Following the hardship Nigerian citizens have been going through since the removal of fuel subsidy, among other government policies, a Public Affairs Analyst, Ugo Enwereji, says the government has not been truthful to the people.
In this interview with DAILY POST, he charges the government to cut down the cost of governance, and reduce fuel price and price of food items in the market for the affordability of an ordinary Nigerian. Excerpts:
What’s your position on the #EndBadGovernance protest scheduled for today, August 1 across the country?
The government has not been truthful to the people and that is why they want to protest, because you cannot tell a hungry man not to protest. There is no way you can stop him from protesting. Let them look at the indices, if they don’t do this and it results in violence, the country and its economy will feel the impact and ordinary Nigerians will be at the receiving end.
Any time the people protest, the government feels the itch. It is definite. You can check in the past 2-3 weeks back, a lot of things have been done to see how they can try to sort out some situations. At least they have started listening a bit. That means it has gone to the point when they have to hearken to the plights of the masses because no matter how you say it, the power belongs to the people.
I feel Nigerians don’t know how much power they have. They have the power to do whatever they want to do and put people in whatever position they want to put them, but they don’t know how to use this power and that is why the political classes are always pulling us down. There is no way the country will be shut down for a day and the government of the day would not want to listen. They would listen.
A government that understands the plights of the masses and is also proactive would have started negotiations a long time ago. They would have planned ways to mitigate this whole issue. But the fact that the government let it get to this point, up to the protest and they are coming out, means they are reactive and not proactive. This would have been nipped in the bud. But be that as it may, going forward I think what the government needs to do is to put out security forces around because it is the right of the police, the right of all the security agencies to protect the protesters and not to aggravate them.
There is no way the government won’t shift ground. They will shift ground. There are going to be some parleys and discussions because you cannot just come out and say you want to use violence and the people will just go back
If you saw what happened in Kenya, all those people were doing a peaceful protest till they started shooting at them. And that’s when it aggravated which is what I think this government should not do. Protect them. If you see anywhere that touts are trying to take over, you have the right to arrest them except you are sponsoring the touts. Anybody that is not protesting peacefully, the police and the security agencies have the right to arrest them. But they also have it as a constitutional right to protect those who are protesting because protest is part of life in any nation.
Based on speculations, do you think the protest would be hijacked by hoodlums to loot and cause mayhem?
Talking about the protest being hijacked, it is not a new fact. Even prominent people of the government at hand also protested at some point and also during the EndSARS protest of 2020. Nobody killed them nor killed their children. So everybody has the right to protest.
I don’t believe in Nigeria’s protest because it has not gained anything but anybody who wants to protest can protest because it is their constitutional right. Like I said, the government protests every day. They go to rallies; they go to events, go to different places to talk about themselves. That’s the means of protest against the masses because the masses don’t like what they are doing either.
Do you agree that opposition parties have a hand in the proposed protest?
Talking about the opposition parties having a hand in the protest, there is no way the protest will not have a political undertone and yes, the opposition may be behind it. They too, when they were an opposition party, funded protests, so there is no way the opposition parties would not take this as a means of coming at the main government. There has to be a political undertone. The opposition will always come out to support the protest.
For example, the immediate past President, Muhammadu Buhari, the current President Tinubu, and others all held hands in protest against the administration of Goodluck Jonathan in 2012 and 2014 respectively to make sure that Jonathan lost the 2015 election and he eventually lost the election, paving way for the coming into power of the APC government. So, if they did it to someone else, why would they want to become sacred cows that they cannot do it to them? Let the people protest, but guard them to make sure that it does not degenerate. President Bola Tinubu himself has been a king of protests.
Do you think the President’s cabinets are not advising him the right way?
I just feel that the cabinet around him is not advising him very well. They are not giving him popular advice that can help him to move this country forward. What are people asking for? It’s their basic needs. The average Nigerian is a happy person. They don’t need too much. If one/tenth of what happens in this country should happen in other countries, those countries would burn down but Nigerians, if you push them to the wall, they enter the wall. They don’t demand too much. Just allow them to survive and that is the basic thing. Just look at what is happening now. You cannot travel via airplane from state to state because of the high cost of air tickets. People are scared to travel now because the cost of getting an air ticket is four times what it used to be a few years back. It’s as if you are traveling to the UK. Everything has escalated. So, how do you want people to survive?
Now we have the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, that goes out to sit with the government and instead of talking about important issues, they talk about increment of salary. How much? N70,000 that cannot even buy a bag of rice? Is that what a family of five will eat for the whole month? Let the government reduce the price of a lot of things, especially the ones that ordinary Nigerians cannot do without in their everyday life. Reduce the price of fuel. Reduce the price of food items. Let people be able to afford social amenities. Let people be able to do business. If you check, most of our Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs, are dead. Now the so-called government is building a lot of shopping malls. Who will buy them? Who will rent them? The people out there don’t have the spending power anymore. All these shopping malls you are building will also die one day. The only thing people are looking for now is just food to eat and water to drink.
Go around town, almost all the industries are idling away. Many of them are closing down because there is no purchasing power again. So please, reduce the price of fuel. Reduce the price of doing business because the cost of doing business is at a high rate, so people cannot do business to even employ able-bodied youths and earn a salary. How do you expect them to survive? Reduce the cost of governance. The cost of governance is too much and you are proposing to create another ministry? And you said we don’t have money. You do budget for things that are not relevant while people are here suffering.
How would you react to the recently signed N70,000 New Minimum wage bill and the National Assembly members going on recess?
Salary increment has always been a curse in Nigeria because the day the salary is increased, all market people will increase the price of every commodity at a very exorbitant rate. So what exactly do you do? You give us with one hand and take it back with 15 hands? Take the price of fuel to where you met it. For me, in Nigeria, the price of fuel should not be more than one hundred naira per litre because we have this crude. Let Dangote Refinery work. Allow all our refineries to start operating even at 75%.
I have issues with the National Assembly members going on recess till September at this critical time when protest is brewing. I have a massive issue with that because they are the middlemen between the government and the people and they are going on recess till September. So they won’t be around throughout this August. God forbid, but what if there is an impasse between the government and the people? Who will go into dialogue with the masses? The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC? People have lost faith in the NLC, so it cannot even lead the dialogue. That dialogue is what the members of the National Assembly, comprising the Senate and the House of Representatives are supposed to sit down and call the government to address because the constituencies are theirs. They are the ones the people talk to, so they are supposed to be on ground to take back what the people tell them to the government.
But in the case when all of them are going on recess, many of them are going on holiday out of this country, if there is an impasse, who is going to mediate between the government and the people? This is why many people are calling for serious sanctions on the Senate because they are not doing their functions very well. How do you go on recess when you are told that there is going to be a nationwide protest that might burn down the economy?
INTERVIEW: Hardship: Nigerian Govt not truthful to citizens – Enwereji