Before We Lose The Lessons Of The # EndSARS Protest

By Emeka Alex Duru

“I remember the whole thing as if it was yesterday”, Marshal Kebby, the iconic essayist of the rested Daily Times title, Headlines, would write. We were kids, naked and innocent, idling away, you may say, but certainly enjoying the rusticity of the village. On that particular day, as was the norm, we darted from one end of the compound to another. And the pandemonium ensued from no particular direction, at least as much as one could recall. Some uncles, from no precise points, scaled through the dwarf wall and broke into our joy. As they scampered in different directions, some barely tying wrappers or managing torn knickers without tops, they shouted, “ a biala ha, a biala ha (they have come, they have come)”. Other grown up men around, abandoned whatever they were doing and joined in the race – a race for life. That, initially did not make any meaning to us, except that our mothers, conscious of the danger at hand, raked us into the huts in the compound. And there was a huge ball of silence!

By the time the confusion was over, some of the less fortunate youths and the elderly ones had been taken in by law enforcement agents. They had become criminals at dawn. Even without hearing their side of the story, they were labeled looters of relief materials. Some were forced to sign prepared statements admitting looting the materials. Some were even forced to admit keeping guns in their houses. By the time they were let off the hook, many had lost limbs on account of police brutality, while their families were forced to cough out money that was acutely scarce at the time. Real hoarders and looters were incidentally left untouched as they sorted their ways in kind or cash. At the end of the day, the very essence of the search and recovery exercise was lost.

That was how we saw it in my hometown, Orlu and, I guess, other communities in Igbo land, in the days after the Civil War in 1970. The relief materials in questions were items, mostly food and other consumables donated by concerned nations and groups to Biafra at the peak of the war to mitigate the pangs of the Federal Government – imposed economic blockade that was taking huge tolls on the Biafran children. But in line with the pervasive corruption in the system, some of the items were hoarded by those charged with their distribution. At the end of the war, information went round on the locations were the relief materials were either kept by the government or hidden by those they were entrusted with. Hungry and angry villagers invaded such locations and carted away the materials. In the process, dangerous items like guns, entered into wrong hands. The search and recovery exercise which was intended to bring back the looted materials, was compromised and the aim, lost.

When I read reports of some states gambling with the idea of house-to-house search for items looted by criminal elements who hid under the canopy of the #ENDSARS# protests to break into warehouses where the Coalition Against COVID-19 (CAVOVID) materials were kept, I recalled the futility of such efforts in the post-civil war East. If anything, the mission then ended a mere wild goose chase. The outcome, this time around, will not be significantly different. It is mere distraction.

Getting at the looters does not require elaborate announcement. Doing so, would rather give them time and space to relocate their loots to safe havens. The Police and other agents of the state, know how to do their work, when they want to do so. There is no how, for instance the criminals who broke into public and private warehouses and stole heavy gadgets and other costly items cannot and should not be fished out by the police from their homes and hideouts. That is a task that must be accomplished if only to send across the message that crime does not pay. What is needed in going about it is elevated intelligence gathering procedures and commensurate commitment by the respective officers. Devoting time and logistics on house-to-house searches for the items, will only amount to trivialising the issues of the protests.

Come to think about it! The politicians are seizing the public spaces, announcing their solidarity with the youths. All of a sudden, the very same youths they had a couple of months ago, dismissed as good-for-nothing, are being toasted as heroes of the moment. Trust the Nigerian leaders and their crocodile-tear tendencies. They are already cashing in on the mood of the day. But knowing them, whatever lip service fraternity they are flaunting with the youths, is merely in an attempt to lie low and allow the wind of the protests blow over. For them, it is as Newswatch of old would state, “hollow rituals of comic tragedy”. You can only trust the sympathy and empathy of the Nigerian politician at your peril. By the time the present dust of the #ENDSARS settles, it is business as usual.

Rather than the distraction of the house-to-house search, the relevant question to be asked, is how Nigerians slipped to this beasty level. To be candid, the descent is not a mere happenstance. It is rather a manifestation of a malignant virus that had been incubating in the system and waiting for an opportunity to burst. Incidentally, no efforts had been made in attending to the menace. #ENDSARS protests have provided the platforms.

This is about the country where political parties fix rallies on work days and the entire arenas are filled with able-bodied young men and women, that ordinarily should be in offices, factories or farms. The leaders curiously do not see anything wrong with the rented crowd, preferring rather to celebrate the ominous gatherings as measures of popularity and acceptability.

While the genuine #ENDSARS protesters filed out each day of their convergence, it was apparent that what we had at hand was an army of youths many of them unemployed after years of university education, some unable to ply their trade due to the epileptic public power supply system. There were others who were retrenched from their works. Of course, there were the undergraduates who have been at home for some time because of the Federal Government/ASUU face-off. Any system having such army of idle hands risks danger. It should not therefore come as surprise that the otherwise peaceful protest was hijacked by hoodlums and fringe members of the society. What we had at hand was akin to a game in the night where it is often difficult to distinguish the pretenders from performers.

That Nigeria of the 21st century, with abundant human and material resources, could still be associated with the primitive looting engagements by its citizens in the last couple of days, clearly shows the extent the country has gone down. But bad as they are, events of the past few days provide opportunity for stock-taking on where we are headed for, as a nation. They call for re-examination and reassessment of certain basic principles guiding us as a people. These are the lessons of the protests that should not be lost.

*Duru is the Editor of The Niche Newspaper