By Dr Dennis Otuaro
Peaceful demonstrations to convey felt needs are rights enshrined in our nation’s constitution, which also highlights ways and means by which such rights and dissents are disposed.
But are protests and demonstrations necessary at the time our national ecosystem is recovering from a grievous pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the great depression? I profoundly, with all sense of responsibility, do not think so.
In the apparently challenging circumstances this nation finds itself as it tackles headlong the triggers left unattended to in its 25 years of democratic practices, you would agree with me, that it is only germane that the present structural reforms put in place by the Federal Government, together with its many cushioning interventions are just the only way to get this nation out of the wood.
When the mandate to govern this nation was given to President Bola Tinubu, you can recall he took it as an honour of a lifetime to serve in that capacity and immediately went to work to rebuild this country. We have as a result seen historic progress made in the area of clearing about $16bn (18 per cent) from the nation’s external debt. There has been an addition of $4bn to the nation’s external reserves, and all forex backlogs owed to foreign airline operators have been cleared. The Tinubu administration has started the path to full local government autonomy to bring decision-making closer to the people; the most essential victory of which was got at the Supreme Court. There are also the student loan for undergraduates in federal and state universities, and relief emergencies in liquidity and palliatives sent through the subnational governments in line with the federation principles.
Closing these yawning gaps together with the emergencies declared in the oil and gas sectors where this government continues to bear the cost of variations in the unsteady fluctuations in the price of crude and its refined components, is critical to addressing the balance of trade deficits, low manufacturing and production, producing to meet domestic demands, and decentralised aggregation and production network of small medium enterprises, which could mean the nation would earn forex and tax to pay back the Federal Government loans to meet capital and recurrent expenditures.
Given these strides and the visible signs of turning from the headwinds, I consider that the present attempt by the conveners of the August 1 protest to want to go ahead with their planned protest would be premature, counterproductive, distractive and dissuasive.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are persons who when they look at Nigeria in its present path to economic recovery, see carnage, despair and darkness. They spread fears and lies for profit and power. They daily pray that this government fail to justify their misplaced idiosyncrasies and the concomitant effect is the avoidable gaps where they take advantage of the short-term difficulties to create artificial scarcity, price gouging, food and double-digit inflation. They only seek to use our people to fund their plot, having failed in previous successive attempts to destabilise the Federal Government.
There is the hope however that the governmental interventions would slice through the double-digit food inflation and provide a more abundant life for the teeming number of our citizenry.
Be that as it may, we can’t soon forget how previous unhealthy demonstrations were hijacked and used to perpetrate unrest. Properties worth billions of naira were destroyed, prison breaks became normative and very dangerous criminals were let back into society who soon became rapists, carjackers, kidnappers and killers. They foist back on society the very issues the present protest hopes to achieve.
It is in this regard that I use this medium, as the Administrator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme to appeal to all ex-agitators not to be part of any protest, and not to allow themselves to be used to settle political scores or be used to unleash destruction of government infrastructure.
In closing, I remember the words of the third-century Greek philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, who said, “The mills of God grind slow, but they grind exceedingly sure.”
Taken from this, let me say no radical surgery to remove a malignant tumour is pleasant ab initio, but once it is removed, it automatically impacts the quality of life of the index case.
This should provide a renewed source of hope for us as we look forward to a greater, bigger, and better Nigeria.
Dr Dennis Otuaro, Administrator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, writes from Abuja
