Professor advocates creative, scientific approaches to protests

A retired professor of political sociology at the University of Lagos, Lai Olurode, has waded into the ongoing conversation over a planned nationwide protest in Nigeria.

Mr Olurode’s intervention came via a statement he sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Monday.

Before delving into the Nigerian case, the former national commissioner with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) made some preliminary clarifications.

According to him, civil protests became popular in the US in the early 1960s to register dissatisfaction with social discrimination against the minorities particularly the blacks and people of colour and women as well. Protests were then largely a positive force in righting the then prevalent social wrongs.

The professor said in most civilised and democratic countries of the world, civil protests are rarely outlawed.

“Even, under dictatorships, protests, where they are forbidden, they get smuggled into modes of registering dissatisfaction and social discontent with harsh government social policies,” he said. “Without street protests and marches, the military would have probably remained in power in most of Africa.”

According Mr Olurode, ‘the most common form of civil protest in Nigeria is street protests or marches. But Nigerians can be more creative by considering alternatives to street marches as forms of civil disobedience. If we go by previous experiences about the consequences and backlash of civil protests, the outcomes have not been salutary.

“The question then is why employ the same mode of behaviour that hadn’t produced any substantive outcome in the past.”

Mr Olurode therefore advocated “more creativity and the reliance on science to decide on whether this pending protests should hold or not.”

He said, “I hereby advocate that those who have subscribed to the protest option to register their protest against hunger in the land should do so through petitions or even boycotts of government services in place of street protests.

“Without any doubt in the mind of many, the 2020 EndSars bloody protest left sour tastes in the mouth. The scale of private and public destruction was massive. Though, the protests led to the erasure of EndSars inscriptions on police vehicles but the protests by no means eliminated police toll gates and the associated sharp practices. These gains got flattened in the midst of the losses of life and property which followed the imbroglio.

“In the light of this, I appeal for caution on the resort to open protests. Let’s deploy more creative thoughts and scientific simplicity to feed our decisions. A desirable outcome is an improvement in Nigeria’s citizenship project which is achievable through alternatives to street protests or marches.

“Never must we allow opportunists whose narrow concern is to promote ethnic rather than class politics to take advantage of our innocent expressions of social discontent.”