So, what happened in and to Nigeria between August 1st and August 10th, 2024 and who might be the winners and losers from that? Empirically, the country was enveloped in mass protests against bad governance in those 10 days. But winners of any such test of strength do not emerge from the facts of the matter. Winners are produced. The day after, the winners of the mass protest against bad governance are being produced.
It means that the protest is just about to begin. This time, the protest will not be street actions. It has passed over from street actions to the discursive spaces – the media, academia, civil society, think tanks and public intellectuals. This is the stage of the politics of meaning. This is where the winners and losers of what happened in the past ten days will emerge. Intervention lists below the five frames it can identify so far.
The first frame that this platform identifies is the position of the majority (based on social media computation both in terms of frequency of occurrence or situated reading). Here, it was a ground breaking popular action, the likes of which has not been the scale in modern Nigerian history.
If this frame saying it was a ground breaking mass action prevails, then the winners would be the protesters because the mandarins of bad governance would have been delegitimated, forced into a subject position where they have to oblige the protesters. Winning and losing in this sort of game is never a permanent thing but for now, the winner status of the protesters can be established in the frequency of President Tinubu’s assurances to deliver. He may be engaged in nothing more than speech acts but speech acts have binding implications. After all, he emerged as the bad guy throughout the protests. When the protesters arrived in town, they resignified the person and the government of Tinubu in terms of governance so bad as to warrant being confronted on a mass scale. President Bola Tinubu will carry the #Endbadgovernance label for the rest of his life. He may, with some luck, renarrativise himself out of it but in a way that will involve a completely modified Tinubu. There is nothing he does now that will not be seen from the prism of a Tinubu struggling to do better after the protests or trying to show that he could be stubborn. None of the options is inviting for a man who prides himself as a skillful politician.
In the week under reference, a sitting president was forced to watch the flag of another country waved openly by a set of citizens in a masterful critique of their own country and its symbols. In ‘banal nationalism’, that counts as a minus for Nigeria and its leaders. In anger, the leaders responded by classifying it as treason, but thereby suggesting they do not know what was happening. Protesters pouring unto the street implies a rupture of the social order which makes a claim of treason against them meaningless because they have already dismissed the order being referenced, with some paying the ultimate price for that with their own life. That is why the best option would have been to deny any sort of protesters an opportunity to interrogate the state. But when a government reads everything as challenge to authority, it ends up reaping benefits that it ought not to. It all depends on which school of statecraft each of us attended.
There is a second framing of the protests, held notably by some very few columnists who argue that it was northern insurrection against the government of the day and speaks to restructuring of the country through a completely different route. For them, it is because the North for which mass protest was forbidden under Buhari has suddenly found in mass protest a viable instrument.
As with all discourses, this is neither a good or bad argument. It is just an argument. All we can do to it is give it a situated reading. A plausible situated reading would be how this position overwrites the heterogeneity of the northern territory. It completely overlooks the historical rejection of the Buhari persona in northern Nigeria until Bola Tinubu, a master constructivist, repackaged Buhari and sold him to Nigeria. Before that, Buhari had no purchase among the political, business, traditional and security elite in Northern Nigeria. The northerners who overthrew Buhari in 1985 said he was incapable of appreciating diversity. That was a pragmatic statement as usual but it came from his own colleagues. Only the youths hailed Buhari as a man of truth.
Banal nationalism is what critical psychology call this clutching the flag at a juncture like the protest. it speaks to something between North and South or any such simplistic binaries
Just for the purpose of argument, by what logic should the North (assuming a homogenous one exists) still reject Buhari whom the Southwest had suddenly identified as the best material in 2014/15? Does the fact of some clerics declaring antagonism to #EndSARS or keeping quiet on Buhari’s nepotism permanently stand for a Northern consensus for a Buhari under whom the North itself was finally wrecked? How were those statements produced? Just how do some of these columnists draw the inferences which they circulate?
If those saying it is northern insurrection prevail, the winners will be the promoters of the diversion called a new constitution. The Patriots, for example, who have rushed to The Presidential Villa in what is more like a solidarity visit to propose restructuring of the country in the territorial image of the protests that they have. They are not impressed with the reality that no African country, including ancient ones such as Egypt and Ethiopia, have been able to break out of the trap of material backwardness and how this is not due to lack of good constitutions or lack of ‘true’ Federalism. That makes their route diversionary but as a discourse is not about good or bad but about pushing it to consensus, they could emerge the winners if care is not taken.
Re-regionalisation is ever a challenge to the theory and practice of the developmental state which Obasanjo, for example, recently bought into but belatedly. He must have done so because he would have seen how difficult for any African country to get it right through any other model other than the developmental state. The state is still the winning instrument for any African country to get it right. Africa is not where it is because of any other reasons than the outcome of contemporary global power configuration. So, prioritizing restructuring looks funny.
Secondly, re-regionalisation could work but, like every discourse, those that re-regionalisation will exclude could come back to haunt the country, years after the members of The Patriots may have been gone.
Anyway, there is the third narrative for which the mass protests was an outing of looters, criminals and people engaging in treason. Surely, there is an element of intelligence in denying an opponent an honourable identity but isn’t there something worrisome in state power denying a massive breakdown of the democratic order under its watch? It is always tempting for the government of the day to play down such breakdown as an approach to its containment but it is also true that denials come back to haunt its protagonists. Or is another case of which school of statecraft we all attended? Should this frame prevail through its articulation and sedimentation, the government will be the winner(s). it will have its way, frame and jail as many people as it can and get away with it.
Fourth on Intervention’s list is Tinubu communism, a discursive response that might not be found in the huge “Marxist literature” on governmentality. Well, those who cannot find it should take it as their own problem. As far as the Tinubu government is concerned, it is there. It is the practice peculiar to the Tinubu regime involving government purchasing trucks of rice or whatever it fancies and making itself the distributor of such stuff. It prefers this to making products more affordable to the generality of the people. Unlike conventional communism which has a redistribution paradigm: from each according to his/her ability and to each according to his/her needs, critics say that Tinubu communism is based on practices of classical cronyism. It is an important framing of August 1st to August 10th because it suggests a fearful but crafty reading of the protest in which the regime is the winner by reducing its list of cronies through contract for purchase and distribution of stuff on no clear guidelines. Which winners emerge should this paradigm prevail: governors and contractors
Making the invisible visible is the acme of popular protest
There is the last framing, that by both the invisible and voiceless, those we can’t see and can’t hear anything from at this point. It doesn’t mean they are not there. They are but they are for the moment victims of unheard screams, either because they have been shot at, killed during the protests or driven into deeper conditions of poverty and misery. A seemingly hurried memorialisation appears to have been put off. If that’s the case, better because memorialisation cannot or ought not to take place before documentation. It is documentation that fires memorialisation because that’s the moment of visibilisation. And it is making the invisible visible that, even in death, make victims to occupy an intimidating subject position, individually and collectively. The politics of well organised documentation and memorialisation of all those shot to death in this mass protest will, therefore, make eternal winners of all those killed in the 10 days of the protests.
What’s Intervention getting at in this piece? It is that winners in all contestations depend on which narrative of the protest prevails. It means that just because people protested does not mean they have won. The protest has to be backed by the narrative artillery. Interestingly, the narrative artillery looks like a unconstrained enterprise in contemporary Nigeria. The social media is awash with reproduction of relevant anecdotes, old reports, previous statements and graphics most helpful to any intertextual or rhetorical analysis as opposed to so-called evidence based analysis.
Interestingly too, the hoarse voices chanting ‘fake news’ have found it a mission impossible and unprofitable. They have realised they were all along on a false track. Who determines when a news item is fake? At what point do we find the evidence that validates a true news from a fake news if all news lack non-discursive grounding? Since when did fake news become an issue? It was not an issue as long as multinational corporations, big pharmaceutical companies, spy agencies and great power ministries of information monopolized this representational practice of power. It became an issue as soon as complex spatialities of power and articulation came about with globalisation, enabling ordinary citizens to express themselves. In the age of simulation, to talk of fake news is to exhibit terrible ignorance. All news are discursive. None is fake or genuine. Every other reality was a lie until made true. Jean Baudrillard did not get everything right in his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place but no serious reviewer challenged his thesis: the war took place empirically but which version of it did we see?
It is up to the Nigerian ruling class. If Buhari earned #EndSARS and Tinubu earned #EndBadGovernance, the next revolt may end class rule completely. Those who think they can escape that through circuitous tactics or by cutting Nigeria into pieces may not know what that entails in the context of current global power relations. They should go and read their history.
