Unlike the usual Christmas season filled with joy and happiness like we used to know, Christmas 2024 would be a different one. People can no longer afford to travel to celebrate Christmas with their loved ones. Even before now, many struggled to afford basic meals. In their bid to appear happy or merry, people are being trampled in stampedes for food – the latest inhumane phenomenon introduced into our political vocabulary in Nigeria. Not less than 60 lives had been lost at the point of getting free food, from Ibadan to Anambra and to Abuja. There is hunger in the land, across all major regions of the country. People do not mind walking miles just to get free meal even though it won’t be enough for a day. For them, it’s just to put something in their stomach.
The hunger and desperation witnessed in Nigerian streets today are not accidental but the inevitable consequences of a global economic system that prioritizes profit over people. The coexistence of extreme poverty and extreme affluence only serves to show how the wealth of a few is predicated on the deprivation of the many. The suffering of the many Nigerians this Christmas sustains the privileges of the elite who go about taking pictures with their families in pyjamas for us all to fawn over. Nothing makes it more clear than this Christmas that the situation in this country demands a revolutionary restructuring of our social values.
As if the hunger crisis were not enough, another scourge plagues the nation – the scourge of kidnappings. Less than two years into Tinubu’s tenure, over 2 million Nigerians were abducted, leaving Nigeria to rank the top on the list of countries with the highest rate of kidnappings. According to the NBS Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey 2024, some 600,000 Nigerians were killed and 2.2 million others abducted across the country between May 2023 and April 2024. The ones not abducted by kidnappers, are being abducted by hunger, which makes it look like a competition between hunger and abductors, not forgetting there’s bad road killing commuters too.
Before now, there used to be a middle class in Nigeria, but now, it’s either you’re poor or you’re rich. This situation is because of how the government is interested in the pocket of themselves and those around them, to satisfy their greed. This is a direct characteristic of capitalism, which leaves many to die in penury and abject poverty. Capitalism has created so much crisis and insecurity – the crisis of physical security and the crisis of economic security, being the most prominent. Both forms of insecurity are products of a system that prioritizes extractive accumulation by some few individuals over collective well-being. While some might just want to chalk it up as a crisis of BAD GOVERNANCE or BAD GOVERNMENT, the government’s failure to address these crises does not just reflect government incompetence but goes deeper than that! It is an intentional perpetuation of a class hierarchy that serves to maintain the dominance of a global capitalist elite. Just like the rampant abduction by kidnappers, the abduction of human potential in every part of the country (whether by hunger or by violence) is part of capitalism’s measures of keeping the working people under control. Hunger has become a weapon to keep us in check!
Capitalism leaves people to keep fighting for survival, introducing individualism, and even class between the poor, causing unnecessary competition, that can sometimes take the form of gender oppression. The unnecessary competition makes it hard to find any solidarity on the streets. There is no middle class to act as a bridge anymore and our country has become starkly polarized into rich and poor. In this situation, how possible is it to escape the violent nature of neoliberal capitalism?
Women and children are mostly victims of kidnappings, stampedes and reoccurring femicide because they are at the lowest rung of the social ladder. Women are often forced to shoulder the burden of survival of the next generation alone, under conditions of systemic violence. This is made worse by a commodification of emotional labor and relationships that has further alienated us from the humanity of others (especially of women who most men patronise for emotional labor). This means that the Nigerian society is not only economically stratified, but we have also become emotionally fragmented. Women are also The biggest victims of senseless ritual killings and fetish violence. The struggles faced by women, from kidnapping to economic precarity, are not isolated incidents but part of the schemes of a capitalist system that seeks to exploit and a patriarchal culture that seeks to suppress their agency, just to make that exploitation easier. The progress of women in society can have a positive impact on a society in many ways but the neoliberal ideas of capitalism and patriarchy do not want the growth of women and humanity at large.
The example of the passionate resistance of women can be seen in Nurse Olamide who did not only lead a struggle of Nurses (who are mostly women like herself) but also played great roles in the #EndBadGovernance protests, and who is now being persecuted for that. She is presently on trial for “insulting” political office holders. Just like our resistance recently secured the release of Dele Farotimi, we must not sleep on #FreeOlamide because this Christmas is not so merry for her. We must not forget her so easily in the same way our patriarchal society tend to easily forget women. The liberation of the Nigerian people is inseparably tied to the liberation of women like her who serve as revolutionary examples. We should not be okay with a country where anyone who raises her voice would be arrested just as the case of Nurse Olamide, and we should rise up against every attempt to take our democratic freedom of speech away.
Christmas 2024 is here to remind us that the joy and abundance associated with this season are not accessible to every under the current social order. Christmas is here to remind us that we must do something about that, and that must start from #FreeOlamide!
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