On August 1, a 10-day nationwide protest with hashtag #EndBadGovernance ensued across the country. The identified culprits are the rising cost of living and general hunger and insecurity in the land occasioned by the introduction of harsh economic reform policies, in particular the removal of oil subsidy and devaluation of the Naira by the Tinubu-led federal government.
The original plan was to have a peaceful protest devoid of any form of violence or breach of public peace. But what exactly is a peaceful protest?
A peaceful protest, also known as non-violent resistance, is a form of action in which participants do not engage in any act that could be deemed violent. Participants in a peaceful protest are unarmed, do not fight back against attempts to stop their actions, and they refrain from damaging any public or private property. There have been many examples of peaceful protests throughout history. Their effectiveness varied based on a number of factors. Many of these protests were based on a concept called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience means breaking the law in a non-violent way to achieve a desired result. The vast majority of peaceful protests throughout history still involved breaking some laws because protest movements are, at their core, an attempt to enact change in society.
This element of breach of law and order is reflected in the words of Omoyele Sowore, journalist and convener of the RevolutionNow Movement. in his reaction to President Tinubu’s recent address to the nation, Sowore said “we want the system to be shutdown such that they will understand that Nigerians are the real owners of the country, not those in Abuja’’
One classical proponent of non-violent protest was Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in his opposing to British colonial rule in India. He believed in the effectiveness of civil disobedience and led a number of non-violent protests such as the Salt March of 1930, in which many people joined Gandhi on a long-distance march to collect salt, which was being heavily regulated and taxed by the British. At the other chaotic end of the duo poles of civil disobedience, were the protests in the United States of America over the brutal killing of George Floyd by the police.
The EndBadGovernance protest was not as peaceful as planned but it generated many ideas some of which were indeed sarcastic. It was suggested that instead of wasting funds on food production and job creation for “lazy youths” and listening to protesters, the Federal Government should arrest all of them and build more police cells and prisons to accommodate them to serve as a deterrent to miscreants! This is exactly the kind of characterization of protesters that fuel anti-government sentiments in what ordinarily should have been a path to engagement.
Of course, the human condition is more or less an inter-connected loop of sorts with its inherent contentions, one of which is the struggle for survival or fight for justice by every individual or organism within the loop. So it is only natural for protests, agitations and discontent to manifest, not necessarily as a destabilizing force but as a vital part of the contemporary socio-cultural dynamics and ethos.
Simply put, protests are inevitable especially in a society such as ours that is largely inequitable, unjust and imperfect. The irony here is that an attempt to supress a civil protest may in fact bring it about, or inadvertently escalate it to something of a recrudescent epidemic similar to what happened during the Arab Spring and more recently in Kenya.
More importantly, the idea of civil protest ought to be contextualized within democratic tenets and the principle of fairness and equity. This way, engagement, dialogue and positive action provide a better option than propaganda, repression or the usual kinetic pushback by law enforcement agencies, infamously the police. But it is important to keep in mind that just because a protest is peaceful does not mean that it does not break any laws.
Beyond that, it is equally important to interrogate the divergent idiosyncrasies of protesters. Why do protests turn violent?
Is it just because people are hungry and desperate? Is it possible that some persons have a predilection for vandalism and destruction of public property and pour out on the streets at the slightest provocation?
The common practice in such instances is to say that the protest has been ‘’hijacked’’ either by hoodlums or political thugs. Needless to add that the hoodlums and the thugs in question may or may not be citizens of Nigeria.
Research has shown that people generally see confrontational protests as unwarranted and ineffectual. People protest because they believe they can make a difference by acting together. Yet, some protests turn violent. Why? Experts have suggested that people who are prepared to use violent confrontation can be psychologically different from those who are not. People who are prepared to adopt violence are more likely to report feelings of contempt for political adversaries whom they hold responsible for wrongdoing. In other words, people who turn violent at protests are more likely to harbour contempt for authorities they hold responsible; the situation is likely to degenerate further if there is a general sense of despair and helplessness that things would never change.
Simply put, if Nigerian youths have confidence in President Tinubu and his policies, the protest would likely not hold even if there is hunger in the land.
Psychological research offers some support for this analysis. Where people don’t believe their appeals to the authorities will be heard, protesters may more likely adopt violent methods of protest. Under these circumstances, people think they have nothing to lose.
Traditional institutions, ethno-religious sentiments may ignite or escalate civil unrest. For instance, some commentators have expressed serious concern that the cultural institution may lose its significance if festivals and cultural practices are over-politicized or weaponized by the custodians against perceived opponents. This was because shortly before the March governorship election in Lagos state, the Oro festival was held within the election period, thus prompting widespread suspicion that the festival was deployed as a tool by the incumbent APC-led administration in the state against Igbos in Lagos and their LP.
Whether this was true or not, it is a matter of individual opinion, as it were. Again, from studies into policing and crowd control, it has been established that heavy-handed treatment from the police is a major catalyst of violent protests. A typical example was the ENDSARS protest. Put differently, even the most peace-loving activists may come to see violence as more acceptable if the state responds in a way that seems unjustified and disproportionate.
There is the cost of governance of which a recent case study was the renovation of the Vice President’s lodge in Abuja, at a time citizens cannot afford to eat. So one thing is clear, in order to minimize protests henceforth, the Tinubu government must listen to the people and respond proactively.
