By: Nice Linus (Contributor)

To hang unto hope, they say, is what the Nigerian people need. It is why the current administration has tasked itself with ‘renewing hope’. Hope that the poor man will somehow continue to breathe under the heavy burden of policies designed to milk him to the very last drop of blood. Hope that these baby-steps of pain will not be the end of us. Hope that our national prayers and fastings, led by dutiful wives of politicians who could have advised their husbands better, would save a future on the brink of crashing and collapse.

By the end of year one, it became crystal clear that ‘renewed hope’ was the cause of the widespread hunger and multidimensional poverty people were plunged into. Thus, both young and old trooped out into the streets on August 1, 2024, and days following, to protest the terrible conditions of living we as Nigerians have been subjected to.

The peaceful demands of the #EndBadGovernance protesters met stiff repression. The government of the day displayed its high-handedness once again by unleashing state security agents on peaceful protesters. State-orchestrated kidnaps saw activists and participants go missing for days, only for their relatives to find them arraigned in court for the most absurd of charges – treason.

To further establish its groundbreaking legacy of autocracy, minors between the ages of 14 to 17 were arrested from Kano, Kaduna, Gombe, Jos, Katsina and Abuja. Unlawfully arrested, these minors were allegedly remanded for weeks in adult facilities, some with hardened criminals, poorly fed and cared for. As much as the police denied these claims, their arraignment of the kids in court served to invalidate them. The minors looked malnourished, some even collapsing during the court trial.

About 76 in all, these minors were charged with treason, incitement to mutiny by hoisting the Russian flag encouraging the military to take over government, among other charges. What was more weird was their bail conditions – 10 million naira each and two sureties, one being a level 15 civil servant and the other being the minor’s parent.

Given the bail conditions, it was obvious that the court was rather contented with having these children languish in the facilities they had been remanded in, because it was practically impossible for poor children protesting the economic situation of the country to be able to meet up with such absurd conditions. Public outrage, however, forced the president to direct everyone involved in that sordid affair to back down. From the police down to the court.

Are there not three arms of government, supposedly independent of interference each from the others? How come the same remote control works for all of them?

The executive committed grave error, violating the rights of citizens to dissent and convey their dissent to the ears of government peacefully via protest. It was in the hands of the judiciary to correct this anomaly. However, our judges failed miserably, reeling out bail conditions that no politician-criminal ever received, even when the facts of the case were glaring, favouring the release of the minors whose only ‘offence’ was protesting hunger.

Since there was no wisdom found in those who sit as judges in the temple of justice, we cannot expect much of lawyers in that regard. That said, I reckon probably no one was prepared for the alarming stupidity evident in the Counsel to the Federal Government’s reasoning. According to Rimazonte Ezekiel, the arraigned minors were “adults, university graduates and married men”. He brazenly claimed that the kids seen in court came with some of the parents of the defendants. One would wonder whom the Counsel was referring to. The minors aged 14 to 17 who were standing trial?

Following the order of the President to release the minors without prejudice to an ongoing trial, the Attorney General of the Federation, in exercise of his powers under Section 174 of the 1999 Constitution, took over the proceedings from the Inspector General of the police. 39 of the released minors from Kaduna state were given a hundred thousand naira and an A18 model Android phone each to compensate them for their gruesome experiences at the hands of the government. There were also promises to rehabilitate them, provided they ‘turn a new leaf’.

Furthermore, the state government had the minors examined medically and brought their religious leaders to counsel them. The essence of this counselling was to enforce ‘hope’, to teach them how to bat their eyelashes in a display of ‘you say wetin’ whenever there was a call to protest the bad conditions of living in the country, as ‘protest’ would make them bad proponents of their religions.

Even after the minors were released from incarceration, they still weren’t free. Being subjected to religious brainwashing was not enough, they were also subjected to surveillance to ensure they do not make mockery of the President’s gesture of ‘compassion’.

It is saddening to know that our children are no longer safe from this kakistocracy. In actual sense, they were never safe from its social-political impacts. And with their safety compromised, the future of Nigeria as a state has been tampered with. No amount of ‘renewed hope’ can change this fact.

Needless to say, the ‘renewed hope’ agenda is a mirage. It has proved to be a ploy to keep the people underyoke. This ploy is being enabled by the government and its cohorts across political, economic, social and religious borders. Thus, when the government violates the right to express dissent in protest, there is almost no other institution for the people to fall back on, as all aligns with the government.

This is the case in all stratas of society, in all spheres of life, in Nigeria. Even in the University system. Dissent is discouraged. Protest is demonized. And such strict measures are deployed to suppress protests.

The University of Ibadan management did same, when they imposed an unsolicited three weeks break on students, forcing students out of their hostels on the 31st of August, following the pockets of protests that broke out on the 29th of August. To enforce their order, supply of electricity to halls of residence for about five days was cut, hall wardens had food vendors evacuated. Partnering with the University of Ibadan internal security unit, rooms were bursted and residents were forced to leave. To cap it all, of all projects that could have been carried out, the hall wardens of Indy and Zik halls chose to build a gate to hamper smooth movement between both halls; a symbol of victory, built on the consciousness of both halls, and indeed on that of the students community as a whole.

That gruesome experience became the bedrock for other affronts – students being denied exams, the rampancy of fines in halls of residence, and students being evicted from their halls for no just cause.

In all of these, students themselves are silent, ‘hoping’ things will get better. Hoping and yet panicking. ‘Hoping’, for lack of courage to do anything else. Afterall, where there is life, there is hope. And where there is hope… What? Nothing exactly. This kind of ‘hope’ births nothing in the one who has it, only fear for tomorrow.

There is a thin line between hope and hopelessness. It’s so thin that differentiating both concepts may sometimes prove difficult. Hope mirrors optimism, and optimism doesn’t mean that things are going on fine. Rather, it means that things are so bad that one finds it hard to believe there would be a change. However, against the instinct to give up, one chooses to recognize the 0.00001 chance of things turning out for the better. That’s hope! And to show one’s hope, decisive actions should be taken to begin the change we so desperately wish to see.

Hopelessness, on the other hand, is absence of hope. Hopelessness is what breeds fear. Hopelessness is what makes you want to align with existing social constructs when you know they are wrong, even when you know they are by design oppressive of you. Hopelessness is what cripples you, even when there could be change if you so decide.

So, this ‘renewed hope’ is hopelessness, and hopelessness kills faster than poison. It kills the religious sector, the health sector, the educational sector. It kills the last, most formidable institution that the people could fall back on – the people themselves.

AUTHOR

Nice Linus is a student of the University of Ibadan, an advocate for human rights, hopeful for positive change in the Nigerian system and for the Nigerian people.