By Mike Ozekhome
I have carefully listened to and read President Tinubu’s national broadcast regarding the ongoing mass national protests. With all respect, the President’s speech appears vacuous, drudgery, and full of a litany of the government’s alleged interventions but is completely devoid of any concrete answers to the many itemized demands by the traumatized youthful protesters.
Aside from this, he erroneously, as always, picked on imaginary opposition or political opponents who allegedly want to derail Nigeria. No, sir. These are not sponsored protests. They are a genuine outpouring of grief, frustration, anger, hunger, melancholy, hopelessness, haplessness, and joblessness by the ignored and denied Nigerian youths who appear not to have a tomorrow even after their yesterday and today have already been mindlessly stolen by rapacious elites and state captors who control the levers of power at all different levels of government. The rage is not about a mirage or mere supposition; the blind can see; the lame can walk; the numb can feel; and the deaf can hear the grinding poverty and abject penury ravaging the land.
However, in terms of the decency of language and an apparent exhibition of understanding of the litany of problems besetting Nigeria and the empathy required by a president to address the urgent demands, President Tinubu appears to get it right. He was not abusive, arrogant, or grandstanding with the usual ruler’s narcissism and brinkmanship, factors that exacerbated the recent Kenya protests and uprising. He looked apparently sober and pensive while addressing beleaguered Nigerians as “my fellow Nigerians.” Thus far, thus above average.
However, in terms of measurable panacea and solutions to balm open wounds, assuage bruised egos and dashed hopes, or placate angry and protesting Nigerians who are daily suffering and groaning in the midst of government inertia, waste, big government, big spending, opulent and primitive displays of vulgar wealth by government officials, endless borrowing, white elephant projects, yachts, planes, SUVs, endless trips abroad, yawning leakages, and official corruption—both apparent, real, visible, and palpable—he scores miserably low. The speech was long on promises of a better tomorrow without demonstrating how this Eldorado will manifest. What will the youth take home after days of rage, tens of deaths, injuries, mental, physical, psychological, and emotional lacerations and trauma, hunger, self-denial, brutality, and high-handedness by state security agencies? I do not know. Or do you?
The government must stop the blame game and, as I have advised serially this year alone, go back to the drawing board and think not merely outside the box, but beyond it. Blaming the Muhammadu Buhari government, of which this same APC government is but a mere offshoot and successor, is illogical, indecent, and inelegant. It insults our collective intelligence. It is like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face; and (please, permit the obscenity or vulgarity) it amounts to dipping one’s finger in one’s anus and smelling it. You will not expect to perceive Christian Dior, Gucci, Armani, Hugo, Versace, or Chanel fragrances. It insults our collective intelligence. President Tinubu still has a chance to save Nigeria from what remains of a groggy, tottering, fumbling, dawdling, and near-crumbling country on the verge of imminent precipice. All hope is still not lost if he employs and deploys the right instruments of statecraft.
