------- Forwarded message -----From: "Tobi Adewunmi" <tadewunmi@isgpp.com.ng>To: "Ayo Olukotun" <Ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>Cc:Sent: Thu, 8 Aug 2019 at 12:55Subject: Prof. Olukotun's ColumnSOWORE AND THE SEMANTICS OF REVOLUTION
by Ayo Olukotun
If the practice of democracy is viewed as an extended conversation involving citizens and government on the one hand, and between competing non-governmental stakeholders on the other, then there is wide room for all manner of expressions including revolutions launched on laptops and public address systems.
A relaxed approach on the part of government to the challenge of public square demonstrations by placard carrying youths, in the name of revolution, would have allowed it to take off, employing responsible force to keep it peaceful, and within the ambit of the law. You cannot have a revolution without a revolutionary agenda, revolutionary personality, a vanguard, a rearguard and minimal capacity to enforce the revolutionary script. The demands of #RevolutionNow include predictable stuff like the payment of the minimum wage of thirty thousand Naira, freedom for all political prisoners including El Zakyzaky, abolition of tuition fees in all secondary and tertiary institutions, stopping the killings in the country and sacking all incompetent service chiefs, employments for youths, as well as putting an end to estimated billing by the power companies, and the provision of prepaid meters for free. These are demands familiar to all who have taken part in public discourse over the last number of years, while some of them have been adopted by government, as policy.
True, one or two of them, especially that touching on security jitters, are serious with new dimensions being introduced by the day; it is doubtful however whether the implementation of these limited reforms, important as they are, can be called a revolution, which connotes a fundamental political and socioeconomic change. Up till now, it is not entirely clear why Sowore and his group chose the word – 'revolution', which has been capitalized on by security agencies to accuse him of treasonable felony, terrorism, and plans to effect a regime change by force. If Sowore can be validly accused of intellectual laxity or laziness, the security agencies can also be legitimately accused, as Wole Soyinka pointed out, of lavish and fearsome labelling of what may have passed off as routine political dissent by disaffected youths. No doubt, there is a certain curiosity and haziness about the timing of the protest, coming in the wake of ongoing legal challenges to President Muhammadu Buhari's victory at the February polls, with some suggesting that the so called revolution is merely a ploy by some opposition parties, or those fronting for them, to open a theatre of conflict that would either set aside or bypass the ruling of the tribunal and courts on the elections. Be that as it may, it does not provide enough warrant to, as it were, kill a fly with a sledgehammer, through the excessive deployment of security, unless there is information that Sowore had trained guerrillas, acquired weapons to confront the Buhari administration in a fierce battle. In a sense, this kind of intensive interrogations of officialdom are little more than elite youth reaction to governance shortfalls and entrenched deficits. Recall for example, that the Yellow Vests in France, launched a revolutionary opposition and street protests in 2018 against the government of Emmanuel Macron, resulting in modulated reforms of the economy and the lessening of the gap between the rich and the poor. Some other European countries and Canada have since initiated their own Yellow Vests with demands varying according to the political economy of the country.
In Nigeria, we may contextualize the current mood as informed partly by a demographic revolution in which the youths constitute a predominant majority of Nigerians, it is also among these youths that the woes of governance such as unemployment, poor infrastructure, poor education and health bite deepest. Add to this, the fact that most of these youths never knew a better Nigeria than we currently have, not having been born, or were too young when the country was better governed and Nigerians of my generation had the benefit of quality education and better social services. Their imagination is understandably constrained by the abjection to which Nigeria has dropped in the last two decades, just as their expression of outrage is not alleviated by access to the qualitative education that once held sway in Nigeria. It is also the case that in politics, the older generation have refused to acknowledge the weight and talents of the youthful strata, despite the not-too-young-to-run campaign. As an example, it would have been refreshing if more capable youths have been appointed as members of the forthcoming federal executive council due to be sworn in a fortnight. So, what we have playing out is a conflict of generations, in which our youths are either exiting Nigeria in desperate circumstances, joining the swelling ranks of counter-culture and crime, or alternately, inviting the ruling class to a dialogue on why the blemish of Nigeria as the sick man of Africa, should persist for so long.
This columnist does not imply that the demographic bulge is the only problem out there; there are existential issues such as worsening poverty, shrinking job market, degradation in education, health and other social services, all in the midst of successive groups of politicians promising change, only to backslide on their promises or give excuses for their lack of performance. These of course are not problems that started with the Buhari administration, they have been there for decades, but there is no doubt that the economic recession and post-recession blues mean that more and more people are sinking into the bottomless pit of poverty. What the Sowore outburst has to teach us, in case we are a nation that learns, is that time may be running out for the ruling class, to make desirable changes, and to walk the talk by rescuing Nigerians out of the bind in which they find themselves.
There is also a riddle that we must take note of and redress concerning the repetitive holding of elections that do not translate to change for the general populace. To be sure, the sanctity of elections, as administered, counts, but as Dr (Mrs) Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, member of the Ghanaian parliament said on Channels television earlier this week, if the people do not see meaningful changes in their lives, election after election, they would come to see polling as a meaningless ritual indulged in by the political class to improve their own lots while the majority of the people are left in the cold. This expresses the paradox of the Nigerian predicament as it makes nonsense of electoralism and what passes as governance. I reminisce that sometime back in the 1980s, most Nigerians actually preferred the military to civilian rule on account of better performance by the military. Obviously however, the military demystified itself through a brutal form of dictatorship that delivered less and less in terms of social goods. For democracy to be consolidated in modern day Nigeria, it must move beyond the appurtenances of power change through elections, to draw more and more Nigerians into the safety net, and to alter the unhappy narrative of elections without transformation, and the wielding of power without purpose. In concrete terms, this implies that we must revisit all those abandoned or failed social and economic projects that were long on conceptualization and conferencing, but short on implementation and visible imprints. This remains the abiding challenge beyond the politics of semantics about revolution.
- Prof. Ayo Olukotun is the Oba (Dr) Sikiru Adetona Chair of Governance, Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye.
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