Nigeria: The Politics of the Hunger Protest and the Wrong Move for the Government’s Attention

Nigeria: The Politics of the Hunger Protest and the Wrong Move for the Government’s Attention

By: Dr. James Bwala

In the legendary 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, three middle-class teenagers unexpectedly commit three separate crimes and then claim their acts were due to the fact that they were frustrated with their parental situations. In real life, a rebellion sociology definition refers to when an individual rebuffs goals and means that are accepted by a society and replaces them with goals and means that are not accepted by the society. This claim is corroborated by the definition by Robert K. Merton, which defines rebellion as when an individual replaces goals, as well as means, that are accepted by their society with goals, as well as means, that are not accepted by their society. He also defines rebellion as being more extreme than retreatism.

The August 1–10 announcement of a peaceful protest was like the classical film Rebel without a Cause; in this case, however, I can say, Protest without a Cause. Although the protest was tagged as ‘Hunger Protest’, with a promise of a peaceful movement, the resulting end clearly indicated that more than issues of hunger, the protest has its own agenda to achieve beyond the surface to which it was organized. Political protest is defined as a variety of methods used by individuals and groups to express dissatisfaction with the current political system, often involving mass activism outside of traditional parliamentary channels, such as demonstrations, boycotts, and civil disobedience. What the organizers said is that the protest is going to be peaceful. But what we saw from day one to day five of this protest was the sociology definition in Robert K. Morton’s words: rebellion. 

How can someone explain the sense of burning our national flag and raising the flag of another country or the military flag in democratic settings with a call for military intervention if the real reason behind the protest is hunger? 

Hunger is defined by the United Nations as periods when people experience severe food insecurity, meaning that they go for entire days without eating due to a lack of money, access to food, or other resources. However, what we saw during this period is that hunger is more complicated than empty bellies. It interconnects issues of poverty, inequality, conflict, climate change, gender discrimination, weak government and health systems, etc., all of which play a role in driving hunger. 

From the discussions arising on matters of the protest, the display and interplay of issues give a reflection of the kind of society that we are living in. A society where we have all failed to look beyond ourselves and our contributions to where we are currently living and choose to shift blame is typical of a Nigerian, who sees nothing wrong with his or her action or inaction but dares to condemn the actions of others. I have lived closer to one of the biggest internally displaced persons, the IDP camp in Maiduguri, and I got the figures of persons living at that camp standing at 38,000 in population. More than 12,000 households and that camp called “Bakassi IDP Camp” in Maiduguri gave me an understanding of the definition of hunger by the United Nations. 

I have traveled far and wide in my work as a reporter. I have visited places affected by Boko Haram conflicts and banditry, especially in the Northeast, Northwest, and Central Nigeria. I have visited a few places in the southeast and south-south parts of the country, and I have been home in the southwest part of the country for the last two decades of my journey in the journalism mines field. I have seen the results of poverty and what our protesters tagged as the lead in the 10-day protests as the days count. In all these, I have learned lessons about the resilience of our people in the face of hunger. That hunger is the issue for this protest was something far from the truth, and still, I cannot comprehend why it has to be about the Tinubu administration. This is not about the hunger protest; it is about a political interest, and this is the wrong move to get the government’s attention. 

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Many Nigerians have been brainwashed not to see anything good about the Tinubu administration but hunger and hardship in the land. They have seen nothing in the speech made by the president. They described the speech as empty because, according to them, it did not define what they had expected. Most of them speaking have held government’s offices at certain levels in their careers and have enjoyed government’s scholarship in one way or another. In their own eyes, what they have done or contributed is good enough to position them to criticize the government today. They never see their actions or inaction in the past as contributing to the mass neglect of their duties that informed and brought us to where we are today. 

I have the opportunity to speak with some high-level citizens who share their views and support for the protest. In our discussions, the list of those who supported the protest includes over 30 individuals. Some of them are friends of the president. I believe if they wanted to see the president, they could do so without stress. I do not know why they would stand so far and support or acknowledge the protest when they can easily approach the president and inform or give him advice that can move the nation forward. I could not be convinced, knowing the positions they held in the past, that their voices could not matter at this time and that only by supporting or nodding heads at the protest could they be heard. 

We all know about government: the office, authority, or function of governing. Governing: having control over or ruling over oneself. We all understand governance as the activity of governing. Accordingly, governance is a set of decisions and processes made to reflect social expectations through the management or leadership of the government (by extension, under liberal democratic ideals, the will of ‘the people’ as they rule themselves). There are many issues implicit in this set of relationships whose core revolves around the notion of citizenship, as this defines the body politic over which claims of self-rule apply. 

In the most general sense, we have the difference between a liberal democratic view that the government (state) serves citizens who have a natural claim to services as a benefit and right of citizenship on the one hand and, on the other, the counter-enlightenment view often associated with fascism: that the citizen must serve the state and has no rights other than those granted by the state. In what may be called the American model of citizenship, which, through our system of government practice, is a broadly endowed set of rights representing potential claims for benefits as defined by the state, what constitutes a valid claim by citizens is contested, and then the question of who qualifies to have claims met is debated. This offers us an opportunity to understand a number of pressing issues hotly contested: what is the proper role of government, who should have the right to make claims, how exclusionary or inclusive we should be as a society, how are rights defined and defended, to name but a few. 

It was supposed to be a peaceful protest, as the organizers have told us. But what we saw on the streets on the first of August was nothing short of rebellion. They said it was hijacked, but who hijacked it? In what I saw on the streets, strong young men who do not qualify under the definition of hunger are those on the streets. In what I saw on the streets are young men who are raising another country’s flag other than my country’s flag. What I saw on the streets were the young men who were burning my country’s flag and chanting for military intervention. I ran through the streets and talked to some people within the bracket of hunger as defined by the United Nations; they are the onlookers and those who are praying that this does not escalate to a situation where we could not have a country to call our own because some disgruntled fools are let loose on our streets for political score cards in the name of hunger protest. 

Dr. James Bwala, PhD, writes from Abuja.

Nigeria: The Politics of the Hunger Protest and the Wrong Move for the Government’s Attention