relief materials by hoodlums, to the extent that one cannot support looting and people taking laws into their hands, a few questions have been raised.  What are those relief materials still doing in those warehouses months after COVID 19 and at a time when many Nigerians cannot afford decent meals? What are the criteria for the distribution of the relief materials – who qualifies to get a share? Is it left to the discretion of elected officials? Who monitors to see that these materials are distributed and to qualified persons? Why is the information about these materials not in the public domain?

The lesson to be learnt is that benefitting from public resources should not be left to the discretion of public officials. Even the legislators who claimed that what was looted from their homes is materials for their constituency projects; what are the criteria for distribution of materials paid from the federal treasury called constituency projects? Evidently, to whoever catches their fancy. May be, party loyalists who worked for their election, or the relations and supporters of the legislator? No, this is clearly a system without rules. Constituency projects are evidently distributed through a primitive approach to modern governance. Discretion of public officials should be replaced with an entitlement regime where everyone knows the regime for benefitting and the qualification criteria are based on empirical evidence.

To the security agents who shot and killed unarmed protesters in violation of their rules of engagement and the prevalent constitutional jurisprudence, this is a great opportunity for the system to get them to face the full wrath of the law. Murder is a capital offence and the punishment is death by a means stated in the law. This is a great opportunity to send a strong message against impunity and those who believe they can kill and get away with it.

There is also a message for the just inaugurated commissions of inquiry. You must be agents of harnessing the opportunity of reforms and ending impunity, if you insist on the atavism of formalism, abstruse legalism and business as usual, then the opportunity to end impunity would have been unfortunately lost. There should be no government magic. Do the right things as stipulated by law.