With the economy all over the place, despite the humongous sums spent by the fiscal and monetary authorities in support of their alternative economic schemes…the premium on competent government is that much important. Otherwise in four years time we will be back at the Lekki Toll Plaza peddling the same snake oil that we have hawked each time the state has had serious questions asked of it.
If one test of the strength of a democracy is the measure of trust between the electorate and their elected representatives, then the events of the last two weeks in the country have been a poor advertisement for our practice of a “government of the people”. Even from this remove, the optics remain unsightly. At one level, significant portions of the electorate (first, the #EndSARS protesters, and after that the hoodlums who unleashed mayhem across the country) appeared to challenge, in different ways, the legitimacy of the state. At a morally lower vantage, the state, too, lurching drunkenly from one unbelievably maladroit response to another clearly mythical characterisation of the events it was forced to respond to, did little to cover itself in glory ― at several points, its different contingents seemed to be competing to weaken it as a credible negotiator.
Naturally, the point was reached, where worries were legitimately entertained about the resilience of our state. Yet, in this tension lay the very beauty of the last two weeks, if not the whole of 2020 ― an invitation to take a look at received opinions and rethink/remodel most notions, processes and practices from first principles. Very easily, those who spend time on such matters will point out pressure points to which communities must respond. How technology has and is changing everything, including by exacerbating old tensions between governments, communities and markets, for one. How, for instance, to address the fact that a growing technological base seems to shift wealth away from labour to capital? What to do to balance big tech’s leverage of individual data with traditional worries about privacy, and the new concerns over the potentially disruptive play of make-believe information? How a very conservative and economically illiterate state may cope with the challenge from its younger, cosmopolitan, and technologically-savvy youth?
Almost without question, solutions to these and myriad problems of the twenty-first century, including the warming of our space, have included proposals to strengthen the individual and her communities at the expense of the state and the markets. It is in this sense that it may be argued that the Nigerian government, in its preferred response to the protests, missed a unique opportunity, not just for dialogue. But to lay the foundations of a country that’s prepared to deal with these new challenges differently from how it has responded to such tasks in the past.
…was it significant that at the height of the crisis, not one elected public official was able to intervene to pacify his or her electors? Governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives, chairmen of local governments, councillors, even the president were, at the height of the crises, noticeable by their absence.
The masquerading of the “strong state”, especially the narrow focus on its monopoly of the means of violence, simply introduced two new fault lines into an already fraught mix. Both fault lines are simultaneously the result of a trust deficit and will work over the near term to widen the democratic shortages that we labour under. Thus, was it significant that at the height of the crisis, not one elected public official was able to intervene to pacify his or her electors? Governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives, chairmen of local governments, councillors, even the president were, at the height of the crises, noticeable by their absence.
Wags point out that whereas the charge readily levelled against the #EndSARS protesters was their clear lack of a leadership cadre, on the opposing side, the presence of leaders simply underscored serious concerns over their quality. That this leadership was constrained by its unwillingness to risk being overawed by the protesters or the mobs that inherited the space created by the violent disruption of the protests, makes the point more poignantly. The interruption of the connections between electors and their representatives, which was a key feature of the chaos that descended on the country two weeks ago, was a test that our democracy sorely needed to pass.
If collective memory is important for the way nations describe themselves, then a second failure is of greater moment. What has been the effect of the protests’ denouement on the country’s younger cohort? Cousins and siblings of today’s protesters could not have failed to notice how cavalierly the state transacted with their elder ones.
And one that it failed most woefully.
If collective memory is important for the way nations describe themselves, then a second failure is of greater moment. What has been the effect of the protests’ denouement on the country’s younger cohort? Cousins and siblings of today’s protesters could not have failed to notice how cavalierly the state transacted with their elder ones. In response, they will either resolve to flee the country in search of social bargains that better accommodate them as (different) individuals or resolve to show more teeth than their elders did, when next the current feedback loop closes.
With the economy all over the place, despite the humongous sums spent by the fiscal and monetary authorities in support of their alternative economic schemes, and with the odds of our negotiating bridging loans with multilateral financial institutions now that much higher, the premium on competent government is that much important. Otherwise in four years time we will be back at the Lekki Toll Plaza peddling the same snake oil that we have hawked each time the state has had serious questions asked of it.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
