Theo Adebowale

EndSARS is a watershed in the response of citizens to governance in recent times. It is paradoxical that General Muhammadu Buhari employed mass protest to draw attention to the weakness of his predecessors and very many Nigerians rose to the occasion. Presidential electioneering 2015 was essentially a protest against what many of us saw as corruption and cluelessness in government. GMB, our presidential candidate was on hand to speak against misgovernance, to stop the rot, and to bring about change. He promised to stop subsidy to the petroleum sector because it was a fraud. He would revive the refineries to cut drastically the cost of production.
An army general, no one doubted when he promised to reorganize the security architecture so that those in North East and North Central as well as other parts of the country would go about their daily lives without danger. The economy would receive a boost, the workforce would get a better welfare package, education and health would be given the necessary befitting attention.
Curiously, the new government that frowned at corruption and cluelessness of its predecessor could not assume authority on transition. Ministerial positions took months to be filled while boards, agencies and departmental political leaderships were retained by personnel of the party defeated at the pull. The new government preferred that the policy of the former government be sustained, until it would get recruits from religion, region and relationships. Attempts to protest government actions and inactions were blackmailed. It is shameful that the Federal Government has been very intolerant of opposing views.
In the face of unemployment, harsh economic conditions and political intolerance, the youth have been unserious, not sparing time to show passion for socio-economic interplay of factors of production, demand and supply. They have been considered as no more than consumers of junks and receivers of waste. But the economy is worsening; governments are bereft of ideas that can bring a turn-around. Taxes and levies are mounting, and whatever could bring about income, earned or unearned, shameful or demonic was acceptable to many Nigerians young and old. The Nigerian police by its nature of interaction with the public came handy for expression of aggression. Even the protesting youths voluntarily obliged that while it objected to operational methods of the police, it wants a drastic review of the welfare, career, reward and discipline processes of the organisation. It was an opportunity not to miss by a political leadership caught up in the conundrum of COVID-19, global economic recession and political circumstances. It was a development for a robust interface with the youth, which the political elite or rather the ruling elite might not find easily convertible for sinister objectives. But talking seriously about altruistic purpose in a turbulent socio- political circumstance, it was an opportunity to search for genuine Nigerian youths that can be profitably involved in governance in consultative, advisory and technocratic terms.
But it is saddening that fake news and hate speech is all that a section of the ruling class is able to identify in the scenario. Whereas abuse of the social media stands condemned in all its ramifications, it will be a dissolve to governance for #EndSARS to be so conveniently wished away. That blackmail is too simple to distort the issues involved. Police brutality itself has acquired a global phenomenon that the Nigerian case study would only help to showcase. Overwhelming reports of Nigeria police brutality are in the archives, but so also do we have damaging evidence that Nigeria treats her police with a view to make them inhuman in their interactions with members of the public. Have we not been sufficiently informed that the protest was not about the police, but rather that police brutality was the opportunistic development to vent anger on a system that has multiplied hunger, increasing petroleum product prices and increased electricity tariff?
Whereas that the Special Anti-Robbery Squad has been a formidable force in the battle against banditry and military in the North, does not obliterate statistical data of causalities, agony, injustice and criminality that are reported in the South on a daily basis. If anything, this establishes that in a heterogeneous society like Nigeria, a one-level police organisation cannot work. Cultural differences, historical antecedents, religion and economic situations would vary conditions for policing. Against while a people may be satisfied with benefits accruing from nepotism and fatalism, some others might not envy such reward as evidence of progress. It may be noteworthy that #EndSARS is an eye-opener. It has exposed the potential of the Nigerian youths to engage the ruling class. It has also shown the intellectual capacity of the youth to tackle gluttony of the ruling class. It may be an effort in futility therefore to expect the youth to trade off such possibilities where they know that they can bring about the necessary development that can make Nigeria great.
Citizen education would reduce abuse of the new social media, no doubt but it would be absurd to blame misgovernance, bureaucratic incompetence, nepotism, corruption on the social media. If there was no massacre in Lekki Toll Gate, what stopped the Federal Government from giving the official report of the Tuesday encounter? Again, why did the military turn back the panel of inquiry set up by Lagos State Government from inspecting the mortuary? Would it have produced hate speech?
Traditional rulers are a unifying factor in our body politic if only they would be given a rightful place to employ their relevance. They would ordinarily not seek to neutralize the youth and the difference they are capable to unfold. To remember that traditional rulers have a role to play when some people want to maintain status quo is just not what a dynamic society as ours would tolerate. Was it for nothing that the enlistment into the army to #EndSARS was not exclusive of any class? The circumstance brought Nigerian youths at home and abroad together, local institutions are shut, and without the hand of Esau of the land they were provoked into a spontaneous protest that held simultaneously across cities of Nigeria to demand an end to economic and police brutality. Because they are not likely to forget that injustice is not a virtue somewhere to the exclusion of other places, it shall remain an interesting topic of discussion for a long time to come. Evidence that the political class appropriates the national wealth for self and employs the police to brutalise the populace would not be dissolved by father figure of traditional rulers. We can view #EndSARS protest as an opportunity to restructure, to reorganise and to rebuild because old things have passed away. Behold, it is the political class that must make all things new, a privilege nature has graciously provided. And it is the path of honour that is best to choose.