— Maiwada Dammallam
Sometimes I get the eerie feeling that in Nigeria, unlike in other places, citizens are more in charge of violence than the government. Citizens harasses the government at will and at the slightest provocation so much so that one could say violence is a more effective tool for negotiation than dialogue.
Why are governments at various levels are so lenient with saboteurs? On any given day in Nigeria somebody, somewhere is holding the government to ransom and inflicting unnecessary pain on citizens with one kind of protest or another simply because it’s cheap, lucrative and safe to do so. Apparently Nigerians are confusing the right for freedom to be what to be with the right for freedom to be what not to be.
Only in Nigeria you will find people participating in protests without knowing what the protest is about or how it affects them; some just for the fun of it and some just because they received an sms inviting them to join. For crying out loud, why should somebody assume only by blocking a highway could the attention of the government be drawn to a problem? And in case one is of the opinion Governors don’t care, how could blocking a road in a state force a governor to care when Governors have multitude of options to move around at citizens’ cost? Protests like this are nothing short of biting your nose to spite your face.
Interestingly, while the tanker drivers are said to have blocked the Bida road to protest the deplorable condition of the bad roads in the state, especially Bida-Lapai-Lambata Road, I wonder how many of the drivers could go home should the government decide to make tax clearance or proper vehicle registration a condition for that. I can bet all at my disposal that this is a simple case of the tanker drivers eating and having their cake — a case of demanding good roads from the government while defaulting in payment of taxes from which the government could build the roads. We should understand that good roads don’t fall from the sky. They are built with revenues generated by the state and any habitual tax evader have no moral impetus to protest for good roads. As they say: “Beta soup na money dey make am.”
It’s important to understand that, in most cases, problems we protest to resolve are bigger than we see them and mostly beyond the people whose attentions the protests are suppose to attract. We jump into protests mostly with only half the story and as guided by our watery assumptions. Leaders are not magicians and could only go as far as the buoyancy of their constituencies allows in as similar manner as a truck could only go as far as the fuel in its tank allows.
Funnily, same protesters will block the same roads should the government introduce toll gates to tax motorists to generate the money to provide good roads. This is a typical case of wanting to make heaven yet afraid to die. Sadly, nobody is ready to touch the correct button to reset the system back to normalcy. You cannot constitute public nuisance, deliberately obstruct the national economic only to simply walk home, blame the government for not doing enough to make the economy buoyant and sleep soundly without being taught some hard lessons about sacrifices in the context of nation building. We just need to change our mindsets and approaches to issues.
