As the president goes to war. Until now, President Bola Tinubu had spoken little about the “enemies” of his administration. He let his appointees and confidants do the talking, or the fighting, while trying to maintain what is believed to be the honour of his high office. So far, those officials do not seem to have let him down. But when, on February 27, the Nigeria Labour Congress called the nation’s workers out to the streets to protest the sweeping hardship, the commander-in-chief himself deployed to battle and would hold nothing back.
By Ogochukwu Ikeje
Listening to one government official after another, as the day passes, it is crystal clear that the Tinubu administration is seeing enemies everywhere. The adversaries pop on the streets. They are on our national borders, but their headquarters is in the political class. Their one and only aim is to pull down the administration, brick by brick and pillar by pillar, until there is nothing left. It is a war. The administration will not call it by any other name. And the officials made up of the president’s appointees and allies do their best to spot the enemies whenever and wherever they pop up.
Late last year, when President Bola Tinubu visited his home state, Lagos, to rest, roadside crowds, instead of applauding or waving, shouted at his long convoy, ‘Ebin n pawa’, Yoruba for ‘We are starving’. The president’s men let that pass. But when that little irritation morphed into big hunger protests across the country, with women blocking a major highway, in the Niger State case, the officials had had enough.
Senate President Godswill Akpabio, the number three man in the country, a personal friend of the president and, to boot, a veteran of such wars, described the protesters as being sponsored. “You can see sponsored protests here and there,” he told reporters on February 21. In other words, the enemies of the government assembled the protesters, got them to act the way they did, and very likely paid them to say they were hungry. Finally, Mr Akpabio dismissed them as ignorant people, who didn’t know the amount of work the government was doing to fill the protesters’ homes with food.
Felix Morka, spokesman for the president’s party, the All Progressives Congress, chose, well, a tame word, “unfair”, to describe the hunger protesters. To Mr Morka, the protesters cried too soon. If they had waited until, say, the eighth month of the eighth year of the administration, perhaps…
On February 20, a day before Mr Akpabio spoke, the vice president, Kashim Shettima, announced a major newsbreak. The federal government had uncovered as many as 32 grain-smuggling routes in just one part of Sokoto State, he announced, triumphantly. Under the cover of night, 45 truckloads of maize were intercepted on one of the routes alone, Mr Shettima added. It was a major and fruitful crackdown. The enemies had been stopped in their tracks.
“And the moment those foodstuffs were intercepted,” to quote him, “the price of maize came down by N10,000. It came down from N60,000 to N50,000, so there are forces that are hell-bent on plunging this country into a state of anarchy.” Then he hit out at “those who could not get to power through the ballot box, who, instead of waiting till 2027,” have resorted to desperate measures.
Clearly, though without naming the desperate saboteurs, Mr Shettima was referring to the main opposition figures, Peter Obi of the Labour Party, and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, who contested the 2023 presidential election and came up short, according to the electoral chairman Mahmoud Yakubu.
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Mr Shettima did not say how long those smuggling routes had been in existence, whether they were charted after the election or before. The only thing that seemed of utmost importance to him and the administration was that the efforts of some enemies of state had been thwarted.
Until now, President Bola Tinubu himself had spoken little about the enemies. This is in keeping with the behaviour of kings and presidents. They tend to let their appointees and aides do the talking, or the fighting, while trying to maintain what is believed to be the honour of their high office. So far, those officials do not seem to have let the president down.
But when, on February 27, the Nigeria Labour Congress called the nation’s workers out to the streets to protest the sweeping hardship, the commander-in-chief himself had had enough. He deployed to battle and would hold nothing back. In Lagos, two days later, to launch the red line train project, the president took aim at the Labour leaders and let fly, telling them that calling four strikes in his nine-month administration was unacceptable.
“If you want to participate in the electoral process, wait till 2027. If not, maintain peace, you are not the only voice of Nigerians,” he told them. In other words, the Labour leaders are just like the grain smugglers who want to destroy his administration by making food scarce.
Neither his officials nor the president himself would admit that knocking out the petroleum subsidy without any safety nets, and leaving the naira at the mercy of the market forces brought Nigerians to this low point.
In penultimate Tuesday’s instalment of this column (Animal Farm on my mind, February 27), I highlighted the devious and manipulative role Squealer played in George Orwell’s bestseller, Animal Farm. The fat porker, who was the animals’ minister of propaganda, and who could “turn black into white”, blamed everything that went wrong on the Farm on one pig, Snowball, the expelled rival of the leader, Napoleon.
In Nigeria’s case, those fighting the perceived enemies of the president are probably as many as the enemies, seen here, there and everywhere.