On hardship protests

To protest or not to protest? This is the Shakespearean question on the lips of millions of Nigerians over the past week or so, from government officials to religious leaders, and media pundits to ordinary citizens. No one, except perhaps the intelligence agencies, knows who is planning it, or whether there is one being planned, […]

To protest or not to protest? This is the Shakespearean question on the lips of millions of Nigerians over the past week or so, from government officials to religious leaders, and media pundits to ordinary citizens. No one, except perhaps the intelligence agencies, knows who is planning it, or whether there is one being planned, but nearly everyone in the country is talking or sharing clips about a mass protest against the persistent cost of living crisis. On X yesterday evening, the issue was trending in Nigeria with more than 274,000 posts at the time of completing this article around 5 pm.  I do not have any answers to the question myself, but one is clear.

The threat of a protest against living conditions is already a protest itself, regardless of whether it is carried out or not. And for that, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must bear full responsibility for how we got here in the first place. I can think of many reasons—nearly all of them directly traceable to the actions and inactions of the Tinubu government—for how we got here, and of course how we get out of this situation because it is simply impossible for a mass protest of any kind to be or remain peaceful in today’s political, economic and social climate in Nigeria, even if the demonstrations are to be held by monks or professors.

President Tinubu’s gravest misstep so far as a Nigerian leader has been that he misread—indeed, unread—the economic mood of the country he took over in May 2023. I don’t think it was deliberate, but that misreading has also been his undoing from then to date, since a proper reading of the economic situation of millions of Nigerians at the time would most likely have dampened his enthusiasm for launching some of the painful policies, that have led to where we are now, with threats of mass protests that cannot be conducted peacefully by anybody, hanging on the neck of his government. What the President misread, most specifically, was the depth and breadth of hunger in the land that was already everywhere evident when he took office.

By December 2022, when the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), introduced its mischievous, even malicious, policy of naira redesign, the prices of staple foods that most Nigerians eat daily had already been rising persistently over the previous 24 consecutive months, that is, food prices rising every single month since at least November 2020. CBN’s naira redesign policy, then, only made things worse several times over, such that by May 2023, food inflation stood at 24.68 per cent , up from 18.19 per cent  in November 2020.  In other words, the current widespread anger over hunger had been brewing among millions of Nigerians even before the advent of the present government. The 2023 elections were then both a distraction from this hunger and a ray of hope for many.

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Unfortunately, for a new government that styled itself as one of “Renewed Hope”, the President misread the hunger situation in the country even then, and went ahead to launch two policies—fuel subsidy removal and naira devaluation—that have turned a terrible situation into a tailspin. The rest, as they don’t say, is history still acutely present.

Tinubu won the popular votes of the country in the 2023 presidential election, no doubt. Yet, by his misreading of the food situation and his own policies, he would immediately start to lose the popular mind of the country, because by last month, food inflation figures had risen to 40.87 per cent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). This is nearly double the rate at the time the government came to office last year.

Yet, if misreading the country’s food security situation in May 2023 was bad, and launching painful policies even worse, the government’s management of the fallout of these policies have been nothing short of abysmal. To his credit, Tinubu must have been worried enough about the hunger situation to declare a state of emergency on food security early on in July 2023. A full year after, what has come out of that state of emergency declaration and its 12 key action points?

I have read policy documents on the government’s food security plan, and my first impression was that those who drafted it either did not appreciate fully the dire situation of the problem they were trying to solve, or they did not fully appreciate the political virtues and vices of food in a society. Food—adequate, accessible and cheap—is possibly the single most important factor for political stability. The opposite is equally true, after all, an overfed populace is still easier to keep in line than a hungry one. In its food security action plan of July last year, the government said it would immediately release grains to households and fertilizers to farmers, beef up strategic food reserves and create a National Commodity Board, improve rural security, expand farmlands and revitalise river basins, encourage all-year farming, pump money to farmers through the CBN, improve rural transportation, among similar activities.

These are good plans, yes, but they are no plans for an emergency situation. They are more like a wish-list because all of them require putting other structures in place that may or may not work. Creating a commodity board will take a few years to become fully operational. The government has already spent more than 10 years trying to resolve rural banditry. There is no guarantee that those who collect CBN money will use it for farming. And well, there are not grains or fertilizers in any reserves in Nigeria because they had been disrupted by corruption or the Russia-Ukraine war. Thus, what the government’s emergency declaration on food security promised the most is also what was glaringly missing in its plan for achieving it: an immediate or short-term solution.

In my view, the most important drivers of the current cost of living crisis are three: rising food prices, unprecedented transport costs, and low incomes that have not only stagnated but eroded in real terms. So, what the government needed to do the most in July 2023, when the devasting effects of fuel subsidy withdrawal and naira devaluation were already much evident, were also three: massive importation of food to crash prices in the short term while working towards the other medium to longer term measures on food security; a mass transit support system throughout the major towns and cities; and a new minimum wage to raise pitiful incomes by some margins. These are the same policies the government is now trying to implement after losing quality time and the goodwill of the people that a new government should normally enjoy.

If the government had taken some of these steps and faithfully implemented them since last year, few would be paying attention to anything like mass protests now.

But rather than focusing squarely on dealing with the core drivers of the cost of living crisis since last year, the government was busy distracting itself with so-called “palliatives” that went straight to the pockets of the politicians, blaming opposition parties or previous governments, or went chasing shadows like converting the country to the use of compressed natural gas vehicles, falling for the spin by vested interests that food importation was not a good idea because it would disincentivise local food production, even though local production has never been anywhere near local demand, and delaying the implementation of a new minimum wage on the rather weak argument that salary increases would perversely raise inflation higher too.

So, while it is clear that a mass protest over the cost-of-living crisis will be quite dangerous right now, the Tinubu government must also accept full responsibility for how we got here, and work hard to win enough hearts and minds to prevent it. Blaming opposition party figures or religious fatwas against protests cannot resolve such a situation. I rest my case.