Police shouldn’t have arrested protesters waving Russian flags –Farooq Kperogi

Days after the #EndBadGovernance protest ended, renowned United States-based Nigerian scholar and columnist, Professor Farooq Kperogi, in this interview with BIODUN BUSARI, x-rays the numerous demands presented, violence, use of force, and other national issues

Do you think the purpose of embarking on the #EndBadGovernance protest was achieved?

There are always at least two consequences for any undertaking: the intended and the unintended consequences. We can apply that to what you called the purpose of the protest. The protest was the culmination of deep, disparate resentments across Nigeria. The purpose of the protest was many and varied. It was not a single-issue-centered protest. Some wanted a ‘revolution’ and a reign of ‘rage’ to shake up the system.

Some wanted a mere guarantee of affordable food and security, others wanted subsidies restored, and yet, others wanted nebulous good governance, and so on. None of the demands materialised, as we all know.

Nonetheless, I would say the protest achieved many unintended outcomes. First, it ruffled the complacency of people, hitherto safely ensconced in the quiet pleasures of the power structure.

Since 2015, people in power have become accustomed to the docility and unearned civil obedience of citizens, which has made Nigeria a dictator’s paradise and the playground for neoliberal International Monetary Fund/World Bank vultures. Only the #EndSARS protest of 2020 briefly jolted people in government out of their calm, smug self-satisfaction.

Second, the fact that adversity has united Nigerians from different regions and strata of society to rise against an oppressive cost-of-living crisis shows that there is hope that critical democratic citizenship, which had been dead in Nigeria, can be revived.

It shows that people can transcend primordial divisions, buck governmental blackmail, and demand a fair shake. Frederick Douglass popularised the notion that power concedes nothing without a demand. So, understanding that citizens need to demand concessions from the wielders of power is a great thing.

What were the weaknesses of the protest?

As I pointed out earlier, the protest wasn’t united around an easily identifiable demand. That was its greatest undoing. In 2012, the #OccupyNigeria protest was centred around a reversal of the hike in the price of petrol.

The 2020 #EndSARS protest solely revolved around the disbandment of SARS and an end to police brutality. But there was no thematic unity in the demands of the #EndBadGovernance protest. In my opinion, it should have been limited to the petrol price hike and the devaluation of the naira.

The unwieldiness of the demands of the protest provided the government with the wiggle room to evade addressing any of the issues on the protesters’ list of demands.

Why do you think the protest in the North was violent?

Multiple reasons. First, there was a direct relationship between how security forces responded to protesters and how protesters conducted the protests. Security forces appeared to be more brutal in certain parts of the North than they were elsewhere. That was a definite contributing factor to the increased violence there.

Second, the level of poverty, desperation, and despondency that the cost-of-living crisis activated nationwide is felt more deeply in the North than in the South because of the prior multidimensional poverty there. Many desperately poor people wanted to use the protest to commit what sociologists call suicide by cop, also called suicide by police or law-enforcement-assisted suicide.

Suicide by cop occurs when suicidal people, who can’t take their own lives by themselves, either because of a lack of courage or out of religious restraint, tempt the police or other law enforcement agents to kill them. Islam teaches that if you take your own life for any reason, you’re hell-bound.

In my column, I called attention to a viral video where scores of protesters in a northern Nigerian city were chanting, “da yunwa ta kashe mu, da ma bullet ya kashe mu,” which when translated into English means “instead of dying of hunger, we would rather be killed by a bullet.”

They faced off with gun-toting military officers. These were people angling for law-enforcement-assisted suicide. Such people would be violent in the conduct of their protest.

Finally, because of the huge, growing, economically disinherited underclass in the North, who started life as almajirai and have nothing to lose if they die, protests tend to devolve into anarchy.

This is in addition to criminals of opportunity, who see every civil upheaval as a chance to cause violence and rupture the social order, creating avenues for consequence-free theft.

More than one thousand protesters were arrested and 21 reportedly killed. How would you describe the FG’s use of force to quell the protest?

I don’t have the full details of the use of lethal force by the Federal Government, but I watched videos in Kaduna where law enforcement agents appeared to be the unprovoked aggressors against peaceful, singing protesters.

There were other occasions, of course, where one could argue that the use of force was justified. Protesters destroying private and public property, which have no bearing on the protest, invite state violence on themselves.

In one of your articles, you said the protesters thought they were waving the military flag and not the Russian flag. Are you dismissing the possibility of foreign influence?

No one can be certain of anything at this moment. The facts are still emerging, and interpretations of actions and inactions are in flux. Some people waved what they thought were the flags of the Nigerian Armed Forces that turned out to be Russian flags. But it has also now verifiably emerged that some protesters in the North intentionally waved Russian flags, and chanted the name of the country and that of Putin, its president, in a symbolic nod to Russian imperialism. I find that deeply distressing.

Apparently, some of the protesters are enraged with the West and its predatory institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, whose soft, yet overpowering policy dictatorship influences such odious economic policies like the subsidy removal and currency devaluation that President Bola Tinubu and other members of Nigeria’s political class implement and parrot with slavish devotion. Support of Russia is seen as a repudiation of the West and its asphyxiating, anti-people policies.

But that’s ignorance. Russia is as much a self-interested, calculative, and predatory power as the West is. Changing one neo-coloniser for another one is self-demeaning stupidity.

There is no evidence that I can find to suggest that Russia funded the protest just because its flag was waved by misguided, self-belittling ignoramuses.

How do you think the government should treat those arrested for waving the flag?

I completely understand why people in government would be perplexed by protesters waving Russian flags while asking for an end to bad governance in Nigeria. It exemplifies a remarkably embarrassing cultural cringe. That is the deep-rooted inferiority complex that causes psychologically damaged, formerly colonised people to inferiorise and disdain their own country and its culture and to uncritically valorise other countries and their cultures.

But does that constitute treason? No. Waving a foreign country’s flag while protesting against a home government doesn’t cause the home government to be overthrown. There is not even the remotest possibility that just because a Russian flag was waved during an anti-government protest, the government will be denuded of legitimacy and displaced. So, arresting protesters because they waved a foreign flag is law enforcement overreach. The pro-Russian folly of the protesters is a clear case of national self-debasement, but it is not treason, even by the wildest stretch of definitional fantasy.

A government that is secure in its legitimacy would ignore the Russian-flag-waving know-nothings.

After the president’s address on the #EndBadGovernance protest, the presidential candidates of the People’s Democratic Party and Labour Party, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, respectively said he didn’t address the demands. Do you think they were fair with their assessment?

Absolutely! The speech was vacuous, banal, and pointless. I also criticised it as self-serving and needlessly threatening. He didn’t address a single demand of the protesters. Instead, he doubled down on the very policies that instigated the protests.

What do you think are the right tools for Nigerians to demand good governance from the government?

There are no right or wrong tools. It’s obvious, though that the only time people in government sit up is when citizens protest. Notice the amount of energy, money, and scheming that Tinubu’s government invested in stopping or containing the protest.

It even forced a reluctant, insensitive national broadcast from the president. Before then, the government carried on as if everything was good as if the people didn’t matter. The president never considered Nigerians worthy of a broadcast.

He never granted an interview to even a government-owned media organisation, much less private media outlets.

Suddenly, a protest changed all that. As disruptive and unnerving as protests can be, they appear to be the only way to extract concessions from people in power in Nigeria—or to communicate the frustrations of the people to them.

President Tinubu has been asking for more time to fix Nigeria, but Nigerians are grappling with hardship. How long do you think Nigerians should wait?

Every perceptive person can discern the future based on the present and the past. There is nothing to suggest that the IMF/World Bank policies Tinubu is currently pursuing will yield a different outcome from what other countries have experienced.

These policies uniformly result in disastrous outcomes worldwide. When you remove subsidies from essential commodities and services that sustain daily life, devalue your currency, impose heavy tax burdens on an already traumatised citizenry, and take from the poor to enrich the wealthy, you depress the economy, wipe out the middle class, and curtail the ability of ordinary people to live, much less make discretionary expenditures.

As a result, companies close because there weren’t enough people with the means to buy the goods and services they produced. Foreign investors will flee, not only because of poor patronage but also because even if there were patronage, their profits would be worthless when converted to hard currency.

This happened in Nigeria from the 1980s to the early 1990s when former military president Ibrahim Babangida embraced and implemented the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme—the same policies Tinubu is implementing now.

IBB asked for more time and said we were only going through temporary pains for future permanent gains. The gains never materialised until he left office.

It’s the same story throughout developing countries that surrender their sovereignty to the World Bank and the IMF. So, I think Nigerians will wait forever.

What do you make of the call in some quarters that Nigeria should adopt a unicameral legislature to cut the cost of governance?

I support the call for a unicameral legislature. A two-chambered legislature in Nigeria is a waste of resources. It uncritically imitates the American bicameral legislative system, which emerged from America’s unique socio-historical experiences. We don’t share that experience. The fact that both the Senate and the House of Representatives have increasingly become unabashed extensions of the presidency is an even greater reason to have a unicameral legislature.

Some eminent elder statesmen visited President Tinubu and told him that the country needed a people-oriented constitution. Why is it hard for the government to get this done?

I am in total agreement that the current constitution is miserably defective and that we need a new constitution that will emerge from the consensus of different strands of Nigerian society. The problem is that it is only people who find themselves outside the orbit of power who ask for a new constitution. As soon as they get into power, they become content with the status quo. Most of the people in power today recognised that the 1999 constitution needed to be changed. Today, they are its chief protectors. Don’t be surprised if the people calling for a new constitution now change their tune if or when they get to power.

That said, I think Nigeria’s problem isn’t just the form and content of its constitution. It is the absence of willpower by those in power to implement the law of the land. A new people-oriented constitution won’t implement itself; it would still need people to bring it to life.

In 2022, you wrote an article on former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, accusing him of religious bigotry and gave 10 reasons he could plunge Nigeria into a religious war. Many, however, believe he could have made a better president. Do you agree?

I have no crystal ball to predict what kind of president former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo would have been, nor does anyone else. What I do know, however, is that his economic policies are not different from those of President Bola Tinubu. Like Tinubu and, for that matter, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, he also said he would get rid of petrol and other subsidies.

In fact, it was the government he was second in command to that removed the petrol subsidies that Tinubu embraced and made his own.

The Buhari/Osinbajo administration made no provision for petrol subsidies in the 2023 budget. Like Tinubu and other prominent 2023 presidential candidates, Osinbajo said he would devalue the naira. He was and is an IMF lackey—like other presidential candidates in 2023. If his policies are indistinguishable from Tinubu’s, why would he be a better president than Tinubu?

Did you face any backlash for that article, and do you think you were too hard on him?

I’m not sure what you mean by backlash and from whom? Most people praised it because it was evidence-based. I had irrefutable factual evidence for every claim I made.

Of course, as with everything that involves humans, people who stood to lose from his not becoming president were angry with me. But that’s not unique to my articles on Osinbajo, whom I had praised when I didn’t know who he was.