AWKA TIMES Magazine

14/08/2024

Nigeria: Hunger Protest, Potential Realignments, and the 2027 Presidential Election

The activists who planned the recent protest in Nigeria could not have expected its political fallouts, including the potential to trigger realignments in the 2027 presidential election.

By Chudi Okoye
Awka Times
August 14, 2024

https://www.awkatimes.com/nigeria-hunger-protest-potential-realignments-and-the-2027-presidential-election/

Even before the recent protest in Nigeria had commenced, its pre-announcement by planners prompted a preemptive attack by fringe elements in the Southwest region and apologists of the current Nigerian administration who tried to pin the proposed protest on the Igbos of the Southeast. Igbo abstention from the protest and the manner of the protest’s eventual ex*****on, with its most truculent expression (involving deaths, property damage, looting and stochastic violence) occurring in parts of the impoverished North, appear to have unleashed a different dynamic: a potential fracturing of the political alignment that ushered in the present All Progressives Congress (APC) administration headed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

In a previous essay on this issue, I described how ethnic discourse had unfortunately – but characteristically for Nigeria – been injected into a protest that was conceived essentially as a revolt of the hungered poor. What had the makings of class struggle regrettably suffered an atavistic regression – a reversion to ethnic mean, to borrow concepts from psychiatry and statistics.

My initial article had focused on a particular aspect of the protest discourse: a projection of mischievous intent onto the Igbos of the Southeast, who were said to be behind the protest because they were still stewing over the loss of the election by one of their own, Peter Obi of the Labour Party. The Igbos were then given an ultimatum – by faceless Yoruba firebrands – to remove themselves from Lagos and other parts of the Southwest. In the wake of the protest, however, a different narrative is emerging: a narrative surreptitiously pushed by administration hunchos and keenly cultivated by some members of the Southwest media intelligentsia, retrojecting a northern geopolitical motive into the protest. According to this new theory, the hunger protest erupted, not necessarily because Nigerians were in any worse condition than the miseries suffered in other lands, but because northern elites, like fish out of water, have become restless being out of power.

When fish is out of water, its gills collapse, it suffers stress and potential brain damage, and it eventually dies if deoxygenation is prolonged. I am metaphorizing, but this is essentially what’s presumed in parts of the Nigerian media to be happening to the temporarily displaced northern power elites. I have read deeply argued articles suggesting that the protest was orchestrated by the ‘North’, and that it was an early warning signal that an impatient North is angling to retake power by 2027. It is also suggested that the protest and the North’s impatience mean its alliance with Tinubu, which led to the ascendance of Muhammadu Buhari and his succession by Tinubu, is now all but dead.

This could be alarmist. But if it is even close to being realistic, it completely changes the outlook for the 2027 presidential election.

Successful Alliance
Nigerian politics is notoriously transactional, with its practitioners – for the most part lacking ideological conviction or simply inured by ideological consensus – in continuously shifting alliances. So it was with the political alliance that brought the incumbent president, Tinubu, as well as his predecessor, Buhari, to power.

Buhari, an unsmiling former military dictator chucked out by his colleagues after only 20 months in power, had transformed himself into a barely relatable democrat in pursuit of the Nigerian presidency under civilian dispensation. But he was unsuccessful in all his initial efforts. In 2003, he contested under the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) but was defeated by Olusegun Obasanjo, another ex-military henchman seeking re-election under the banner of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 2007, Buhari was trounced by Obasanjo’s successor, Umaru Yar'Adua. In 2011, this time fighting under the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), Buhari was defeated by Goodluck Jonathan.

Having been rejected three times by the Nigerian electorate, a dejected Buhari was reportedly ready to pack it in, but for a renowned political strategist from Lagos, Bola Tinubu, who interjected in his depression and persuaded him on a new tack. In 2013, in order to take on then incumbent PDP, Tinubu mobilized various political formations – including his own Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), a breakaway faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and a faction of PDP (nPDP) – to form the APC. The new party would win power in the 2015 election, toppling PDP’s 16-year incumbency. Buhari also won re-election in 2019, and was succeeded by Tinubu himself in 2023.

Despite its spectacular rise to power, the APC’s nine-year reign in Nigeria has been an unmitigated disaster, even if one factors in global events that occurred during its rule, like the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza which is threatening a wider Middle East conflagration. The APC’s governance failure is reflected in the decline of all economic and social indices under the party’s watch, marked the most by the collapse of the country’s currency; a severe contraction of the economy, with the GDP just about halved to $252.7 billion in 2024 from its peak when the party took power; the widespread insecurity in the land; decay and the grimification of social life; and, latterly, the embarrassing hunger protest which revealed Nigeria to the world as a poor country, despite its swagger. All of these resulted in the party’s shrunken governing mandate, seen in its reduced share of presidential election votes from 53.9% in 2015 and 55.6% in 2019 to 36.6% in 2023.

The APC’s poor record of governance, in addition to geopolitical power struggle and conflicting personal ambitions within the party, may be at the root of its seemingly troubled alliance.

2027 and an Unraveling Alliance
If indeed the APC alliance is becoming fractured, if the North is truly becoming restless as suggested, it might not be unconnected with the fact that Bola Tinubu has governed with a heavy Yoruba accent. He has been exceedingly parochial (no less, probably more so, than Buhari before him), and appears to be on a rapid trajectory to consolidate Oduduwa hegemony in Nigeria. It is telling that a Tinubu that was backed in the 2022 APC primary by northern governors, who helped secure his nomination reportedly against Buhari’s wish, is now – again supposedly – facing the unsteady support of the North. If that is the case, it means a political realignment might be being considered by Tinubu strategists for his re-election in 2027.

To understand the point here, let us look at how Tinubu won the election of 2023, as reflected in the official results (see chart above). Tinubu won the election with a plurality of 36.6%, the lowest winning score of any president in the 4th Republic, and the second lowest throughout Nigeria’s presidential history. It was a narrow victory won largely because of his alliance with the North.

My analysis of the 2023 results shows that the North boasted 61% of the votes, compared with the South’s 39%. Tinubu won 38% of the total northern vote, beating his nearest competitor in the region, Atiku, by two percentage points. Tinubu’s win in the North was made possible by a strong performance in the Northwest, which made up 28% of the total national vote and where he garnered 40%, the highest score. He also carried the North Central, which represented 19% of the national vote and gave him 39%. He was outperformed by Atiku in the Northeast where his running-mate, Kashim Shettima, hailed from, his 35% to Atiku’s 51%; but then, that geopolitical zone constituted only 14% of the national vote.

The importance of the North to Tinubu’s victory is further revealed if we consider his performance in the South. As already indicated, the South boasted only two out of five voters, significantly trailing the North; even so, Tinubu was outperformed in the South by Peter Obi. Tinubu secured 34% of the overall southern vote, driven by the 54% he obtained in the Southwest (which made up 18% of the national vote), and the 28% he won in the South South zone (which made up 12% of the national vote). But he was considerably outperformed in the South by Obi who won the region with a sizeable plurality of 43%.

Tinubu was soundly beaten by Obi in two southern geopolitical zones: in the Southeast where Obi scored a forbidding 88%, and in the South South which Obi carried with 42%. Even in Tinubu’s native Southwest zone, which he carried with a slight majority, he was given a run for his money by Atiku (who won 22% of the votes in the zone), and by Obi (who got 20%).

It is fair to say therefore that the North was crucial to Tinubu’s victory, such as it was, in the 2023 election. It is significant therefore if it appears now that this political alliance may be going through some stress. It has to be assumed that the sabre-rattling regime apologists, especially those in the Lagos-Ibadan media axis openly mocking Tinubu’s northern allies, must be aware of the fundamentals of the last election.

If so, it means that a different playbook might be in consideration for the 2027 presidential election. Perhaps an attempt at further inroads into the two regions where APC had decent showings in 2023 (Northeast and South South), to mitigate any erosion in the North Central and Northwest. This calculation perhaps explains the stupendous amount (₦20 billion) spent on renovating the residence of the vice-president, Shettima, who will be expected to exploit the power of incumbency to erode Atiku’s victory in that zone in 2023. It might also explain the indulgence of Nyesom Wike (“the Mouth from the South,” as I call him), the talkative and generally obstreperous character installed as minister of the Federal Capital Territory. He’s there to usurp Peter Obi in 2027 and deliver a clear APC majority in the South South – assuming he does not implode before then!

Assuming my speculations are correct, what should the other leading candidates do?

I have written several articles, before and after the 2023 election, arguing that Atiku owes a duty to the Southeast to repay the zone’s loyalty to the PDP since 1999, by facilitating the emergence of a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction, which is necessary for Nigeria’s unity. I berated him before the election for undermining the prospect of this; I have urged him, after the election, to do the right thing; and I have said that if he does not, Obi must do what is necessary to send Atiku, who’ll be 80 by the next election, into political retirement.

As it is, reading the tea leaves – or his “body language,” to borrow a vernacular of Nigerian politics – there’s a non-zero probability that Atiku might run again in 2027. Let me be clear: I am not predicting it. It’s possible that Atiku might be influenced by what happens in this November’s US presidential election. If America elects Kamala Harris, it might discourage Atiku, sensing a swing against gerontocracy, to seek the Nigerian presidency. If, however, America elects 78-year old Donald Trump, Atiku might be emboldened.

Atiku might also be encouraged if he thinks the Tinubu/North alliance might fracture. In that case, he’ll want to exploit northern disaffection and improve on the 36% of the region’s vote he secured in 2023, whilst pushing for further inroads in the South South, and defending his win in the Southwest.

Of the three leading candidates from 2023, Peter Obi has the greatest burden, I think. Whereas Tinubu has achieved for the Southwest what the great Awo could not, and whereas Atiku’s skin in the game is primarily personal, Obi has the burden of winning for Nigeria. Equilibrium in Nigeria’s tripodal politics, to say nothing of equity, requires Igbo presidential accession. I have written repeatedly that this has to be achieved in 2027. Of the current crop of the Southeast’s political leaders, Obi is the readiest, given the coalition he has built. If the region misses this window, it won’t be until 2039 that it might have another opportunity. But by then, the current crop of Igbo political elites will be quite aged; and I am not sure yet about the clout of the next generation.

Obi performed creditably in the 2023 presidential election. While he wasn’t adjudged the winner of the election, he did achieve a result that no other third-party had attained in Nigeria’s presidential history. For the 2027 election (assuming he’s running!) he’ll need to defend his impressive performance in the South, and re-strategize to improve on the 14% he won in the North. For this, he’ll need a deeper incursion into the northern power circles. I’m afraid this means that although Obi has built a progressive coalition, he’ll need a running-mate with cachet within the northern establishment. Obama did it in 2008, by picking Joe Biden as running-mate, to persuade America to vote for a Black man as president. Obi should think carefully about his running-mate for 2027: someone who’ll not put off his young and ebullient base, but who can persuade the northern powerbrokers to trust him.

The 2027 presidential election promises a scintillating contest: between a depleted incumbent who will seek re-election for personal and other parochial reasons, but who seems to be bleeding support; an aged juggernaut who might run one last time to achieve a burning personal ambition; and an effacing populist with the burden of history on his shoulders.

Who comes out victorious will say as much about the candidates as it does about Nigeria itself.

10/08/2024

If Kamala Cracks the Glass Ceiling, Can It Be ‘Obi-literated’ In Nigeria?

History beckons in Nigeria, if Kamala Harris can smash the power ceiling in the US.

By Chudi Okoye
Awka Times
August 10, 2024

https://www.awkatimes.com/if-kamala-cracks-the-glass-ceiling-can-it-be-obi-literated-in-nigeria/

They are both trying to break a glass ceiling in their respective countries: she, a gender barrier; he, an ethnic one. They are both ‘youngish’ boomers facing septuagenarians who’re well past their prime, being far older than the average age of their countries’ previous leaders. She, at 59, faces an opponent aged 78, in a country with a previous presidential inaugural median age of 55; he, now 63, last year faced and may yet again face a rival who officially claims 72, in a country with a mean age of 50 for its previous heads of government.

Kamala Harris of the United (but quarrelsome) States of America and Peter Obi of (a somewhat disunited) Nigeria are separated by a world of personal experiences. They’ve followed different paths to prominence in public service: she, intrinsically; he, via the private sector. She was district attorney and attorney general in California, US senator and presidential aspirant, before berthing as the incumbent US vice-president. He became governor of Anambra State and was a vice-presidential candidate, before running for president in his own right. Despite their different points of departure, Harris and Obi may be headed for a similar point of arrival as barrier breakers, if providence smiles on them and they also remain steadfast, focused on what they must do to achieve a history that beckons.

I plan, in this brief excursion, to probe some of the cross-currents, specifically to see what might be relevant in Harris’s foray into the firestorm of US presidential politics, were Obi to re-launch his own presidential bid in Nigeria in 2027. I will look specifically at: (1) how Kamala Harris emerged as the presumptive nominee of her party; and (2) how she’s handling the reactionary forces in US politics, as she rolls out her campaign.

Fortune Favors Kamala
It is nothing short of Shakespearean how Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for the 2024 US presidential election. To hear her political opponents tell the story, including yarns spun by the Republican Party’s seemingly discombobulated flag-bearer, Donald Trump, the rise of Harris is the result of an intramural conspiracy. They claim that Harris’s principal, Joe Biden, was on course to be trounced by Trump, particularly after his disastrous first debate, and was thus forced against his will to yield the ticket.

There was no indication of subterfuge in the eventual exit of Joe Biden from the presidential race. It was his dismal performance in the June 27 debate, which he and his team had proposed, that proved his undoing. There was certainly a measure of pressure from the Democratic Party hierarchy, alarmed about losing a critical election to Trump, urging the 81-year old to consider whether he had the stamina for what would be an excruciating campaign. While Biden balked at obliging his party, campaign funding – especially from big donors – had begun to dry up, eventually forcing Biden’s decision to quit.

All through the wrenching process, Harris stood firmly by Biden, without the slightest sign of disloyalty to a principal with whom she shared a deep bond. It was her unimpeachable behavior that made possible her seamless transition to the top of the ticket when Biden eventually decided to stand down.

This was crucial because, on deciding to yield, Biden not only endorsed Harris as the party’s nominee, he also orchestrated the transfer of his campaign machinery to Harris – funds, personnel, field operations, etc. This, in turn, gave Harris a great head start. It put her in a prohibitive position against potential challengers, were the party to permit an open primary to choose Biden’s successor, as some were suggesting. With a crunched time to revamp the ticket before the November election, the party alighted on a remote delegate voting arrangement which Harris handily won, having been endorsed by Biden and other party leaders.

It was chance and party pragmatism that occasioned Harris’s hop to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. She deserves great credit, nonetheless, for receiving the baton from Biden and, so far, running a good race.

There is something in all this for Peter Obi. His exit from the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in May 2022, as the party’s primary loomed, was at the time a subject of some debate. Although Atiku Abubakar was odds-on to win the primary, some felt Obi might again have been made Atiku’s running mate, placing him in a strong position to succeed Atiku in 2027.

There’s little question that PDP would have won the 2023 presidential election, had the party been able to prevent Obi’s departure. Remember that Atiku, under the PDP, secured 29.1% of the votes, while Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, both of whom defected from the party, secured 25.4% and 6.2% respectively. These add up to a total of 60.7% won by the three. Although certain statistical adjustments must be made, in reverse-engineering the results, to reflect the incremental effect of the efforts the decampees made to boost their destination parties, a unified PDP would still have won a significantly higher share of the votes than the 36.6% plurality with which Bola Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress (APC) carried the election.

Still, there’s no telling whether Atiku, hankering after the presidency for very long and finally achieving it in 2023, could have been persuaded to walk away from power in 2027. This is where I think, reflecting on what transpired in the US, Peter Obi’s political skills will be tested, if he wants to run again. I am not at all convinced that the Nigerian opposition parties, in their current formation, have a chance of defeating Bola Tinubu’s APC in 2027. I have consistently argued the necessity of a recombination or at least an electoral alliance between the major opposition parties, if they hope to recapture power from the APC. It puzzles me greatly that about a year-and-a-half or so before we enter the 2027 election cycle, there’s been no substantive move in this direction.

A challenge for Peter Obi, if he’s planning another presidential run, is to put Atiku Abubakar – who’ll be over 80 by the next election – out to political pasture. That way, Obi can forge an effective alliance between his Labour Party and PDP. Obi deserves credit for the formidable coalition he built to win a quarter of the ballots in 2023, a threshold no third-party had ever attained in Nigeria’s presidential politics. But he needs a more ruthless step to consolidate his base and turn it into a winning coalition. It starts with sending Atiku into political retirement. For inspiration, Obi can look to how 81-year old Joe Biden was persuaded to hang up his gloves.

Political Force Fields
Persuading Atiku to retire and inheriting his political machine will not be enough to send Obi to A*o Rock, I’m afraid. Even if Obi achieves that onerous task, he will still confront the reactionary forces and frictions of Nigerian politics. There will be atavistic forces threatened by his ethnicity; and there will be conservative forces, even if enlightened, threatened by the progressive and populist tendencies in his coalition.

Obi doesn’t need anyone to tell him that some laws of classical physics, particularly those of Newtonian mechanics, apply to Nigerian politics. The First Law of Motion says that an object at rest will persevere in that state of rest or if in motion will remain on a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it (F∆t = m∆v). The Second Law of Motion states that the force acting on a body is equal to the mass of that body multiplied by the acceleration (F = ma); as such, the acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied. Both of these laws apply to Nigerian politics, along with the Third Law of Motion which states that whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first (F1 = -F2).

Obi should contemplate these Newtonian laws, and look to what’s unfolding with Kamala Harris in the US for inspiration on how to navigate the force field of Nigerian politics.

Harris faces a monumental gender barrier in this November’s election. Yes, Hillary Clinton had shattered the ceiling somewhat by winning the Democratic Party nomination and going on to win the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election by a statistically significant margin. She was nonetheless handily defeated by Donald Trump in Electoral College votes (the real decider of US presidential elections), garnering 227 to Trump’s 304. We will see in this year’s election if America will finally elect a woman as president.

Kamala Harris also faces serious racial resistance, although Barack Obama had cracked the racial barrier to US presidency in 2008. The ‘drag coefficient’ of racial bigotry is minimized as a result, but not eradicated.

We can see both of these factors, gender and race, in the particularly nasty politics of Harris’s opponent, Trump. I reported late last month, in the immediate wake of Harris’s emergence as the putative Democratic Party standard bearer following Biden’s exit, that Trump and his party had wasted no time hurling racist and misogynistic abuses at her. I predicted then that it would get worse. And so it has. Trump has mocked Harris’s racial identity; derides her intelligence – calling her “dumb” and “stupid” and “lazy” – all stereotypes used over the years by Whites against Blacks; deliberately mispronounces her name as a form of othering, to give Americans the impression that this woman, born in Oakland California, is not really an American, because she was born to immigrant parents; he even mocks the way Kamala Harris laughs, to invoke the stereotype of African slaves as laughing jackasses; and, in what doubles as a racist and misogynistic slur, he claims that she slept her way to the top.

Donald Trump says these things openly in the media, and on his campaign stops, to roaring laughter and the chortling delight of his supporters. It is all evidence that a significant part of the American population is unwilling to accept the idea that a Black woman can become US president.

Joy Trumps Hate
In Nigeria, of course, leading politicians don’t typically unleash the sort of verbal diarrhea that pours forth from Donald Trump, though their sidekicks aren’t always inhibited. (It is not lost on me that some rank and file Nigerians often appear to be highly enthralled with Trump: no doubt, I imagine – I hope! – because they lack full information about the extent of this man’s baseness.) Whilst reactionary politicians in Nigeria can be more circumspect, they act with no lesser prejudice, as is seen in the lopsided allocation of public goods.

There is a lesson in how Kamala Harris has carried herself in the face of Faustian bigotry. While Trump has been running his mouth, Harris is running her campaign with clout. She ignores his gutter-level baits and insults, or flicks them off with masterclass witticisms, and quickly returns to real issues. She meets Trump’s scowls with wan smiles; his sulking with élan; his grim deprecation of America with optimism. She steers her campaign with calm composure, with poise, with joy and measured exuberance – all of which seem so far to delight her thronging crowds and appear to be driving some positive flutter in the polls.

We don’t know if Kamala Harris can keep this up – all the way to election day. But there’s something to be said for “politics without bitterness,” a slogan adopted by the late Waziri Ibrahim in Nigeria’s Second Republic. Obi has been a practitioner of this type of politics. It is a good way to take bluntness out of the ruthless actions that must be taken to answer the call of history.

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08/08/2024

Clash of Class and Ethnicity in Regional Responses to the Hardship Protest in Nigeria
The ongoing hardship protest in Nigeria may be squelched by strident rebuke and heavy-handed coercion, but there’s a deeper dynamic in it that bodes ill for the country.

By Chudi Okoye
Awka Times
August 8, 2024

https://www.awkatimes.com/clash-of-class-and-ethnicity-in-regional-responses-to-the-hardship-protest-in-nigeria/

After weeks of it being whispered and days of its disrupted ex*****on, the 2024 hunger protest in Nigeria (hashtagged ) is winding down to a whimper.

Compared to the Kenyan protest (hashtagged ) which erupted earlier in June and eventually forced President William Ruto to reject his legislature’s controversial finance bill, the Nigerian affair – some might argue – has yielded little except carnage, deaths, arrests, and a roiling of the republic. The fissures and pressures that provoked the protest persist, but the brutal response of the Nigerian regime makes clear that it isn’t going to give ground, despite pious pretenses about its disposition to dialogue.

That said, any claim of a failed protest, already gleefully and unconscionably made by some, is, in my opinion, wrong. Something important has come out of the chaotic protest in Nigeria.

An Igbo proverb says a fierce wind reveals the rotten rump of a hen. So it has been with Nigeria and the protest. The blustery wind of the protest has revealed the rotting rearside of Nigeria.

The patriotic protagonists who planned the Nigerian protest, evidently disillusioned and yearnful youths, were not naïve. They likely anticipated the antiquated heavy-handed response of Nigeria’s ‘hybrid regime’: as the country is currently classified in The Economist’s global Democracy Index which rates countries on a continuum between autocracy and democracy. They likely also envisaged protest infiltration by spoilers and nihilists, some possibly planted by the regime itself. But it is a safe bet that the protest organizers never saw this coming: the injection of ethnic dialectics into what is essentially class struggle, and thus regional variations in responses to their protest.

The protest is about much that ails Nigeria today. It’s about the excruciating hardships faced by the populace, the lack of jobs and grinding poverty; about the surging inflation, seen most acutely in the astronomical rise of food and fuel prices, all made worse by the government’s neoliberal economic policies, including petrol subsidy removal and Naira depreciation. It’s about worsening insecurity in the land, the rampant kidnappings, banditry, farmers-herdsmen conflict and violent secessionist agitation.

The protest is also about the rank insensitivity of the present administration. In Nigeria, no one fears the lumpen povertariat. Not the gilded few, roistering and flaunting their fabulous wealth amid monumental poverty. Not the government, engorged in unbelievable profligacy. Even as the nation groans under the policies it has floated, the government remains bloated, its officials living large: miles-long convoys; new SUVs for federal legislators, price tag: ₦160 million each; ₦20 billion (nearly a fifth of Ekiti State’s entire 2023 budget!) spent renovating the vice-president’s residence; plans to purchase new planes for the presidency, to add to the existing fleet; and, despite public outcry, plans proceeding apace to spend ₦15 trillion (about the combined 2024 budgets of the 36 states) on a coastal highway contract, awarded without competitive bidding to a company connected to President Bola Tinubu and his family.

It is for these outrages and more that the protesters are pouring out on to the pavements.

But not if you ask some ethnic chauvinists. Even with the protest merely looming, word was already abroad, pushed by mischief-makers purporting to speak for Yorubas of the Southwest, that this was a plot by Igbos of the Southeast, an “insurrection” no less, to bring down Bola Tinubu’s government. Soon there was talk of a counter protest, with genocidal threats and the tag , insisting that Igbos must vacate Lagos and other parts of the Southwest. On July 27, the following message was posted on X, the social media platform, under the handle, Lagospedia:

“Lagosians and every S’West stakeholders [sic] should prepare for the massive protest of on the 20th - 30th of August. They have 1 month from now to leave and relocate their business from all S’West States. We urge all Yorubas living in the S’East to return home.”

To their credit, as the tempo of threats and intimidation rose, some Yoruba leaders spoke up to foil the roil. Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, along with spokespeople for Yoruba organizations like Afenifere, the Yoruba Council of Elders, the Eminent Elders Forum and the Western Regional Organization all made statements to douse the tension. So did candidates in the 2023 presidential election, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), who condemned the ethnic slur and incitement, calling for the purveyors to be apprehended by the authorities. Even President Tinubu, in his otherwise vapid address to the nation on August 4 about the protest, spoke out against the ethnic attacks.

Igbos, however, were not entirely reassured. The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) waved off the Yoruba leaders’ statements as “hypocritical,” insisting they were the secret “sponsors” of the attacks on Igbos. The South East Caucus in the National Assembly criticized the ethnic profiling and scapegoating of Igbos, recalling the bloody history of such targeting, for Igbos in Nigeria but also other tribes in Africa. Other interventions were defiant, insisting on Igbo right to live anywhere in Nigeria as long as demands for restructuring or Igbo separation from the federation are rejected.

Nevertheless, with an apparent ploy to pin protest planning on the Igbos unfolding, and with all that this entailed, there was a cascade of cautions from Igbo leaders and groups advising Igbos to shun the protest. The pitch for protest abstention came from all corners: Ohaneze Ndigbo, governors, lawmakers, IPOB, etc. All urged Igbo people to stand down and let this one pass because the calculus of blame and retribution was stacked against them.

Dissecting Indifference
It is totally understandable why Igbo leaders would urge a path of protest resistance. It’s self-preservation. Thinkers and philosophers going back to Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes – and even their predecessors in classical antiquity like Epicurus – have emphasized the idea that self-preservation is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A 2018 reissue of Samuel Butler’s 1900 prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey has a subtitle that captures the sentiment: “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”

And so it is with the Igbo decision to stay out of the 2024 protest.

At first, one might wonder how wise really it is for Igbos to opt out of this historic political surge in Nigeria. It is not as if they’ve fared any better in this economy.

Igbos are not in any way immune to the widespread privation in Nigeria. Although their homeland was once posited as a felicitous region somewhat better off than the more impoverished parts of Nigeria, years of marginalization and neglect by the federal government (which became more acute in the Buhari/Tinubu era), along with sustained misgovernance by a rapacious regional ruling class, led to an increasingly radicalized separatist movement which in turn has spawned a spate of violent criminality, seen most vividly in a rising scourge of self-terrorism in the region. The economic and social consequences of this have been devastating: a contraction of the regional economy, caused by supply chain disruptions, market uncertainty, investment flight and business collapse; all leading to a loss of productivity and widespread unemployment, creating a swollen underclass which, in turn, feeds the terrorist enterprise. It is a vicious circle.

Given the festering conditions in the region, and especially the widespread discontent, you would think the Southeast would offer a fertile ground for the current protest. Alas, but for a smattering of protest activity in some of the Southeastern states, the region in general demurred, in line with leadership guidance. In fact, there was even the depressing spectacle of some Igbo characters taking matters too far, disporting themselves in pubs and parks as they mocked earnest protesters in other parts of the country who were getting killed, arrested and generally harassed by the authorities.

It was most unbecoming. But you could understand (even if you don’t justify) the detachment and sense of schadenfreude in a people long brutalized by Nigeria, whatever they do. Igbo people have gone from initially resisting assimilation into a colonial Nigeria to a Nigerianistic fervor under the leadership of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. From there, after being framed for the failure of Nigeria’s First Republic, it was ‘Biafrexit’, as I call it, led by Emeka Ojukwu which culminated in civil war. Then there was a re-embracing of Nigeria, in the Second Republic, led again by Zik and the likes of Alex Ekwueme. After that, with yet another bout of Igbo othering and rejection by Nigeria, an impatient tendency emerged seeking Igbo exit from the country, led by the likes of Ralph Uwazuruike and Nnamdi Kanu. A brutal suppression of that tendency led to yet another phase in Igbo evolution in Nigeria: what I call ‘Biafritis’, a phase of despondency and self-mutilation.

Igbos have tried really hard, yet again, to be good Nigerians in this Fourth Republic. In the first 20 years of the current dispensation, across six presidential elections held between 1999 and 2019, Igbos overwhelmingly voted for contenders from other parts of the country, even rejecting their own kin who contested (including, in 2003 and 2007, their great war leader, Ojukwu). However, in 2023, they backed Peter Obi, not necessarily for primordial reasons but because Obi had put together a third-party electoral coalition that they thought offered Nigeria reprieve from the governing duopoly of the PDP and All Progressives Congress (APC) that seemed bereft of new ideas to move the country forward.

Obi constructed an unusual coalition comprising a cross-section of eager youths (of the type behind the current hunger protests), organized labor, members of the enlightened urban professional class, segments of the intelligentsia, and even organized religion (mostly Catholic and evangelical), all built on a primordial core of Obi’s Igbo South East.

Peter Obi was not returned as winner of the 2023 presidential election. He was instead accounted by the electoral commission to have secured 25.4% of the votes, carrying 11 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, as against the 36.6% won by the APC’s Bola Tinubu who carried 12 states, and the PDP’s Atiku who secured 29.1% and also carried 12 states.

Although Obi contested the election result in court, his legal challenge was nowhere as fierce as Atiku’s who really shredded Tinubu in his forensic assault. Even as Tinubu settled into governance, it is Atiku, I would argue, that has provided the boldest opposition to his administration. Yet, time and again, we see tics of nervousness and vituperation from the administration whenever Obi pipes up in opposition to its policies and actions. It is not hard to understand why: geopolitics.

This is what we have seen with the ongoing hunger protest in Nigeria. Though backed both by Obi and Atiku, bigots and regime apologists – most of them edgelords and bargain basement provocateurs – were fast to fasten an ethnic logic to the protest, attempting to foist it on Obi and his Igbo ethnic group. Hence, the Igbo abstention: a rational reaction by a people constantly threatened in the Nigerian firmament.

There’s some concern, no question, as to the near- and long-term implication of Igbo protest avoidance. One could make a cogent case that it culminates to self-disenfranchisement, given that there’s casus belli for the protest which affects the Igbos and everybody else – more so because the Nigerian constitution envisions democratic participation both through street protests (see Sections 39(1) and 40) as well as through the ballot box (see for instance Sections 14(1)(c) and 77).

One could also make a case that protest abstention threatens to fracture Peter Obi’s delicate third-party coalition, comprising a concentric circle of an Igbo core and outer progressive rings, which he will need for another sortie in 2027, failing which Igbo stab at the presidency of Nigeria will be unfeasible until 2039, as I have argued in previous writings. Protest abstention could prove a forced error in this regard.

But all that aside, Igbo abstention signifies something deeper for Nigeria: an emotional withdrawal, a form of psychological abandonment, by a constitutive part of the federation which had hitherto invested energy and resources into the Nigerian project.

Similar to signals before an earthquake (animal behavior, changes in water level, earth tremors) or those before a volcanic eruption (gas emissions, temperature changes, subsidence), for those who wish to take note: Igbo emotional or strategic exit portends an ineluctable fracturing of the Nigerian federation.

FeaturesNationalDepartmentsPolitics Updated: August 8, 2024 Clash of Class and Ethnicity in Regional Responses to the Hardship Protest in Nigeria By Chudi Okoye August 8, 2024 15 0 Share Facebook Twitter Pinterest VK WhatsApp https://x.com/multimeverse/status/1819283544469909968/photo/1 Must Read Fe...