Opinion
By Emmanuel Onwubiko
THERE is one social development that has emerged with the advent of the current president Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration. This social trend which is very outrightly negative is the reality that the harsh, toxic, thoughtlessly coordinated and implemented economic policies of the Central administration in Nigeria have ensured the sudden disappearance of the so-called MIDDLE CLASS. Now, there are two clear distinctive class stratifications namely: the insanely wealthy and the multidimensionally poor classes of people. Under Tinubu, Karl Marx’s concept of class warfare has emerged.
In August of last year, hundreds of thousands of impoverished youngsters poured out on the streets of Nigeria to protest against suffocating economic policies of the Federal government under President Bola Tinubu including the extremely unacceptable high pump price of petrol, the floating of the Naira that rendered the Naira worthless and the high food inflation that keeps ballooning out of control. The government responded by sending soldiers and police operatives armed to their teeth to kill off several protesters most of whom are youngsters.
As reported by some foreign press, the Nigerian troops and police tightened security in Lagos and the capital, Abuja, as nationwide protests over the rising cost of living kicked off and are expected to continue for 10 days.
Africa’s most populous country is struggling with soaring inflation and a sharply devalued naira currency after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu introduced reforms a year ago aimed at reviving the economy.
Tagged #EndbadGovernanceinNigeria, the protest movement has won support with an online campaign among Nigerians who are battling with food inflation at 40 per cent and fuel prices that have tripled since Tinubu introduced his reforms.
On the fourth day of the nationwide protests, police fired tear gas and alleged live bullets to disperse demonstrators in Abuja, the Reuters news agency reported. In the northern city of Kano, protesters tried to light bonfires outside the governor’s office and police responded with tear gas, the AFP news agency said.
Security forces blocked roads leading to Abuja’s Eagle Square – one of the planned demonstration sites – while in Lagos, police and soldiers were placed at strategic points, including at the Lekki toll gate, where protests in 2020 against police brutality ended in bloodshed. Whilst the protests were going on, the Senate President Mr. Godswill Akpabio was busy jeering at the ‘hungry’ protesters.
I will return to what Godswill Akpabio said which demonstrates the fact that whilst the tiny minority that governs Nigeria is popping Champaignes and having great feasts at public costs, the rest of the masses are virtually starving to near death. The politicians are heartless and insensitive. Nigeria’s current set of politicians, many of whom I relate with one-on-one are not different from the bourgeoisie class of Italy of the middle ages who built what they called VOMITORIUM, a place whereby as they eat on the dinning table, some of the participants who wanted more foods and sweet wine, do go to the VOMOTORIUM to vomit out some of what they had consumed so as to create more rooms in their tummies for more foods. Our politicians who pretend to be practicing democracy are mere EPICUREANS who believe in their hearts of hearts, that the political offices are their own opportunities to amass as much illicit wealth as possible so much so that even their next 5th generation would benefit from their great grand fathers’ loots of Nigeria’s commonwealth.
If you doubt me, here is the FCT minister’s condescending statement about struggling and poor Nigerians. He made these nasty and inhumane comments in October last year but a newspaper like Thisday endorsed this notoriously wicked anti-poor position of Nyesom Wike as if to say the well-being and welfare of the commoners are of no priority to this medium. Thisday went ahead to name this mean hearted minister as their minister of the year.
It was precisely around October of last year that the loquacious minister of the Federal Capital Territory Minister (FCT), Nyesom Wike, called on anyone who has a brother or sister begging in Abuja to take the person off the streets as law enforcement agents will begin to apprehend beggars from Monday, October 28th.
Wike who declared war on street beggars in the FCT during the official flag-off ceremony of the construction of access roads in Katampe District of Abuja on Tuesday, said the resolve to rid the streets of beggars is part of the administration’s strategy to restore the image of the FCT to ensure the city competes with other major cities worldwide.
“Let me say clearly now, we have declared war on beggars because Abuja is returning to beggars’ city,” the former Rivers State governor said.
“If you know you have a sister, you have a brother who is a beggar on the road, do something, because from next week, we will carry them; we will take them out of the city.
“If you know you have a sister or brother who is a beggar, please, from next week, we’ll carry them. We’ll take them out. It is embarrassing that people will come in and the first thing they’ll see are just beggars on the road.
“Sometimes, they may be criminals pretending to be beggars. We will not allow that. So, I’m giving you a public holiday from now until Sunday. From Monday, we will pack them out.
“Let everybody know that we owe a duty to make sure Abuja competes favourably with cities of the world. We can replicate what we see overseas here, and as far as road infrastructure is concerned in Abuja, we are not going to compromise; we will use the best contractors.
“A lot of people have said that we are concentrating on Abuja; that is not correct. As I speak to you, tomorrow, Thursday, we’ll be at the area councils. On Monday, we’ll be in Kuje, Gwagwalanda, and Kwali.
“But of course, it is the city that will tell you how the place will be. If the city does not look good, you can imagine what will happen in the rural areas,” he said.
The FCT minister is dead wrong on his elitist approach to governance. I thought he said that he is a lawyer and even the so-called body of benchers conferred on him unmeritoriously, the position of a life bencher.
So how come Wike, the lawyer doesn’t know that the Grund Norm clearly specified SOVEREIGNTY BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE OF NIGERIA(including the very poorest of the poor forced to beg for survival due to longstanding political corruption by political office holders) and the constitution states that the government derives the legitimacy to exercise authority from these same people that Wike, the opportunistic elite, is driving away to go and die of starvation even when Wike admitted publicly that he drinks wines older than a century which makes these wines worth several millions of Naira of the taxpayers? Chidi Odinkalu, erstwhile board chairman of the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria once stated that Mr. Nyesom Wike has never worked anywhere else but within different layers of government: from being a local government chairman, to being chief of staff to Governor Rotimi Amaechi as he then was, and then minister of state for education under President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and then to the office of governor of Rivers state for eight year and now as minister of fct since the last two years. So it is safe to conclude Wike made his money from politics, if Odinkalu’s position is correct.
So politicians like Nyesom Wike are popping Champaignes and then asking beggars who are mostly young Nigerians to go and die? If this is not the height of insensitivity and callous wickedness, what then do we call this?
Mr. Wike ought to address the underlying causes of poverty afflicting youngsters and old people who are on the streets to beg and no kind of force, even military force, is strong enough to totally stop the hungry citizens from begging to get essential food items to eat.
Why not solve the underlying causes of mass poverty, deprivation and lack of equal opportunities for all citizens before asking beggars to quit the streets of Abuja? If you expel citizens from Abuja, a power that nobody in Nigeria has, not even the president can expel a citizen of Nigeria out of any of our cities, so where should the poor and hungry citizens go? Should the poorest of the poor go and die far away from the corruption and illicit opulence of politicians who pop champagnes in Abuja? This is an intolerable illogicality and a huge fallacy that shows the inadequacy and the apparent poverty of intellectualism in the formulation of policies by the FCT minister who presumes that he is an emperor whose words are laws.
The second case study in absolute political insensitivity and wickedness happened and was reported on July 31, 2024, even as preparations for the August 2024 protests entered a frenetic dimension. The ‘almighty’ Senate President, Mr Godswill Akpabio, had mocked Nigerians who planned to take part in the nationwide protest against economic hardship, saying he and other members of the National Assembly would be “eating” while they (Nigerians) protest.
Mr Akpabio stated this at the Niger Delta Ethnic Nationalities, Youths and Women Group Sensitisation Conference in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
The event, organised by the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), was broadcast live on Arise TV.
A video clip of Mr Akpabio remarking has also gone viral on social media.
Akpabio’s remark
During the event, the Managing Director of the NDDC, Samuel Ogbuku, said the Niger Delta region was not interested in a change of government in Nigeria.
Speaking shortly after, Mr Akpabio said Nigerians should exercise patience over the current economic hardship in Nigeria which he said would end soon.
“All of us feel the impact of what is happening now. But we are aware it will be for a short while,” he said, apparently referring to the current economic hardship in the country.
The senate president then corroborated Mr Ogbuku’s comments that the people of the Niger Delta were not interested in a change of government in Nigeria.
“Managing Director, I want to thank you for what you said. You said we are not interested in regime change; let us own this government.
“Those who want to protest can protest, but let us be here eating,” Mr Akpabio remarked.
Mr Akpabio, a former governor of Akwa Ibom State, is known for often making controversial remarks over serious national issues, says any national newspaper reporting on this callous and thoughtless statement by Akpabio.
In the concluding stage, I’m going to give just a few citations to demonstrate that what we see in today’s Nigeria is not democracy but lootocracy, autocracy and authoritarianism because if we say we are practicing constitutional democracy, then the politicians must abide by the primary purpose for which they were elected which are to provide for the well-being and welfare of the people of Nigeria and to protect lives and property of the citizenry.
Here is how democracy started and blossomed in Europe: “The political community in Europe thus becomes the nation. Nations are forged in state after state, some early, some very late. The nation-building in Norway took place in the 1860s onwards, in preparation for leaving the union with Sweden in 1905. It is frantic; national history is invented and written. But there are old antecedents, Viking times and the Middle Ages. Thus state after state acquires a nation while the middle classes rise up and demand the end of aristocratic and kingly rule. The revolutions in Europe in 1848 are called ‘burgher revolutions’, citizens’ revolutions. The middle class demands political influence and gets it. Only later does the then-burgeoning working class rise and call for the same, from about the 1890s. And so it goes, women get the vote latest of all, after the turn of the century.”
“At this point, rights have become the key democratic norm. It is not participation of the intellectually fittest or the privileged; it is participation based on class rights. The middle class demands this right since the aristocrats have it, followed by the working class, and later women. The arguments concern equality and the right to be a free citizen. Are the employed free enough to be citizens? Do they have enough economic independence to be free agents? Similarly, are they knowledgeable enough to vote? Can they make rational choices? John Stuart Mill, writing in 1859 discusses both issues in On Liberty. A gentleman is a man of education, leisure and independent means, thus able to be a citizen. Can someone who is employed by others exercise free will as a citizen? Mill surprisingly argues that also women can be rational, and therefore should have the vote”.
Source: Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze Sociali
(Janne Haaland Matlary | PASS Academician; Democracy without citizens: How can nominal democracies become real?).
What emerges from the aforementioned citations is that a people determines the quality of democracy that they should have as a political system. Most democracies in European nations came about through popular revolutions by their people. France and Italy are good examples. So, if we want the kind of democracy we envisaged when our earliest pre-independence advocates copied the United States and United Kingdom’s models, then we the people of Nigeria must consider instituting a mass revolution that should be peaceful, constructive and devoid of Ethnic, religious or cultural barriers. Nigerians must work to set up a working democracy here. For now, what we have is anything but constitutional democracy. What we have as a system of government is closer to the KLEPTOMANIAC MODEL of rulership and in another shape appears like AUTOCRACY. There is now a CLASS WAR BETWEEN THE INSANELY RICH ELITE AND THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE OF NIGERIA WHO ARE POOR, DEPRIVED AND IN DESTITUTION.
6th February, 2025.
C.E.
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