History doesn’t repeat itself because history is not a cyclical but a non-linear process. It is memory that brings back a historical event. Meanwhile, memory is not an impartial recorder. So, President Tinubu doesn’t necessarily have to lose sleep because opposition leaders are on a street protest as happened Wednesday, April 8th, 2026, 12 years after a similar one in which Tinubu was a protester.
The problem, however, is that memory, like perception, is what decides how people behave. And memory doesn’t need the sort of evidence that can be procured in transactional terms. That’s where Tinubu may have grounds to fear when leading members of opposition take to the streets.
This appears to be the entire message!
Courtesy: Information Nigeria Facebook page
The last time Nigerians witnessed ‘big men’ embarking on street protest was 2014. By the logic of sequence, it could be said that the November 2014 street protest involving some of those who partook in yesterday’s street protest prepared the ground for Muhammadu Buhari, the symbolic leader of that protest, to ascend power less than a year later.
President Bola Tinubu could have been the best ever president of Nigeria because of his ‘constructivist’ approach to politics. In other words, he doesn’t have anything like ‘rules of the game’ in his dictionary of politics, thus making himself a potential grandmaster in operationalising Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s premise that rule following is also rule changing.
But when ‘constructivism’ becomes lawlessness, it embodies its own electoral catastrophe, symbolically and otherwise. And that appears to be the destination the administration has chosen.
Utter breakdown of consensus within the elite as to lead to elite street protest involving leading opposition leaders is always a strong sociological signal of trouble ahead, particularly when life is already unbearable for those downstairs, all due to misery-inducing policy recklessness.
Of course, yesterday’s protest was a response to an INEC reading of a court process. Instructively, it was Tinubu the opposition leaders addressed in their banners. That is something implicating, coming from opposition players who are or have been masters of the game.
Could it still be morning yet on creation day in Nigeria?
