An old Hausa adage says, “When the sun rises, a palm of hand couldn’t block its rays.” I think it is analogous to this day, 1st of August, 2024. The 10-day protest has just begun and no one knows how it is going to end, come 10th of August. It is an opportunity for deep reflective thinking on both sides of the government and protesters.
By virtue of the fact that the day has just begun, a reality many tried through hook and crook to stop, it should serve as a good lesson for all of us. At the forefront of agitations against the protest are our northern clerics. The same people that sold Tinubu on the Muslim-Muslim ticket but shamefully, as a leading cleric Malam Bello Yabo said, “you asked people to vote Tinubu, now people are hungry and you went and took tea with him without coming back to the masses with any concrete offer to alleviate their suffering… you should know a hungry man cannot listen to a sermon.”
The security agencies tried various forms of intimidating tactics including arrests, detentions, and threats. The politicians organized town hall meetings to cajole and win over the masses. NGOs were bought off to openly declare withdrawing their earlier support. The ethnicity card was played as some leaders of ethno-regional persuasions exempted themselves from participating. Government apologists on many platforms, both in mainstream and social media, employed the scare tactic of reminding people of Libya and Sudan. There were partial power outages and network disruptions in many parts of the country. The most laughable of them was hiring women to protest against protesting.
From the one-month notice, the government had indeed offered many laudable reforms (out of fear of protest?). For example, it made disbursements of billions of Naira in the educational sector, especially the student loan, the Ministry of Youth loans and grants, the President signing the North-West Development Commission, rice palliatives, and rice price reduction by half. The Dangote concession to get crude at Naira price, etc. Even though these are very laudable moves, they are just cosmetics, which is why people still insist on coming out today to protest.
Cooler heads and well-meaning Nigerians from all sectors of society have been advising the government for weeks now to return the subsidy or at least reduce oil prices. For the simple reason that 80% of the hardship faced by ordinary Nigerians was due to the subsidy removal. The moment you return the subsidy, it will certainly arrest inflation, crash prices, reduce transportation costs, and have a direct and immediate impact on the populace. But the call is adamantly ignored and all the cosmetic approaches the government is dangling to the masses aren’t immediate and holistic enough to have a meaningful impact on everyone.
The Tinubu government budgeted 28 trillion Naira this year, and one single project (Lagos-Calabar Highway) gulped 56% of the budget. Just a week or so ago, Tinubu sent a supplementary budget of 6.2 trillion Naira for capital and recurrent expenditures, making this year’s budget peak at over 34 trillion (the highest in our history). But the highest-ever subsidy payment was 4 trillion Naira paid in 2022 under Buhari. And no country in this world survives without some form of subsidy to protect its people and economy. The US and China would go to war to protect their agriculture subsidy, which is highly detrimental to other economies.
Yet as people are hungry and pushed to the wall, the Nigerian government could continue enriching itself with a 34 trillion Naira budget and cannot sacrifice 4 trillion (12%) for its citizenry?
The cat is now out of the bag. Let us hope that over the next ten days, both the government and protesters will listen to the voices of reason and reach an amicable understanding that would be a win-win situation for Nigeria and Nigerians.
Ali Abubakar Sadiq wrote this piece from Kano
