When Nigerian tyrant Muhammadu Buhari left office in May of 2023, he was leaving behind a country languishing in a snake pit of economic chaos, at a time when the cost of living had soared considerably with inflation breaking the roof and heading skyward like a cloud of smoke from a burning petrol tanker. At the time of his exit, he had successfully overseen one of the worst crimes in Nigeria’s history—the brutal killing of unarmed peaceful protesters at the Lekki Tollgate on that tragic evening of Tuesday, October 20, 2020—citizens he swore under oath to protect at all costs. They were massacred in their own country with bullets and guns purchased with their country’s taxpayers’ money for daring to exercise their fundamental human rights in their bid to resist further extrajudicial killings by trigger-happy officers of the Nigerian police.
Following these killings, which dictator Buhari’s calamitous regime made desperate attempts to conceal before their efforts collapsed in the face of a flood of evidence, to this date, there is no known evidence that the Buhari tyranny sanctioned any of its military officers and their accomplices who may have played various roles in what has become known as the Lekki Massacre.
As if dictator Buhari’s disrespect for the lives of Nigerians was not enough, Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu refused to implement any of the recommendations of the panel he constituted to investigate the Lekki Massacre. It is not difficult to decipher why he refused to implement the panel’s report—the findings heavily indicted the government, and so its recommendations were taboos. Imagine for a moment that the panel’s recommendation favoured the government; the speed with which the Lagos State Government would have implemented those recommendations would have been faster than Usain Bolt’s top speed for a 100-metre sprint. So the government considered itself so supreme that it chose to ignore the recommendations, knowing that there would be no consequences. The rest, as they say, is the history of the Lekki Massacre. They buried the case in a shallow grave and expect us to forget about it.
Such is the utter disrespect and crude arrogance that the Nigerian political class has for everyday citizens. To them, any Nigerian who is not affiliated with anyone in power is either a slave, a second-class citizen, or lacks human qualities and can, therefore, be treated in whatever way they desire.
Enter “President” Bola Tinubu, who had publicly vowed to continue with the horrendous policies of dictator Muhammadu Buhari, his failed predecessor. In keeping to his words, Tinubu immediately amplified the hardship dictator Buhari had left behind, even before stepping into his new office. Since that lamentable day he stepped into that office, his victims, Nigerians, have been subjected to one horrible affliction after another, with the government being insensitive as usual, giving awkward reasons why the people must experience hardship and the cruellest form of starvation. But that is not all; beyond economic repression, “President” Tinubu is also following dictator Buhari’s legacy of anti-human rights in Nigeria, which has seen him arrest and arbitrarily detain people for exercising basic fundamental rights enshrined in the Nigerian constitution and several international legal instruments Nigeria is signatory to. So terrible is the situation that Tinubu, himself another tyrant, secretly detained minors for months, accusing them of treasonable offences! Minors!!! Nobody knew when a peaceful demonstration became an offence in Nigeria, let alone a treasonable one. But then again, how can we underestimate a tyrant, especially one as desperate as Tinubu, who is overly desperate to activate a climate of repression in Nigeria to avoid the scrutinisation of his economically crumbled regime?
There is the troubling role of the police in this conversation, which on its own, is enough to trigger a revolution across Nigeria. Officers of the Nigerian Police Force were trained and equipped with public funds to enforce the law with strict adherence to the spirit of justice and fairness. However, in today’s Nigeria, these uniformed men and women have turned the law on its head. Reports of harassment, intimidation, theft, robbery, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearance have become commonplace, with the police often accused of being responsible for these crimes. It was these atrocities that resulted in the eruption of the #EndSARS protests of October 2020, as young Nigerians insisted that enough had been enough, understandably so. After the massacre at the Lekki Tollgate, the Nigerian police have carried on as if nothing ever happened, and reports are now rife that their impunity has been accentuated. It is as if the #EndSARS protests were the inspiration that roused them to escalate their level of impunity.
Besides the issues highlighted above, it must be pointed out with emphasis that the Nigerian police have become a tool for the political class and other so-called ‘powerful’ individuals. Once you have enough money, you can get them to run around for you as you want. The police in Nigeria do not protect everyday people. It protects only politicians and those with plenty of money, whom its officers refer to as ‘VIPs.’ When politicians and these VIPs want to deal with anyone they are superior to, they unleash the Nigerian police on the victim, and the police proceed to accomplish the mission with lightning speed. The recent dehumanisation of activist Dele Farotimi, whom officers of the Nigerian police dragged from Lagos to Ekiti as if all the courts in Lagos had been demolished, is a frightening example of the role of the police in present-day Nigeria. The Ekiti-based VIP, who wields unmatched influence there, wanted his victim’s incarceration and the accompanying legal proceedings to take place in his bedroom, under his direct watch, and he got the police to actualise it with a mere wave of his hand. Everyone who lives in Nigeria knows that it is unimaginable for the police to embark on such a journey at the instance of a non-VIP citizen. Indeed, the villainous role of the police in contemporary Nigeria is unspeakably horrifying. And until the Nigerian police consciously revamp its thoroughly ruined reputation, it will maintain a strained relationship with the people it purports to serve. But whether or not the police are perturbed about their reputation and relationship with the people is another topic altogether, which I cannot exhaust in this treatise. We are talking about a police force that has become notorious for issuing illegal bans on peaceful demonstrations, despite being a fundamental right enshrined in the constitution. Over the years, they have maimed or killed citizens for daring to exercise this inherent right, all in a bid to please desperate politicians. This is partly how the police have become a weapon against the people it was meant to serve.
As I have stated, the list of police’s barbarities against everyday Nigerians is so inexhaustible that it cannot be comprehensively addressed in this essay. Corruption, particularly the ruthless embezzlement of public funds by political officeholders, is another fundamental crime against the Nigerian people, which has not only been entrenched in the political system of Nigeria but tacitly legalised so that those who steal or divert funds meant to develop the country suffer no consequences. It is why they now refer to the Nigerian treasury as ‘The National Cake,’ a clear message that they are all in to feast from the country’s treasury and not necessarily to do any work. Nigeria has remained underdeveloped approximately 70 years after independence because the money meant to transform the country and its people has been diverted to the pockets of a few greedy politicians who masquerade as ‘leaders’ who have plunged millions of their victims into incalculable poverty whilst living luxurious lifestyles with their families.
However, deliberately pauperising their victims has not satisfied them; they have resorted to further burdening them with excessive taxation, as the dictator Tinubu-led anti-people government is presently doing. But even extreme taxation has not satisfied them either; now, they have unleashed economic hardship across the country, probably to torture their victims through starvation. Whenever their victims storm the streets to draw attention to their dire suffering, their slash-and-burn oppressors insist they have no right to do so, so they unleash armed police and soldiers on a people genuinely calling for an end to rampaging hunger! Nothing surpasses this degree of oppression and dehumanisation. Absolutely nothing! Enough has to be truly enough at some point.
I have taken time to highlight only a few ways through which oppressive Nigerian political elites have questioned and continue to question the humanity of everyday people in Nigeria, as if the country belongs to them alone, whilst the rest of us are refugees wrestling with them for space in their own country. The cardinal question, therefore, is: for how long are Nigerians prepared to be subjected to the ongoing oppression and blooming dehumanisation from their enemies who use ethnicity and religion to confine them to perpetual bondage and penury? The unvarnished truth is that Nigerian oppressors will never stop oppressing and stealing the people’s resources until the people, the majority of whom are synonymous with slaves who are in perpetual love with their chains, say enough is enough. And the only way to say enough is enough is by carrying out a sweeping revolution, for which Nigeria is already overripe. Without that, Nigeria will remain a permanently underdeveloped country where criminal politicians plunder the public treasury with remarkable impunity, where the police and the army are weapons in the hands of the oppressors, and where elections are openly rigged and the aggrieved people are confidently told to ‘go to court’ because they already know that the court has been pre-armed with a script.
So, in the end, victimised Nigerians must choose the path of permanent emancipation or be prepared to remain in the shackles of perpetual slavery in a country that their oppressors do not think they are part of, which explains why billions of dollars from oil revenue have been criminally monopolised by political officeholders and their cronies over the years, which further explains why the people, seen as tenants or refugees, have been coerced into buying petrol at a more exorbitant price than citizens of non-oil-producing nations.
So, as Nigerians celebrate the new year, if they have anything to celebrate, they must not forget that a revolution is the only door leading to their lasting freedom, which must eventually pave the way for a nation where all citizens will have equal rights, a country devoid of the rampant corruption and the stupendous impunity that roam freely in today’s Nigeria, a country where judges wouldn’t have to take instructions or kickbacks from corrupt politicians and the so-called VIPs before writing their judgements.
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